Archive for the ‘Assignments’ Category

Return to All-Posts

Essay: REDD in the red

Go to the original post at Dodo's blog
Sunday, August 2nd, 2009

REDD is short for Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation in Developing Countries. After developed countries highly developed their economy, global warming, forest conservation and biodiversity become the main topics they concerned about, and, a blame to poor countries in politics, which reminds me of that famous book our common future, which is full of [...]

Read More >>

Traditional library or digital library? An era of online data centers!

Go to the original post at yendth's blog
Saturday, August 1st, 2009

In the past, all scientists and people used to go to library as a routine activity to gain knowledge from any culture, to discover nature or just to find what they wanted. But at present, everything has been significantly changing basing on the development of World Wide Web. Internet was born and has affected on [...]

Read More >>

Essay on Biogeography of Malesia

Go to the original post at andes's blog
Saturday, August 1st, 2009

Malesia has extremely rich flora.  This region containing high concentrations of endemic flora (Sodhi et al, 2004).  Furthermore, this region also overlaps with three biodiversity hotspots for conservation.  Biodiversity hotspots are areas of high priority for conservation and may be selected on the basis of their local species richness, degree of concentration of rare species [...]

Read More >>

ESSAY ON INFLUENCE OF SPATIAL AND SIZE SCALE ON PHYLOGENETIC RELATEDNESS IN TROPICAL RAINFOREST COMMUNITIES

Go to the original post at peter's blog
Saturday, August 1st, 2009

Introduction
Evolutionary relatedness among various groups of organisms helps to explain community interactions in an ecosystem. There are three mechanisms that are often invoked to understand the structure of diversity within ecological communities; neutrality, competitive exclusion and abiotic filtering. In their study, Swenson et al., 2007 studied evidence for phylogenetic conservatism and spatial scale relatedness in tropical [...]

Read More >>

Essay

Go to the original post at liqianyi's blog
Saturday, August 1st, 2009

ASSISTING, BUT NOT OVERRULING
Reading material chosen: Helping forests to help themselves-accelerating natural regeneration.
In 2000, an estimated 60% of the world’s tropical forest was classified as degraded forest, including secondary forests, degraded primary forests and degraded forest land (ITTO 2002). No doubt that large infrequent disturbances in nature, such as hurricanes, floods, volcanoes, and fire, have [...]

Read More >>

Essay on “Phylogenetic analysis of trophic associations” (Ives & Godfray 2006)

Go to the original post at huaxia's blog
Saturday, August 1st, 2009

Essay on “Phylogenetic analysis of trophic associations” (Ives & Godfray 2006)
Closely related species may share traits simply because they have inherited them from a common ancestor. This idea underlies the concept of “independent contrast” (Felsenstein 1985), which has been widely used in studying correlated evolution and adaptive significance (Price 1997).
Most previous studies focus on estimating [...]

Read More >>

using phylogenetics in understanding community dynamics

Go to the original post at carla's blog
Saturday, August 1st, 2009

This essay stems from the Webb paper on exploring the phylogenetic structure of a tree community in Borneo (2000). I chose the study because I was particularly interested in the idea of using phylogenetic approach in understanding ecological communities; that you can somehow trace ecological processes operating in a community (general; community perspective) by [...]

Read More >>

Essay – due Aug 1

Go to the original post at chuck's blog
Thursday, July 30th, 2009

Your next assignment is to write a short essay (800-1500 words) about one of the assigned readings.  Please do a bit of research as well and find a couple of related papers as references.  Properly cite your references, using the bibliographic style of the paper you are writing about.
Just post these on your own blog [...]

Read More >>