CAP LTER Semester Welcome

When: 3:30-5:00 PM Friday, September 17, 2010
Where: Global Institute of Sustainability, Room 481, 800 S. Cady Mall, Arizona State University at the Tempe Campus
Who: All currently involved faculty and students and those who are interested in becoming involved in the project.
What: An introduction to the Central Arizona – Phoenix Long-term Ecological Research (CAP LTER) project in the Global Institute of Sustainability.

Please join us to kick off a new year of CAP LTER activities. We will have a brief program introducing the project and indicating how you can get involved. Plus, we will have an opportunity for you to meet and talk with fellow researchers. We look forward to seeing ongoing CAP collaborators at this event as well as new faculty and graduate students. Please contact Marcia Nation (Marcia.Nation@asu.edu) for more information.

CAP Scientist Speaks In Italy

CAP LTER scientist, Paige Warren traveled to Ferrara, Italy in July for the Fifth European Conference on Behavioral Biology. She was invited to serve as the opening speaker in a symposium on “Consequences of an Urbanizing World: from Physiology to Behaviour,” organized by Henrik Brumm (Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, Seewiesen, Germany) and Diego Gil (Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, CSIC, Madrid). 

Warren spoke about the transition in urban community ecology from describing pattern to an emerging understanding of the underlying processes – from extinction-colonization dynamics to the importance of species interactions like competition (an idea highlighted in a recent BioScience paper led by CAP scientist Eyal Shochat). She argued that behavioral biologists have an important role to play in distinguishing among these candidate mechanisms. She also called for greater collaboration with social scientists, recognizing that interdisciplinary approaches will yield greater insights into all these questions than solely disciplinary approaches.