Talk at the meeting of the entomological society of Thuringia

So this week-end I talked about why and how we do biodiversity-experiment research and showed some results from our long-term (12 years) field site. What was new was two thing:

1: the audience was composed of hobby entomologist http://tev.nabu-thueringen.de/ , the people responsible for collecting and documenting species occurrence at local scales, they do a lot of great job and have exceptional knowledge on taxonomy of their favorite group/family and some bit of ecology as well, what’s more they do all this for free.

2: everything was in german, I was a bit afraid to get stuck at some point, but I kept to basics and I found that I was doing a good job.

The talk can be found here: http://www.slideshare.net/Lionel_68/entomo-hertzog-2014

I got some interesting feedbacks below is a small list:

-“Ich vertraue nicht im Zahlen (I do not trust in numbers)”, was a nice one, we are usually more interested to find significant linear relationships between two set of numbers than knowing which species is there. I guess that as our vision is more global, we would like to derive some general conclusions, we prefer to use numbers rather than species identity.

• They were interested to put on their server our species list data, to document occurrence of arthropods in these type of grassland in the region. I find this quite a nice idea, especially since our sampling effort (at least for pitfall) traps is so much more important than what is usually do (we have 160 pitfalls left open for 150 days between april and october).

• Looking at spill-over effects, ie the fact that some species are found on a plot just because they are occuring in high densities in neighboring plots. This is an idea that is floating in my mind for some time, some people already did this for specialist herbivores in 2005, but this would be interesting to generalize.

All in all this was a nice experience and I will look up for some of the work these guys are doing and try to fit in somehow.