Writing workshop and Evolution Evolving conference
Writing workshop and Evolution Evolving conference with overseas collaborators
Following up the success of previous editions, the lab organized another writing workshop in St Andrews from the 26th to the 29th of March. For the occasion, we invited our collaborators Joshua Madin (Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology), Damaris Torres-Pulliza (Macquarie University), Kyle Zawada (Maria’s former PhD student), and Luisa Fontoura (Macquarie University) from the J Madin lab. The workshop aimed to advance our collaborative analyses and/or produce first drafts of papers. All the participants, which included Maria, Faith, Jessica and Viviana from the lab, succeeded in achieving their goals for the workshop, which is the third of its kind.
After the workshop, Maria, Jess, Viviana, and the overseas delegation, attended Evolution Evolving , a conference held in the beautiful Churchill College in Cambridge. The conference brought together different kinds of researchers – from historians to biologists, from philosophers to anthropologists – to discuss the evolving theoretical framework for evolutionary biology. The conference indeed had a full session on niche construction, during which Maria gave a talk entitled “Keeping close neighbours, corals are spatially clustered within and across species”, and Luisa gave hers on “Linking coral morphological traits and reef fish community structure”. The others presented their take on niche construction with posters: Damaris presented “Deconstructing reef complexity: relating coral diversity, rugosity and fractal dimension”, Kyle presented “Quantifying niche constructing traits in reef corals”, Jessica presented “Trait-based theory leads to generality across successional systems”, and Viviana presented “Coral-built structural complexity enhances coral recruitment: niche construction in action? “.
We were too focused during the workshop to take pictures, but here we have a picture of the group at Churchill College for the conference. From the left: Damaris, Maria, Luisa, Jess, Vivi, Kyle and Josh.