El Conuco by Gabriela Rodríguez on Scribd

I think

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http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?viewtype=side&itemID=CUL-DAR121.-&pageseq=38
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G. H. Hardy 1908 (Just one page!!!)

Hardy 1908 by Gabriela Rodríguez on Scribd

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"The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity, and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is Imagination itself."

- William Blake, 1799, The Letters
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A cropland cartogram of the world, with grid boxes resized based on the amount of cropland they contain.

 https://maptitude1.tumblr.com/post/167536508944/a-cropland-cartogram-of-the-world-with-grid-boxes/amp
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Harassment, a field study

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Science, including the fields of ecology and evolution, must advocate a zero-tolerance policy towards harassment and bullying. This means promoting safe workspaces in all contexts, and letting go of the idea that fieldwork entails special circumstances.

Revelations of harassment at the highest levels of Hollywood and the UK government in the past month have led to increased personal and professional reflection across all industries. Social media users have flocked to post #MeToo stories on Facebook and Twitter, revealing the gamut of acts of harassment they have experienced in their lives. Science is no exception to this, and scrutiny reveals particular problems in the fields of ecology and evolution.

The past few years have seen numerous news stories about senior figures in these disciplines who have been accused by some of their colleagues and students of multiple forms of intimidation, bullying and sexual harassment. At the same time, there has been an increased awareness and understanding of how colleagues and students may be exposed to vulnerable contexts through lack of oversight. A recurring theme in this coverage is the challenges of fieldwork.

Social media initiatives such as #PregnantInTheField and science educator Emily Graslie’s call for public discussion of the taboos and challenges surrounding menstruation have raised awareness of the particular trials fieldwork can pose to women. But many challenges imposed by constraints of the field, such as limited privacy, geographic isolation and a dependence on others, can affect everyone. Yet ecology and evolution fields seem to prize these ‘macho’ challenges almost as a badge of honour. Conferences echo with anecdotes of the extremes researchers have gone to in order to retrieve the season’s data: the stressful make-or-break deadlines; the isolation posed by remote field sites; the topsy-turvy situation where work colleagues become living companions for weeks or even months on end; the challenges of temporary field accommodation to maintenance of personal hygiene. But during assertion of these bragging rights, there may be limited awareness of the fact that these constraints all contribute to creating contexts of increased personal vulnerability. Complaints alleged against prominent Antarctic geologist David Marchant by two of his former students, which Marchant denies, illustrate such a context.

And, of course, the field is not the only context of manufactured vulnerability: the ‘field mentality’ easily filters through to the department, the lab, or the conference (which shares many similarities with the challenges of the field) as still more reports reveal. Journalist Michael Balter has repeatedly investigated parallel claims of sexual harassment leading from institution to conference and back again, notably in the case of Brian Richmond, ex-curator of human origins at the American Museum of Natural History, who is alleged to have sexually assaulted a junior colleague in a hotel room while both were attending the European Society for the Study of Human Evolution (ESHE)’s annual meeting in 2014; allegations that Richmond denies. In reporting other claims, Balter has suggested that new iterations of sexual harassment on the part of junior colleagues may derive from exposure to a culture of such behaviour exhibited by senior colleagues.

There is evidence that the issue of harassment in ecology and evolution extends far beyond these specific cases: a 2014 study of 666 field scientists¹ found that 64% of survey participants had experienced sexual harassment (defined as inappropriate or sexual remarks), and 20% experienced sexual assault (defined as sexual contact that was unwanted, unconsenting, or where it was unsafe not to consent). Of those who experienced sexual assault, only 23% reported it, and only 19% of those who reported it were satisfied with the outcome of their report. When these acts occurred, the victims were more likely to be women, and either junior colleagues or students. The impact of these attacks may be long-lasting: Kathryn Clancy and co-authors posited that the strain and stress of experiencing harassment and assault may contribute to the ‘leaky pipeline’ phenomenon¹, that is, the gradual loss of women from science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields; their 2017 follow-up study² confirmed this perception among victims of historic harassment.

The 2017 study highlights the difficulty of establishing acceptable behavioural norms in the absence of explicit and enforced policy, as well as the overwhelming importance of such policies in fieldwork contexts: where codes of conduct and expectations were not clearly established, understood and enforced, there was a correlation with higher rates of sexual harassment². It seems probable, although not tested in that particular study, that a correlation would exist with other forms of bullying and abuse as well. Appropriate information flow emerges as a key criterion in creating safe workspaces—both senior staff and junior participants need to understand and abide by regulations for them to be effective. In order to combat contexts of vulnerability in which harassment and bullying can arise, this information flow should extend from what is acceptable interpersonal behaviour, to what are reasonable expectations for junior and senior fieldworkers alike in constrained circumstances: provision of a rota for meal preparation; discussion of appropriate noise levels at night; and access to sufficient food, water and breaks during strenuous or restrictive activity, for example.

The good news is that codes of conduct for acceptable behaviour, and provision of reporting structures to facilitate resolution of complaints, are on the rise in scientific contexts, although admittedly more so at conferences than for fieldwork. Following calls from researchers, for example ref. ³, many conferences and societies now issue codes of conduct for meetings (see the Ecological Society of America’s policy, for instance). ESHE now provisions ombudspersons to whom incidents (both harassment and other forms of inappropriate behaviour) can be reported. By constituting an independent body outside a university department or conference organizational committee, ombudspersons help to combat the recognized challenge that a victim may be wary to report an incident perpetrated by a senior colleague. It’s to be hoped too that growing awareness of not only historic incidents but also formerly taboo subjects, such as the personal challenges of fieldwork, may empower victims to speak up. The ecology and evolution communities must continue speak out about these issues and these incidents, calling out colleagues when we witness bullying or harassment.

As for combatting the structures that have facilitated harassment and bullying, as Clancy et al. suggest, it’s time to let go of the idea that the field or the meeting entail special circumstances that mitigate inappropriate behaviour¹. While it’s true that there are challenges specific to both, this is all the more reason to push for regulation and oversight to preserve safe workspaces for all, regardless of whether this workspace is halfway up a mountain, in a conference centre, or a lab.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0404-3

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Searching for Patterns, Hunting for Causes: Robert MacArthur, the Mathematical Naturalist

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Jay Odenbaugh. 2013.Searching for Patterns, Hunting for Causes: Robert MacArthur, the MathematicalNaturalist. In Outsider Scientists: Routes to Innovation in Biology, edited byOren Solomon Harman and Michael R. Dietrich, 181–200.University of Chicago.

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Estorninos

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How deep does the rabbit hole go?

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http://www.foeeurope.org/agrifood_atlas
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Life is not easily bounded

 Derek J Skillings

" ...Most of the time the living world appears to us as manageable chunks. Even a toddler can see that. We know if we have one dog or two; at a pinch, we can probably count how many trees are growing in our backyard. Natural history museums started, in part, as embodiments of early scientific approaches to ordering and cataloguing the diversity of life. This is possible only because humans can usually intuitively pick out one organism from the next – that is, because most of the creatures we come across have pretty clear boundaries in space and time...

...How come, then, the meaning of individuality is one of the oldest and most vexing problems in biology? For millennia, naturalists and philosophers have struggled to define the most fundamental units of living systems and to delimit the precise boundaries of the organisms that inhabit our planet. This difficulty is partly a product of the search for a singular theory that can be used to carve up all of the living world at its joints. But my view is that no such unified theory exists; there’s no single answer to the question: ‘What parts of the world are a part of you as a biological individual, and what parts are not?’ Different accounts of individuality pick out different boundaries, like an overlapping Venn diagram drawn on top of a network of biotic interactions. This isn’t because of uncertainty or a lack of information; rather, the living world just exists in such a way that we need more than one account of individuality to understand it...

...When you stop to think about it, the problem of individuality is (ironically enough) actually composed of two problems: identity and individuation. The problem of identity asks: ‘What does it mean for a thing to remain the same thing if it changes over time?’ or ‘What makes two entities the same kind of thing?’ The problem of individuation asks: ‘How do we tell things apart?’ or ‘What are the boundaries of an object?’ Identity is fundamentally about the nature of sameness and continuity; individuation is about differences and breaks...

...These two issues are different sides of the same coin. You can often reframe one in terms of the other to suit your focus. To pick something out in the world you need to know both what makes it one thing, and also what makes it different than other things – identity and individuation, sameness and difference. Each of these aspects of individuality also tends to come in degrees. A bee is better individuated than a swarm; and a swarm is better individuated than an ecosystem. Similarly, you are closer to the person you were yesterday than you are to the one in your baby photos... "

https://aeon.co/essays/what-constitutes-an-individual-organism-in-biology