Species composition and abundance of mammalian communities
Mammalian Community Database now available at Ecological Archives!
Our mammalian community database contains data for 1000 mammalian communities (sorry, no bat data). For 940 of those communities, we have species-level abundance data (the remaining 60 contain only species lists). For each community, we even have location information (as best as we can determine from the original publication). Go check it out - better yet, go do something cool with it!
Glenda Yenni, M.S.!
Yesterday, Glenda Yenni successfully defended her M.S. in Statistics! Her thesis was titled: "Resource-driven energy changes in a Desert Rodent Community". In it, Glenda used her M.S. training to examine the Portal rodent data to show how using Bayesian Heirarchal modelling can contribute to our ability to understand complex interactions in ecological systems. Go, Glenda!!!
Multimodality in the individual size distributions of bird communities
The Evolution of Maximum Body Size of Terrestrial Mammals
The extinction of dinosaurs at the Cretaceous/Paleogene (K/Pg) boundary was the seminal event that opened the door for the subsequent diversification of terrestrial mammals. Our compilation of maximum body size at the ordinal level by sub-epoch shows a near-exponential increase after the K/Pg. On each continent, the maximum size of mammals leveled off after 40 million years ago and thereafter remained approximately constant.
Measures of journal quality should separate reviews from original research
Integrating spatial and temporal approaches to understand biological diversity
The Scientist profiles Sarah Supp's upcoming Conservation Biology paper
There's a great piece out in The Scientist covering a paper on which our own Sarah Supp is a co-author. The paper, currently available on-line at Conservation Biology, by USU graduate students Ryan O'Donnell, Sarah Supp, and Stephanie Cobbold, examines reasons for publication delays in the field of conservation biology.
