GEP on AIR!

Alejandro Martinez-Abrain speaks of the New Paradigm of Conservation Biology at "Balears fa Ciència", here (at min.15)

Award!

The publication by Sergio et al. (2014) has been awarded as the best publication of year 2014 of the Estacion Biologica de Doñana (CSIC) in the action framework of the Severo Ochoa (category : senior scientist). 

Congratulations, Fabrizio!

GEP at the DEVOTES SUMMER SCHOOL

Sergi Pérez Jorge from the GEP presented the study “Integrative assessment of human dimension on the conservation of the Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin in Kenya” at the DEVOTES-EUROMARINE Summer School in Donostia-San Sebastian.

The course explored the potential and recent advances in the integrative assessment of marine systems (based upon strong new monitoring tools, such as genomics), including the various ecosystem components (from plankton to marine mammals), at different scales (from water bodies to regional seas), and in management applications (e.g. to the European Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD), the Water Framework Directive (WFD)).

Introductory course : CAPTURE-MARK-RECAPTURE AND –RECOVERY ANALYSIS

UPCOMING WORKSHOP : 21-26 November 2016 !!!!!

23-27 November 2015, Mallorca, SPAIN

The course aims to introduce students, researchers and environmental managers to the theory and practical aspects of the analysis of capture-mark-recapture and –recovery data to estimate survival, recruitment and dispersal probabilities. The course is based on theoretical classes as well as practical sessions with real and simulated data.

Dead line for registration: 24 September 2015 
Places: 20

New publication : a new term in evolutionary biology and paleontology

Martinez-Abrain, A. 2015 Stoch-aptation: a new term in evolutionary biology and paleontology. Ideas in Ecology and Evolution. doi:10.4033/iee.2015.8.6.n

Following two seminal papers published in the journal Paleobiology by Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba several decades ago, I suggest a new term (stoch-aptation) to refer to those individual traits or sets of traits that provide, just by chance, fitness adventages to species when faced with catastrophes (i.e. geological events triggering massive mortality), and that may lead to the origin of taxonomical entities above the species level.

Photo from http://www.aqua.org/explore/animals/chambered-nautilus

I provide as an example of stoch-aptations the set of features that helped mammals pass the Cretaceous-Paleogene transition, as well as traits behind the success of living fossils. However, the identification of specific stoch-aptations can be difficult. This missing term is necessary and useful to (a) consolidate the idea of selection at different hierarchical levels, (b) acknowledge the role of chance in the evolution of higher taxonomical categories and (c) think of the role of geological catastrophes as generators of innovation.