Friday Findings – Volume 3

A short overview this week, although not for lack of interesting things that happened. Here are the highlights from my week in ecology:

Collaborate – collaborations are vital in academia. You can do more together than alone, and multiple brains are smarter than one. It’s also much more fun to discuss and discover with others, especially when the collaboration was a mutual decision. This week I finally met with two new such collaborators. We had already met several times online, but it was fun to discuss face to face, while also seeing some of the work in progress.

Write – I got plenty of writing and revising done on several manuscripts in various stages. I think two are ripe for (re) submission, and two others need some more polishing, but they’re almost there.

Review – I reviewed an interesting paper this week. Obviously I will not share details, as the review process is classified. It’s almost as if editors smell that you’re done with your review work. I submitted it on Wednesday, and cleaned my desk, but by the end of the week I already had four new requests. I’m afraid I’ll have to deny two of them, at least!

Teach – This week, I kicked off the ecological part of our Landscape Planning course for the second semester bachelors. As I worked remotely, I did my work online. However, this year’s the first year I tried live lectures via Zoom. I think it works quite well. I must admit though that I’m looking forward to the excursion part. Interactive teaching is more fun.

Experiment – our LegacyNet pot study is going well. The students that run this project now have done their first aphid counts. Aphids multiplied, which is always a good sign. I’m so curious to see what’s going to come out of this experiment. I had no access to treatments, just plot numbers, so I have no clue whether any of the variation in aphid growth is explained by soil treatments. Next week I’ll get into that. The students on the artificial light experiment finished their measurements, so it is time for their harvest and analyses from next week. Lastly, the tansy team repotted our tansy cuttings, and 360 young plants are now waiting for some growth. They should be ready for experiments in three weeks or so. Everything seems ready for a very successful experimental summer season.

Enough for this week.