Category Archives: University of Northampton

A (Green) Apple for teacher – The Biodiversity Index wins an award!

At a small ceremony attended by businesses and local authorities on Friday, the team who developed the Biodiversity Index received a Green Apple Gold Award from The Green Organisation. I proudly accepted the award on behalf of everyone and made a short speech which, in the spirit of my “reduce, reuse, recycle” policy, I’m posting here. Thanks to Bobbie Lane for the photo, Richard Moore for help with the speech, and Gareth Thomas for the notion of biodiversity as the “fourth resource”.

Ladies and gentlemen.

In June 2011 the UK National Ecosystem Assessment reported to Government that the value of the natural environment to the British economy was at least £30 billion per year in terms of the ecosystem services it provides, such as carbon storage, soil fertility, tourism and pollination.

In contrast, earlier this year the State of Nature Report by 25 of the UK’s leading wildlife organisations, suggested that 60% of animal and plant species for which we have data have declined in the past 50 years. To add to this, some recent work by my research group at the University of Northampton has shown that 23 species of pollinating bees and wasps have gone extinct in Britain since the late 19^th century.

Clearly there’s a contradiction here: at a time when we value biodiversity more than ever, it is declining at an ever-faster rate. So what can we do about this situation? How can individuals and organisations help to reverse this trend? This is one of the aims of the Biodiversity Index.

Energy, water and waste are typically the main resources actively managed by businesses and organisations, but there is growing interest in understanding and managing biodiversity as a fourth resource that is critical for society as a whole. In contrast to some of the other speakers you have heard today, the Biodiversity Index is not going to make you money. In fact, if you are in the commercial sector, it will cost you a small amount of cash to join. But the broader benefits of staff engagement with wildlife conservation, and the positive effect this will have on our country as a whole, are priceless.

The Biodiversity Index is an interactive web-based tool, developed by the University of Northampton and believed to be the first of its kind anywhere in the world. It enables organisations with little or no knowledge of biodiversity to undertake a rapid but scientific assessment of the level of plant diversity on their site and suggests ways to improve each habitat.

The Index widens access to the knowledge and tools required to make a start in improving the management of biodiversity on urban sites, with the potential to assist schools and colleges, universities, hospitals, local authorities, SMEs and larger businesses to improve the environment in which we work and live.

The tool was developed as part of the SEED Project and was launched at the Environmental Association for Universities and Colleges annual conference in April 2013. To date the Biodiversity Index has been used by over 30 UK universities and endorsed by several companies including Ricoh UK Ltd, a Global 100 sustainability company.

On behalf of the team that developed the Biodiversity Index I am delighted to accept this Green Apple Gold Award as an acknowledgment of the innovative work undertaken in this collaboration between the School of Science and Technology and the Department of Infrastructure Services at the University of Northampton.

Thank you.

The Cliff

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UPDATE: Late conversations with colleagues has convinced me that this “cliff” is an artefact. Web of Science started to include search abstracts around 1990, making it much more likely that specific search terms would appear.

Over the past few months I’ve been thinking a lot about PhDs and doctoral students, and our expectations of them, specifically in contributing to cutting edge biodiversity science. In part this is because August 2013 will mark the 20th anniversary of the oral examination (“viva”) of my PhD at Oxford Brookes University. The viva (short for the Latin phrase viva voce or “living voice”) is a peculiarly British method of examining PhD students that differs significantly from its (often public) counterpart in the rest of Europe and Scandinavia, and even more so from its equivalent in North America and the rest of the world.

For those of you unfamiliar with the viva process, I can recommend Simon Leather’s recent posting on the topic.

Since 1993 I’ve had the honour of acting as an examiner for 22PhD theses (4 at the University of Northampton, 18 externally) including two so far this year; I’ve yet to turn down an opportunity to examine a PhD as it’s flattering to be asked and (more importantly) a great opportunity to see new ideas and data being generated by minds younger than mine.

One of the things that has exercised me recently is how much knowledge the average PhD student in my main discipline of pollination ecology actually has to get to grips with while doing the background research for their topic. I wondered how this had changed since my time as a postgrad in the 1990s, and how the expectations of my own PhD examiners had changed since the 1970s. So, using the wildcard term “pollinat*” in Web of Science I searched the contents of seven journals (Oecologia, Ecology, Journal of Ecology, Oikos, Annals of Botany, American Journal of Botany, & American Naturalist) that have published a significant proportion of the literature on pollination ecology over the past forty-odd years.

Of course I expected to see an increase in the number of papers on this topic being published per year over that time period, but not the two orders of magnitude difference that I found. A PhD student studying pollination ecology in the early 1970s would be confronted with fewer than 10 papers on the topic coming from these seven journals whilst at the present time it’s averaging around 130 per year:

So it’s no wonder that PhD theses are tending to become more focussed as topics become more specialised. So far, so expected. But what I think is more interesting is the shape of the graph; why is there such a steep increase in the number of published papers in 1991? I’ve nicknamed this point “The Cliff” because of its shape, and also because it seems to symbolise an intellectual barrier to be surmointed: an ability to read and synthesise a lot more information than was available prior to the early 1990s. What is the reason for The Cliff? Do other areas of ecology and evolution demonstrate a similar pattern in their historical rates of publication? I see a link here to a discussion going on over at the Dynamic Ecology blog about the most cited ecology papers of the past few decades, and particularly the fact that “big ideas” papers are becoming less cited than review papers. Perhaps it’s because we need these reviews to keep on top of literature that we’ve not got round to reading!

But that doesn’t explain why 1991 represents a step change for publishing in the field. I’d be interested to hear the views of others working in pollination ecology. What happened in the late 1980s to stimulate such an interest in doing research into plant-pollinator interactions? Was it the publication of some key papers or books? Did more funding become available specifically for work in this area?

A coiled Spring

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April, according to T.S. Elliot, “is the cruellest month”. Not sure about that, though April 2013 proved to be both frustrating (as we in northern Europe waited for Spring to arrive) and busy, as I tried to pack in a whole set of activities. That’s my only excuse for not updating my blog, so the aim of this post is to catch up with biodiversity-related activities and observations over the past few weeks.

Just as iconic decades begin part-way through a given ten year period (the 60s didn’t really kick off until about 1963, for instance) so April for me actually began at the end of March. In the last week of that month I completed my formal teaching for the term and celebrated the first anniversary of the Nene Valley Nature Improvement Project. I also picked up my daughter Ellen from Heathrow Airport, on a two week visit back from working in China. On the way I counted over 20 red kites flying near the M40 motorway – what an incredible success story their re-introduction has been!

One of the reasons Ellen had come back was that I was due to give my inaugural professorial lecture, entitled “How many bees does it take to wake up in the morning? The importance of biotic pollination in a changing world”. Another reason was to to celebrate my eldest son Patrick’s 18th birthday the following day. Both once in a lifetime events and both had family at their heart. It was a great week.

Some leave time followed, much needed after what seemed like an endless 12 week university term, during which I hoped to plant potatoes and do some other work in the garden. But Spring refused to uncoil. The northerly winds brought cold weather that froze all vernal activity in the act. Flower and leaf buds were there waiting to unfurl; insects would occasionally appear then just as quickly disappear; and birds clearly wanted to get on with the important activities of raising young. But all was delayed. One could sense the tension, the build up of seasonal energy, biology waiting to happen.

A talk at Earlsdon Gardening Club near Coventry on Monday 8th April was well received and took my mind off the organisation of the biennial Bumblebee Working Group meeting on the 11th. This semi-formal get together of scientists, NGOs, and other Bombus-minded individuals, shifts between venues every two years. At the last meeting in 2011 I volunteered to host the next event and then put it out of my mind for 18 months. Organising a scientific meeting is always a bit of a mad panic as the day draws closer and one wonders if anyone will actually turn up. But as it turned out the event was well attended, with over 80 people listening to talks on diverse topics including the effects of neonicotinoid pesticides on bumblebee colonies; I’ve uploaded a copy of the programme.

Friday 12th April was a frantic dash around office and lab to get books, equipment and sundries organised for our annual undergraduate Tenerife Field Course, which was flying out on the following Sunday. A great time was had by all as we explored the biodiversity of Darwin’s Unrequited Isle and we came back with a wealth of great data plus not a little sunburn. No matter how often I tell students that they really need to wear a hat and use sun block, some will never listen.

Arriving from Tenerife early on Monday 22nd, I slept for a few hours then was back at the university for the oral PhD examination of Hilary Erenler, whose work I have mentioned previously. These exams are always stressfull for both student and supervisors but in the event Hils performed wonderfully and passed with only minor amendments. A great result! Now looking forward to publishing some papers from that work.

April ended, and May began, with a change in the weather. Much warmer winds blew in from the south west and life suddenly erupted: pressure had been removed from the coiled Spring. Lots of pollinators appeared in our garden including: Anthophora plumipes, one of my favourites for its glossy, black females and aggressively flower patrolling males; the relatively newly arrived Bombus hypnorum; the bee fly Bombylius major; and several different butterflies.

Clearly it’s time to plant those potatoes!

For she’s a jolly good Honorary Fellow (reduce, reuse, recycle part 4)

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The signals of spring are appearing across Northamptonshire. Despite the current cold and wet weather, a couple of recent ventures out into the wilds revealed Prunus sp. and lesser celandine (Ranunculus ficaria) in flower, as well as lots of frisky birds doing their thing. But for me there is no surer sign of approaching spring than the start of a new series of Gardeners’ World on BBC 2. It’s a programme I’ve followed for many years and (as well as useful gardening information) it provides a barometer for how a significant sub-class of the Great British Public (amateur gardeners) thinks about the environment and its biodiversity. It’s also an influential programme that changes behaviours, as I argue in the following piece of writing from last year, when the University of Northampton gave Gardeners’ World presenter and gardening writer Carol Klein an Honorary Fellowship.

Universities award honorary degrees and fellowships to famous people and “celebrities” for a variety of reasons, not all of them laudable and some ethically dubious. But we proposed Carol Klein because of the effect her work has had on how gardeners garden. I had the pleasure of introducing Carol at the graduation ceremony, in front of an audience of a couple of thousand graduands and their families. What follows is the text of that presentation; as I’ve mentioned previously, why waste good words when they can be reduced, reused and recycled?

Following an introduction by the Vice Chancellor, Ollerton steps up to lectern dressed like an extra from a Harry Potter movie, be-gowned and be-capped. He starts to speak…..

Chancellor, insofar as the Council and Senate of the University have seen fit to establish Honorary Fellowships to confer on eminent individuals, I today present to the Chairman one on whom the Council and Senate have determined to confer such an award.

PAUSE – Carol was guided by a Marshall to stand at the front of the stage. Once she was in place and the Marshall had returned to his seat, Ollerton continued….

I am delighted to introduce to you Mrs Carol Klein.

SHORT PAUSE – just for effect…..

There can be no doubt that the British are a nation of gardeners. Whether it’s just developing a window box, a small back garden, or, for the more adventurous, an allotment, horticulture is a hobby that excites both young and old. This is reflected in some astonishing statistics; the Horticultural Trade Association estimated that in 2010 the Garden Retail Market was worth £4.6 billion to the economy, whilst public gardens such as Kew and the Eden Project both host over one million visitors a year.

Much of this public passion for gardening is both reflected in, and fuelled by, the coverage it is given in newspapers, magazines, radio and (most especially) television. And since its first broadcast in 1968, the BBC’s Gardeners’ World has been the pre-eminent gardening programme in Britain and Carol Klein is one of its most popular presenters.

Carol was born in Walkden in Salford, Lancashire and has never lost her accent! Following her school education she trained as an art teacher and taught in schools in London before moving to Devon. There Carol taught at North Devon College whilst developing her own interest in plants and gardening.

This grew, quite literally, into her own plant nursery, Glebe Cottage Plants, which she set up with her husband Neil.

What was once a hobby had become a career. The nursery exhibited at all the major Royal Horticultural Society shows, winning gold medals at Hampton Court, Westminster, Malvern and of course Chelsea. In 1989 a Gardeners’ World feature on Glebe Cottage Plants led to invitations to work as a guest presenter for the BBC and Channel 4.

In 1998 Carol wrote and presented a six-part series Wild About the Garden in which she promoted the ideals of finding space for native flora and fauna in our gardens, something which is very close to the hearts of those of us who teach and carry out research in the Department of Environmental and Geographical Sciences.

Carol has starred in other TV programmes, including two series of Real Gardens, as well as offering her expertise to television programmes such as Garden Doctors, Time Team and even Water Colour Challenge. Carol’s most recent series, Life in a Cottage Garden, was filmed at her own Glebe Cottage. In December the High Summer episode from the series won the prestigious Garden Programme TV Broadcast of the Year award at the 2011 Garden Media Guild TV & Radio Broadcast Awards.

Life in a Cottage Garden was also made into a book of the same name because as well as her television presenting work, Carol is a prolific author. Carol has written a number of bestselling books including Grow Your Own Veg, with over 200,000 copies sold, and contributes articles for periodicals including Garden News, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and, of course, Gardeners’ World magazine.

And it is Carol’s weekly appearances as one of the presenters of Gardeners’ World for which she is most famous. Every Friday night between March and October over 2 million of us watch the programme as it is broadcast, with many more catching up with it later on the BBC iPlayer.

Gardeners, whether experienced or novice, cannot help but be roused by Carol’s passionate and energetic on-screen persona. However, this is not an act for the benefit of the audience, it’s how she is! I learned that a couple of years ago when I had the pleasure of working with Carol for a Gardeners’ World special edition called The Science of Gardening. During a long day of filming Carol never lost her curiosity and enthusiasm for the subjects we were discussing.

The programme was filmed at Glebe Cottage. In an article for the Guardian newspaper a few years ago, Carol wrote: “It has taken a long time to get to know my garden – 30 and a bit years – and I’m still finding out about it……..at every twist and turn it unfolds new revelations. A garden is a place to enjoy and indulge in, something you can love, somewhere you can nurture. It stimulates all the senses, and its very unpredictability gives it a vitality not often encountered in our contrived and controlled world.”

This, to me, sums up what makes Carol such a special gardening presenter and communicator – even familiar things excite her, whilst the unfamiliar is approached with a keenness to understand and to communicate it to the widest possible audience. In that sense, Carol’s original training as a teacher has never been lost.

Chancellor, distinguished guests, graduands….

ANOTHER SHORT PAUSE – just for effect….

…..today we are honouring Carol Klein not just because of her work as a public gardening figure but also for her contribution to persuading gardeners to think about and to limit the negative impact of their hobby.

All human activity, including gardening, has an impact on the environment that sustains us. It is Carol Klein’s championing of gardening in an organic, wildlife friendly way which may be her most lasting contribution. Tellingly, a recent Public Attitude Survey by Defra showed that almost 70% of respondents “actively encouraged wildlife in their gardens, for example through feeding areas or specific planting”. It is people such as Carol who have helped to shape public opinion in such a positive way.

As Carol put it in a newspaper article a few years ago, gardening with the environment in mind: “relies on building up communities of fungi, flora and fauna in the soil, and any interruption or chemical intervention sets it back. It’s not a question of being hardcore; it’s about having faith in nature and natural processes.” That faith is more than just “tree hugging” or “Saving the Planet”: the UK National Ecosystem Assessment in 2011 estimated that our natural environment contributes over £30 billion to our economy every year through the provision of ecosystem services such as fresh water, carbon storage, pest control and pollination. Gardeners have an important part to play in ensuring that we do not compromise those ecosystem services and Carol Klein has played a significant role in promoting those values.

Chairman, In accordance with the decision of the Council and Senate, I am privileged to present to you Carol Klein that you may confer an Honorary Fellowship.

Applause from the audience as a very embarrassed looking Carol Klein steps forward to give an engaging and humorous speech. Ollerton goes back to his seat on the stage, relieved his part is over

A (bird) book for bedtime (and a bit about bees besides)

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Biodiversity as it’s generally defined and conceived includes not only diversity of species and habitats, but also diversity within species, often (but not always) genetic in origin. Eddie Izzard’s new two-part television series Meet the Izzards neatly captures the idea of genetic diversity, and how it informs our understanding of the past evolution and prehistorical dispersal of a large, bipedal mammalian omnivore. “Cultural biodiversity” in Homo sapiens is less easy to define in this way as it has probably only a limited genetic component and is passed from individual to individual by copying and refining. Other species have “culture”, for example New Caledonian crows and chimpanzees, but human cultural diversity is more varied than that of any other species.

Take book reading as an example. Some individuals of our species never read. Others read only one book. Incessantly. And then argue about what it means with others who read the same book. Other individuals gorge on a book a day or snack on one a month, or manage on a starvation diet of one per year. I’m a two book nibbler. Normally I always have a novel and a volume of non-fiction on the go. The novel is for last thing at night when I need to turn off my mind and do some easy reading; a few pages then it’s time to sleep. Nibble, nibble. The non-fiction is for the morning, if I wake up early enough, or weekends if they are free; or train journeys. Still nibbling, but this time on more solid fare.

As with all cultural diversity, none of this is inflexible and at the moment I’m also reading a non-fiction book at night: Fighting for Birds: 25 years. in nature conservation by Mark Avery, former Conservation Director of the RSPB. Mark kindly came to give a talk at the university recently and brought copies of his book to sign and sell. It was a stimulating lecture and feedback from the students who attended was very positive. For those students who didn’t make it (and there were a lot) I have to ask: why are you paying thousands of pounds a year to not turn up to events that will inspire, educate and develop you? You had the chance of bending the ear of a very prominent British conservationist. At the very least you could have asked: “How do I get to do the job that you do?” You’re currently investing a LOT of money in your future and, frankly, wasted opportunities such as this are the equivalent of failing to claim a share dividend.

Back to the book. Although Mark claims Fighting for Birds is not an autobiography, it is very autobiographical in scope and provides some great personal insights into the RSPB and the development of bird (and broader) conservation in the UK and the EU. His description of the battles fought over the fate of the Flow Country brought back memories of writing an essay on that topic during my undergraduate years in the late 1980s. I’ve still not visited that part of Scotland but I have in mind a road trip this summer that may take it in. The RSPB is one of our partners on the Nene Valley Nature Improvement Area project so I was particularly interested in finding out more about what makes our most important wildlife charity tick. Mark is an engaging and candid writer, forthright in his opinions political and ecological (and their interactions) as you can see from his blog.

By pure coincidence, this week Mark hosted a guest blogger in the shape of Matt Shardlow, Chief Executive of Buglife, talking about the current controversies over banning the group of pesticides known as neonicotinoids. Matt puts forward a compelling case for withdrawing these chemicals from general use. I don’t dispute anything he says about the role of neonicotinoids in bee deaths (though there is some debate about dosage levels used in some of the published studies and how this might translate into effects in the field). But it does concern me that this new focus on pesticides is taking the spotlight off habitat loss, particularly grasslands, which is a far more important threat to pollinator populations. There is a real danger that this single issue will be seen as an easy fix by government when a broader reform of farming practices is what’s really required. The decline of wild bees and other pollinators can be tracked back to long before the introduction of neonicotinoids. There were some silly comments on the blog about neonics currently being the single most important conservation issue. This is short sighted hyperbole and (again coincidently) Lynn Dicks has written an interesting piece on the subject of rhetoric, lies and over-the-top claims in the journal Nature.

The decline and extinction of pollinators in the UK has been an ongoing process since the 19th century. I’d hate to see the government think that it’s “fixed” the pollinator problem by banning some pesticides, a much simpler task than protecting and restoring habitats, and encouraging farmers to manage their land more sensitively. With 70% of the UK’s land dedicated to farming, human (agri)culture has got to be a key element in conserving biodiversity.

Thank the insects for Christmas (reduce, reuse, recycle part 2)

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The university term has drawn to a close in a flurry of activity as we complete our pre-Christmas teaching and assessments, and the Department of Environmental and Geographical Sciences conducted a successful five-yearly Periodic Subject Review of its degree programmes. I’m conscious that some of the things I wanted to write about since my last blog entry have slipped past without action, including a week that was bookended by visits with students to iconic localities on the biodiversity and conservation map. These were a Monday trip to the Darwin Centre of the Natural History Museum in London with students on my final year Biodiversity and Conservation module; followed by a Friday visit to Wicken Fen, arranged by my colleague Janet Jackson for second year students on her Habitat Ecology and Management module. Both great days away from the lecture room, if for different reasons.

At the Natural History Museum we looked at the insect research collections, behind the scenes where the public does not normally venture. Wicken Fen, on the other hand, is open to all and we met birders and walkers as we toured the site. I kept a tally of the number of bird species we identified and the final count was 29 (30 if you include the chickens being kept in a back garden close to the visitor centre). It would have been impossible to make a meaningful species count at the Musuem as we were overwhelmed by the statistics presented by the curators: 85,000 butterfly and moth specimens in the Lepidoptera section, 3 to 4 million specimens of true flies (Diptera). On it went; wonderful diversity and an incredible scientific resource.

Which brings me neatly to the main topic of this entry: the importance of insects at Christmas! I’ve mentioned before that one of the intentions of this blog was to reuse some of the writing I’ve done over the years in various fora, sometimes updating and re-casting it ro reflect recent activities or events (hence the “reduce, reuse, recycle” epithet). The publication this month of the final report of the Government-sponsored workshop Insect Pollinators: Linking Research and Policy in which I was involved has prompted me to modify and re-post an entry that first appeared on the University of Northampton’s blog at this time last year.

The social and economic news is not great, global poverty is on the increase even in the richest countries and the range of human-influenced assaults on the natural environment seems to be escalating on a weekly basis. But at least it’s Christmas! A time to relax and enjoy ourselves, to share time with family and friends, and to unwind during the cold and gloom of winter. Whatever your faith, or lack of it, Christmas should be about taking a break and reflecting on the year that has passed. We’re helped in that respect by the ceremonial seasonal trimmings: the Christmas tree, strings of flashing lights, baubles and tinsel. So while you’re kissing a loved one under the mistletoe, admiring that glossy holly wreath, or tucking into your Christmas dinner, spare a thought for the insects.

“What in Saint Nicholas’s name” you are asking ”have insects got to do with Christmas?!” Well, like the turkey, we’d be stuffed without them: they play an essential part in providing us with the things we associate with the Christmas. If we had no flies, wasps, bees and other bugs acting as pollinators there’d be no berries on your mistletoe or your holly. Kissing and admiring would be a less festive affair and that’s just for starters. These insects also pollinate many of the vegetables, herbs and spices on your plate, as well as some of the forage that went to fatten your roast bird or tender joint of meat. Not to forget much of what went into the nut roast that’s feeding the vegetarian relatives.

The economic value of insect pollination in the UK was estimated by the recent National Ecosystem Assessment to be about £430 million per year . In fact this is a huge under valuation because the labour costs alone of paying people to hand pollinate those crops would run into billions of pounds. This sounds far fetched but it’s already happening to fruit crops in parts of China. The answer is to encourage wild insects, not artificially managed honey bees, because collectively the former are far more abundant, and often more effective, as pollinators. Their diversity is an insurance against losing any one species in the future.

The NEA’s valuation is also too low because it only deals with edible crops. Mistletoe and holly are both dioecious species, which is to say that individual plants are either male or female, as is the case with most animals. This means that the plants cannot self pollinate and insects are absolutely vital to their reproduction and to the production of the decorative berries we so value (a holly wreath without berries is just a big spiky doughnut, in my opinion). Whilst researching the economic value of the annual mistletoe and holly crops for this blog posting I’ve been having a conversation with Jonathan Briggs over at Mistletoe Matters and he tells me that “the mistletoe trade in Britain is entirely unregulated and not documented in any tangible way” and the same is true of holly. We therefore have no idea what the economic value actually is. But some back-of-the-red-and-gold-Christmas-lunch-napkin calculations can at least give us an insight. Auction reports this year show that on average the best quality berried holly was selling for £2.50 per kg whilst equivalent quality holly without berries cost only 75p per kg. In other words, pollination by insects increases the value of that crop by over 300%. Similarly the high quality mistletoe averaged 80p per kg, whilst the second grade stuff was only 20p per kg. And the best holly wreaths (presumably with berries!) were averaging £3.40 each. These are wholesale prices, of course; retail cost to the customer is much greater. A decent holly wreath will set you back between £15 and £30 whilst online shopping for mistletoe is in the £5 to £15 bracket. The national census of 2011 shows us that there are 23.4 million households in England and Wales, plus there are 2.36 million in Scotland and 0.70 million in Northern Ireland. Let’s round it down and say there’s 26 million households in the whole of the UK. Let’s also be very conservative and estimate that only 5% of those households bought one holly wreath and some mistletoe at a total cost of £20. Multiply that by the small proportion of households buying these festive crops and you arrive at a figure of about £26.5 million! And that doesn’t include non-household use in shops, offices and businesses. So there you have it: an industry worth a few 10s of millions (at least) all being ultimately supported by insects.

With pollination, timing is everything, and Jonathan also made the point that spring flowering mistletoe and holly can be important early nectar sources for insects. Therefore despite the poor summer weather, this year has been a good one for mistletoe berries because the pollination happened before the heavy rains began. Despite being quite common plants, rather little research has been done on either holly or mistletoe pollination in the UK and it would make for an interesting student project.

The Landscape and Biodiversity Research Group here at the university is playing its part by working to understand the ecology of plants and pollinators, and how to best conserve them. In this blog I’ve referred a few times to some ongoing projects researching how the wider landscape is supporting pollinators in habitats such as country house gardens (Hilary Erenler’s PhD work which she’s currently writing up) and urban centres (ongoing PhD work by Muzafar Hussain). There’s also the recently completed work by Sam Tarrant and Lutfor Rahman on pollinator (and other) biodiversity on restored landfill sites. Plus work that’s only just started by Kat Harrold on how whole landscapes support pollinators in the Nene Valley Nature Improvement Area. This is all part of a broader programme of research into the conservation of biodiversity in our region and beyond, including a contribution to the Shared Enterprise Empowering Delivery (SEED) sustainability project. Biodiversity matters and its importance to our society is being increasingly recognised by government, business and the public.

So if you make one New Year’s resolution on the 31st December, let it be that you will put away your bug sprays for 2013 and learn to love the insects (even wasps!) who give us so much and help to support our economy in a very real way. It costs us nothing; all we need to give them is well managed, diverse, unpolluted habitats in which to live.

Have a great Christmas everyone!

When is a yucca not a Yucca?

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Notice the difference? The italicisation and capital initial of the second Yucca. That’s how the genus name of a species should be formally presented in a scientific paper, or in a newspaper article, or wherever. Like Homo – the genus in which our own species (Homo sapiens) sits.

It might seem like a narrow and pedantic point, but it’s important. Accurate and descriptive naming of species, genera, families and other taxonomic ranks is crucial to those of us who study biodiversity and is at the core of our science: without names for species, for example, we cannot make informed conservation judgements or comparisons between habitats in relation to which species are present or absent. Names matter.

But it’s not just the names themselves, it’s also how they are presented which is important: when I see the words yucca and Yucca in print, they signify two different things to me. The word “yucca” is an informal name for a group of plants that is widely applied by gardeners and has no formal scientific status. Yucca on the other hand refers to a very specific group of plants and has a clear meaning to a biologist.

To give you an example of this I’ll first have to introduce you to the Northamptonshire Natural History Society (NNHS) which was founded in 1876 and must be one of the oldest surviving local natural history societies in the country. Some important 19th Century scientists were honorary members, including Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley and Joseph Hooker. This perhaps reflects Northampton’s proximity to London though there may be other factors: one could compile quite a long list of scientists with links to Northamptonshire.

The Journal of the Northamptonshire Natural History Society was first published in 1880 and continues to the present day. Which brings us back to yuccas. Last year a short article by a NNHS member summarised the local weather conditions in Northampton for each month of 2010 (J. Northants Nat. Hist. Soc. vol. 45, no. 1). December of that year was a particularly cold month and the author notes that “the species of Yucca trees planted in Northampton, which although thriving in recent years, were killed by the cold period”.

Strictly speaking Yucca refers to plants of a particular group which are endemic (i.e. only naturally occurring) to the New World. The genus Yucca is a member of the asparagus family (Asparagaceae), subfamily Agavoideae. The plants which suffered so much in the cold winter of 2010 are in fact New Zealand Cabbage Trees (Cordyline australis) which, as the name suggests, are endemic to New Zealand. The genus Cordyline is also a member of the family Asparagaceae but belongs to the subfamily Lomandroideae and is therefore only distantly related to Yucca.

The leaves and stems of Cordyline and Yucca do look very similar, hence gardeners tend to use yucca as an informal name for both. However when these plants flower it is clear that they are very different. Flowers of the various species of Yucca are typically quite large and are adapted to pollination by a very specialised group of moths which lay their eggs within the flowers. The reward for these moth pollinators is a brood site for their caterpillars, which feed on a proportion of the developing seeds of the Yucca plant. In contrast the flowers of Cordyline australis are small and produced in very large numbers in dense inflorescences. They are also highly fragrant, to which anyone who has grown one of these plants to maturity in their garden can testify. The fragrance attracts a range of insects which feed on the nectar produced by the flowers and so pollinate them in the process. It is these differences in flower structure, more than characters of stems and leaves, which taxonomists use to classify such plants.

Until recently large New Zealand Cabbage Trees were a feature of many front gardens across Northampton. Some particularly fine examples were to be found along the Kingsthorpe Road between Osborne Road and Balmoral Road. I suspect that the largest Northampton specimens were planted in the 1970s, perhaps because people wished to recreate something of the exotic feel of package holidays to Spain and Portugal. Following the freezing weather of December 2010, the growing tips of most of Northampton’s New Zealand Cabbage Trees were killed and the top growth gradually withered and died. I was sad to see this happen to my own plant, a medium-sized specimen that I had rescued from a skip at the University several years ago, and which had become well established in my garden. However later in 2011 my plant, and those in neighbouring gardens, re-sprouted from its deep tap root and started to produce multiple rosettes of leaves around the base of its dead trunk. Give it a few years and Northampton gardens will once again be crowned by these exotic imports from the Southern Hemisphere. I moved house in early 2012 and wasn’t able to take my rescued plant with me, but I have a feeling it will survive many more cold winters to come.

Names matter to biologists, indeed to scientists of all types. They signify and tell us things beyond just the words themselves. To give a very personal example, a few people have asked me why I chose the title “Professor of Biodiversity” rather than “Ecology” (my main area of training, though confused in some peoples’ minds with New Age philosophies); or “Biology” (a much broader designation than I feel comfortable with); or even “Pollination Ecology” (narrow, to the point, but too restrictive). After a LOT of thought I chose “Biodiversity” because it very broadly reflects my interests in the whole of Earth’s life forms, the interactions between these species, and how they come together as assemblages, communities and ecosystems. But I’m also interested in the history of our understanding of biological diversity and this title gives me scope to pursue those interests too.

It’s all in the name.

The Great eSCAPE

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As I begin to write this blog entry, there’s a buzz of voices around me, excitedly discussing future research or past results, or saying goodbye to friends and colleagues, old and new. It is the last day of SCAPE 2012, the annual meeting of the Scandinavian Association of Pollination Ecologists (or “for Pollination Ecology” or “for Pollination Ecologists” – the name seems to have drifted over the years). SCAPE was the first overseas conference I attended, as a young and enthusiastic PhD student, in 1991. Older but no less enthusiastic, SCAPE is for me a regular fixture in the calendar. Even if I can’t always attend, I try to send my good wishes to the organisers, with a promise to be there the following year.

SCAPE was founded in 1986 as an informal get together of Swedish research students who were all broadly interested in questions of pollination ecology. Since then it has been held every year, maintaining the informal organisation and circulating between Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway, which is the venue for this year’s meeting in Skjærhalden in the beautiful Ytre Hvaler National Park. Attendance in recent years has varied between 50 and 80 participants, peaking when it’s one of the 5 yearly anniversary specials. One of the many great things about SCAPE is that it’s a very friendly, open hearted conference at which new research students rub shoulders with established researchers, and can present their provisional research findings safe in the knowledge that they will receive constructively critical feedback. Those established researchers can expect to have their conclusions challenged, as good scientists should, but it’s never done with malice.

The talks this year have spanned the usual wide range of geographical localities (Brazil, Israel, Spain, Ireland, as well as Scandinavia), scales of research focus (from the genetics of self incompatibility to landscape scale assessments of pollinator diversity), and quality of presentations (overuse of laser pointer on text-dense slides to textbook examples of how to deliver a message in 15 minutes).

Although I enjoyed the whole meeting and gained new knowledge from every presentation, there have been some talks which really stood out for me because I appreciated the overall approach, the message that was being delivered, or the insights it gave into questions I’d not previously considered. These include Dara Stanley’s estimate that bumblebees from 800 different nests were foraging on a single field of oil seed rape; Achik Dorchin’s account of the staggering number of bee species in small habitat fragments in Israel (totalling more than in the whole of Britain); a dissection of the question of when pollination can be a limiting ecosystem service for crops by Ignasi Bartomeus; and Robert Junker’s initial account of the huge diversity of bacteria associated with different flower organs. There were many others I enjoyed, of course, but that gives a taste of how diverse the subjects were.

Although I wasn’t speaking this year, two members of my research group were: André Rodrigo Rech talked about his PhD work on pollination of Curatella americana in Brazilian savannahs; and Stella Watts presented some of her postdoctoral work on honey bee versus unmanaged bee pollination in an endemic Iris species in Israel. This last work was undertaken with Amots Dafni, one of the doyens of pollination ecology. Amots attended the conference and told us he’d finally decided, in his 68th year, to retire from formal university teaching, administration and supervising research students – and begin a new project! Enjoy your “retirement” Amots!

Karin attended SCAPE with me and enjoyed scientist-watching, a hobby that gives me frequent insights into how we work as a community, and gives her insights into what makes me tick. Half a day of travel saw us back home at 2am Monday morning; I then had to be in university for a 9am seminar with students on my final year Biodiversity & Conservation module. Despite being tired the seminar went well, perhaps fuelled by the post-conference buzz I usually feel after these events. The seminar finished early to enable me to drive up to Park Campus, the university’s other site, for a brief meet-and-greet with the head of Sandtander Universities and his team. Banco Santander’s higher education arm has been funding scholarships and research activities at the university for several years now and it was a small grant from them that enabled André to attend SCAPE. Seemed only polite to say thank you.

A highlight later that week was Thursday, which was taken up with our annual first year undergraduate trip to Oxford Botanic Garden, part of my module Biodiversity: an Introduction. I also wrote about this in March but for the current academic year we have brought the trip forward. Our visit was hosted by the superintendent, Timothy Walker, who engaged the students for an hour as we walked the gardens, covering everything from the medical importance of plants such yew trees (Taxus spp.) in providing treatments for cancer, to the importance of specific trees for two Oxford writers, JRR Tolkien and Phillip Pullman. Timothy also described how much of the planting is laid out in beds according to plant families as defined by the latest phylogenetic research the (APG III system) stressing the importance of modern systematics to understanding biodiversity. If you want to know more about this, Timothy wrote and presented a recent television series called Botany: A Blooming History which remains the best account I’ve seen of the history of plant taxonomy and why it is relevant to modern plant sciences.

That evening Karin and I attended the opening of a show at the university’s gallery called “Encounters with Drawing” by artist Angela Rogers. There’s some very thought provoking material in the show and I recommend a visit if you are local and have time – it runs until 30th November. We chatted with Angela about the “drawing conversations” she has with people and some of her comments about “how much space do individuals need” chimed with familiar ideas from ecology about intra- and inter-specific competition in organisms and niche theory.

I’m going to end this entry with a link to a video post by my friend K.-D. Dijkstra (who I introduced in an earlier blog). It’s not often that the actual moment that a species new to science is discovered gets captured for everyone to see, but here’s K.-D. doing just that!

Wrestling the oiled serpent

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Understanding the Earth’s biodiversity is not just about knowing where organisms are currently found, their interactions and community structure, and the threats to them and how they can be conserved. It is also about understanding the evolutionary origins of that biological diversity. With this in mind I was interested to read a number of news reports over the last few weeks about the relationship between science and religion, including a piece on a debate between scientists and theologians on the origin of the universe, and the removal of a young Earth creationist perspective in an exhibition about the formation of the Giant’s Causeway.

Whilst religious and scientific views of the universe are not necessarily incompatible, literal interpretations of the origin of the world and its biodiversity are clearly at odds with our understanding of the diversification of life through evolutionary processes. Reading these reports brought back memories (not all of them positive) of an event I was involved in a few years ago.

Back in 2006, Northamptonshire Creation Group (motto: “Let true science speak” [sic]) approached our former Vice-Chancellor with the suggestion that the University of Northampton might care to put forward a speaker to debate creationist versus the evolutionary world views with a prominent Australian creationist who was undertaking a fairly high profile lecture tour of the UK that year. I was asked if I was interested in taking part and agreed because I have a long-standing interest in creationist arguments. One of my main research areas, the ecology and evolution of plant-pollinator interactions, is claimed by some to be one of those (supposedly) wonderful examples of how God has created precise interactions between species which could not possibly have evolved.

Richard Dawkins and others have argued that scientists should not be engaging in such debates as this because it gives creationists publicity and a credence that they do not deserve. However my perspective has always been that creationists are not going to go away and their influence on school curricula, for example, needs to be tackled head on.

This debate, in front of an audience of about 200 members of the public, colleagues and students, was undoubtedly the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do professionally: we were each given 15 minutes to present our case and that is a very short space of time in which to summarise 200 years of scientific research supporting the validity of the evolutionary world view. But I gave it my best shot and pointed out at the end of the quarter hour that, had I more time, there was so much more evidence I could have presented, evidence which supports the evolutionary hypothesis.

Hopefully, I went on, I’d convinced some of the audience of the validity of that way of viewing the world and the life it sustains, though I didn’t imagine that I’d changed my opponent’s worldview. He was clearly a man of great energy and commitment to his cause to have sustained his point of view for 30 years. But I wished for his sake that he’d not wasted that energy on a debate which was over long ago. which in fact Charles Darwin thought was finished when he died in 1882.

Rather than squabble over the source of biological diversity, I continued, I would rather that these creationists spent their time and energy on trying to save biodiversity. Human activity has put enormous pressure on the species with which we share this planet and whole ecosystems are being dramatically altered even as we argued that night. If creationists really care about God’s creation of life, why are they not furious at the way humanity treats it? Why are they not directing their passion towards saving it?

I thanked the audience for their time and attention and passed the floor to my opponent. What followed was not the evidence based “creation science” [sic] I was expecting (having researched his previous claims on the subject of the Earth’s age, etc.) but a rapid-fire delivery of theological arguments. Over those 15 minutes I counted 50 PowerPoint slides, a Biblical smoke and mirrors approach to arguing evolution. Interestingly, it was clear when he was loading up his presentation that he had about 8 different “Northampton lecture” that he could choose from, depending upon the tack that I took. Had I gone for a theological approach to the debate, he would have argued “science” I am sure.

After our presentations we had an opportunity to ask one another one question before it was opened up to the audience. The question that was addressed of me is one that to this day I don’t really understand. To paraphrase he asked:

“Can you provide a single example of a species which has evolved into another species, without reference to the assumption that evolution has already occurred”

The second half of the question really made no sense to me and perhaps was designed to throw me off. It worked: I asked my opponent to explain the question and received some heckling from nearby creationists who accused me of being evasive. But he clarified his question: what he was really asking was, could I provide examples of species evolving recently. I talked about antibiotic resistance in bacteria, insects which are now immune to pesticides, and also mentioned peppered moth evolution. Then the debate was opened up to questions from the floor and the first thing I was asked (by a smirking creationist) was what the peppered moths had changed into: other moths or something different? I explained the difference, in timescales and outcome, of microevolution and macroevolution. But that was lost on him.

There was also a question about why peacocks and other species were so beautiful, if not for human enjoyment? I spoke about sexual selection but my opponent countered that sweet peas in his garden were never visited by bees because they self fertilise, so why are they still attractive? I suggested he grow some different Lathyrus species, ones which had not been selectively bred by people.

So it went on, trading example for example, neither side giving any ground, until we ran out of time .

The woman who asked me the question about beauty happened to be of Afro-Caribbean descent, and came up to me afterwards when the formal debate had ended. She forcefully asked how I could support a theory which, according to her, stated that “black people are closer to apes and therefore lower on the evolutionary ladder than white people”. I firmly explained that evolution says nothing about racism and “Darwinian” arguments about racial superiority were a later bastardisation of Darwin’s original ideas. But to no avail: the woman “knew” Darwin was a racist; everyone in her church knew that.

Another post-debate exchange with a creationist went something like:

Him: Darwin states in Origin of Species that the fossil record was insufficient to support his ideas.

Me: That was 150 years ago.

Him: Yes, but Darwin said it.

Me: But that was 150 years ago; as I showed, we have acquired an enormous amount of new fossil data since then.

Him: But Darwin said it and he’s the father of evolution.

Me: But he was only one scientist and that was 150 years ago.

Him: But Darwin said it.

Etc. etc. etc. Darwin seems to have an almost mythic, bogey-man status amongst creationists, as if everything he wrote HAS to be true and if it’s false then evolution is not true. A weird interpretation of how science works.

At the end of the evening I went home exhausted and not a little depressed. Wine was drunk and the evening dissected and I wrote up some notes about the event, including the title of this blog. That phrase struck me as a suitably Biblical description of trying to have rational arguments with creationists: well greased serpents will always have a way of squirming out of the grip of logic and evidence, whilst throwing distracting coils around your limbs. I don’t regret taking part in the debate but I’m not in a hurry to do another.

Hedge on the edge

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It’s been a convoluted month and I’ve tried to find a thread that links it all together in a way that relates to the topic of this blog: biodiversity. Not sure that I’ve been altogether successful but the linking theme seems to be…….hedgerows? Perhaps the link is too tenuous in places, we’ll see.

The start of this trail is close to Swanage in Dorset where I spent a weekend away with some friends from my undergraduate days in Oxford at what was then the Polytechnic, now Oxford Brookes University. A group of anything up to 10 of us try to get together once or twice a year, often camping on the south coast or revisiting Oxford haunts, and pretend that we’re once again in our early 20s and not really in our 40s with careers, mortgages, kids and life issues. Beer is drunk and the same stories get told, each year more embellished than the last. Most of us work, one way or another, in the environmental sector and share a love of evocative landscapes, rural and urban. During this latest reunion we walked along a section of coastal path through some beautiful cliff top grasslands. The area is riddled with former Portland Stone quarries and deep galleries, making for a dramatic, human-influenced cliffscape.

The plants we encountered were a combination of typical species of chalk and limestone grasslands, together with others that can tolerate (or perhaps require?) the particular combination of salt and exposure found in such maritime habitats, for example sea aster (Aster tripolium). These cliff top grasslands host a wider variety of crop plant ancestors than any other habitat I know of; on our walk we spotted the wild progenitors of carrot (Daucus carota), beetroot (Beta vulgaris) and cabbage (Brassica oleracea). Along the path we were protected intermittently by wind trimmed natural hedgerows containing blackberry (Rubus fruticosus), a wild rose (Rosa sp.), blackthorn (Prunus spinosa) and ivy (Hedera helix). They clung to the edge of the cliff, exactly pruned to curved shapes as though by an obsessive topiarist.

Our destination was the small 13^th century chapel of St Aldhelm’s, an odd little building that may not have had an original religious function at all and was possibly a coastal watch tower for Corfe Castle. From the chapel we followed more hedges down towards the shore line at Chapman’s Pool where the fissile Kimmeridge Clay deposits yielded some very nice fossil ammonites. One of the fascinating things about this coastline is the way that the modern, living biodiversity is underlain by deposits created by the ancient organisms that built the limestones during the Jurassic period. Life builds upon life.

The walk ended where all good walks should, in a pub; in this case the 18^th century Square and Compass in Worth Matravers (“Twinned with Royston Vasey” according to a very professional looking addition to the village sign).

Back from Dorset on Sunday evening, I packed for an early start the following day to get to the University of Staffordshire for the Hedgerow Futures conference. I was only able to attend the first day but this proved to be an interesting and diverse set of talks. In the afternoon I spoke about the research conducted by one of our former PhD students, Louise Cranmer, on how bumblebees use hedgerows to navigate around the landscape. This work was published last year in Oikos and picked up by the Guardian newspaper as one of their research features. The talk was well received and there were some interesting questions and comments afterwards.

The latter half of that week was spent in Dublin acting as external examiner for University College Dublin’s MSc Environmental Science course. I had a chance to chat with a keen group of students on the course and to talk to them about their research theses. The range of topics studied was impressive, as was their interaction with external bodies and agencies and their use of historical data as a comparison to recent environmental changes. None of the students worked on hedgerows though I did see some nice ones as I flew into Dublin airport. The School of Biology and Environmental Science has a large display case containing a number of skeletons, books and other biological artefacts, including a box of glass slides presented to the department many years ago by Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection. It reminded me that 2013 is the centenary of his death. Hopefully it will give him more of the attention he deserves, a process that has already started with the launch of the Wallace Online project and a campaign to erect a statue of the great man in the Natural History Museum in London.

Returning to Northampton, work began in earnest to get ready for the start of the new academic year. It’s always exciting seeing the university coming back to life again after the slower pace of summer and the last two weeks have been a bustle of activity as we welcomed new students and said hello to those returning for their second and third years. Preparations are under way for student laboratory work and field visits this term, always a process of hope over weather as we leave summer behind. The month culminated in the announcement that Led Zeppelin’s 2007 reunion gig is to be released as a movie. This is good news for those (many millions) of us who applied for tickets to the event but were unsuccessful. So this autumn, if there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now. It’s probably some of our students doing field work.