Dear colleagues:
Apologies if you are getting a lot of reminders/notices about conferences
- but here's another
Rachel Jeffreys and I are chairing a marine stable isotope ecology session
at the Challenger Society 2016 (Liverpool, UK) meeting with a particular
interest in emerging methods. Details at the end of this email.
The abstract deadline is fast approaching (May 12th) so please do submit
if interested.
Website for the conference
https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/challenger-conference-2016/
and for abstract submission with a list of all sessions:
https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/challenger-conference-2016/abstract-submission/
All the best
Clive And Rachel
Beyond the bi-plot: State of the art approaches to using stable isotopes
and biomarkers in marine trophic and spatial ecology
Stable isotope and biomarker (e.g. fatty acids, pigments and amino
acids) analyses are now routinely used to reconstruct trophic
interactions and nutrient flux in terrestrial and marine ecosystems.
Stable isotope and biomarker approaches can be used to address questions
over a wide range of ecological and spatial scales ranging from
reconstructing individual behaviour to deriving metrics of ecosystem
function. Analyses of long lived organisms, or archived historic samples
can yield time series data suitable for assessing ecosystem responses
to anthropogenic change.
In recent years the field of isotope ecology has benefitted from
several technological and conceptual advances, challenging some widely
held assumptions about fundamental processes in isotope ecology, and
changing the types of ecological questions addressed. Compound-specific
isotope analyses provide subtle tools for testing the physiological
processes underpinning trophic fractionation, while also providing new
methods to track nutrient sources throughout food webs in unprecedented
detail. Spatially explicit isotope datasets reveal strong systematic
geographic gradients in the isotopic composition of marine primary
production that complicate conventional diet analyses. However, the
development of predictive spatial isotope models also provides new tools
to reconstruct geographic origin and animal movements. Emerging data
analysis methods allow for uncertainty to be considered explicitly in
diet source approaches, and draw attention to the importance of
individual variation in the form of the isotopic niche.
While these techniques, approaches and datasets provide exciting new
opportunities, the increasing complexity of the field and rapid rate of
publication calls for increased communication of these new insights both
within the field and more broadly to the marine science community.
We welcome presentations utilising bulk or compound-specific stable
isotope and biomarker approaches, or conceptual biogeochemical models to
address questions related to marine trophic and spatial ecology ranging
from microbes to top predators and from individual behaviour to global
ecosystem function.
We are interested in all aspects of the application of stable isotopes and
molecular biomarkers to the study of food webs, nutrient flux, ecosystem
structure and movement - with a particular interest in emerging analytical
and statistical techniques and combinations of data and models.
Please do feel free to contact us if you have any questions.
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