Remote sensing tools have facilitated a new understanding of animal migration by revealing the movements of billions of individuals across the globe. Yet despite their scale, migratory movements are often irregular and strongly influenced by a suite of environmental drivers. This complexity hampers monitoring efforts and makes predicting migration at the assemblage level a grand challenge. We developed a bird migration forecast system at a continental scale by leveraging two decades years of spring radar observations to identify associations between atmospheric conditions and bird migration intensity. Our model accurately forecasts migration events up to 7 days in advance, which may reduce collisions with buildings, airplanes, and wind turbines, inform a variety of monitoring efforts, and engage the public.

Randy Olson is a scientist-turned-filmmaker and science communicator know for developing the “And, But, Therefore” storytelling narrative style for scientists to tell stories about their research and to make their science more compelling to other scientists, funders, and non-scientists interested in science. Join YIBS for this public lecture on science communication!

Lecture part of the new YIBS Seminar Series in Climate Change: Global Warming and Megadrought Hosted by William Boos and Harvey Weiss

Lecture part of the new YIBS Seminar Series in Climate Change: Global Warming and Megadrought Hosted by William Boos and Harvey Weiss

This presentation will detail some of the scientific work and discoveries of the wolverine, elusive animal of the Far North. It will detail how we have applied the best available information to real-world management and conservation decisions facing wolverines, considering the advances in natural resource development northward in the province of Ontario, Canada. Dr. Justina Ray has been President and Senior Scientist of Wildlife Conservation Society Canada since its incorporation in 2004. In addition to overseeing the operations of WCS Canada, Justina is involved in research and policy activities associated with land use planning and large mammal conservation in northern landscapes. She has been appointed to numerous government advisory panels related to policy development for species at risk and land use planning in Ontario and Canada, and is the co-chair of the Terrestrial Mammal Subcommittee of The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC). She has been editor or author of 3 books and numerous peer-reviewed articles, and is Adjunct Professor at the University of Toronto (Faculty of Forestry) and Trent University (Biology Department).

This talk will provide a new framework for interpreting global carbon isotope mass balance through time, highlighting links between atmospheric oxygen and the isotopic composition of the carbon input to the ocean-atmosphere system. Noah Planavsky has been at Yale for three and half years and is currently the co-director of the Yale Metal Geochemistry Center. He studies the connections between the evolution of Earth-system processes, biological innovation, and ecosystem change—foremost in Earth’s early history. His research integrates field, petrographic, and geochemical work. The protracted rise of oxygen over several billion years dramatically changed Earth’s surface environments. However, our current picture of Earth’s redox evolution is still painted with only broad strokes. A central theme of Noah's research has been trying to piece together the history and effects of Earth’s oxygenation. With that end goal in mind, he is currently working on coupling paleoredox proxies in Precambrian sedimentary rocks, calibrating novel metal isotopes systems in modern aqueous systems, and untangling the distribution and diagenetic history of traces metals in sedimentary rocks.

What are the ecological principles that govern microbial community assembly, community-level functions or community invasions? Are they different from those that govern macroscopic ecosystems? In this talk I will give an overview of our work on all of these questions. By propagating hundreds of highly diverse multi-species bacterial communities in dozens of different carbon substrates, we have found generic coexistence of multi-species communities on a single "limiting" carbon source. The type of diet determines the structure of these communities in a predictable fashion. Beyond this finding, our collection of hundreds of multi-species communities, reared under well controlled environmental conditions, allow us to investigate the rules that govern microbial community coalescence and the relationship between community structure and function, and provide a launching pad for future investigations on the eco-evolutionary dynamics of microbial communities. Alvaro is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale. He got an undergraduate degree in Physics from UAM (Madrid) in 2003, and graduate degrees in Biophysics from the University of Minnesota and Brandeis, where he got his PhD in 2010. After a short postdoc at MIT, he started his own group at the Rowland Institute at Harvard as a Junior Fellow in 2013. He moved to Yale in July of 2016.

Introduction: This two-part short course, instructed by Hugh Possingham and Jennifer McGowan (The Nature Conservancy), will assist participants to formulate and solve general conversation problems using structured decision-making with a technical focus on training in the spatial decision-support tool, Marxan. The short course will include a half-day symposium on Spatial Reserve Design. Marxan: Marxan is one of the most widely used decision support tools in conservation and resource use planning. It is a flexible tool, probably best known to support marine/maritime spatial planning by recommending options for a network of protected areas and/or other spatial management regimes. The software supports spatial prioritization by accounting for a broad range of considerations, stakeholder values, and potential tradeoffs in a spatially and economically efficient manner. Marxan produces objective, transparent, and repeatable results. Developed by Ian Ball and Hugh Possingham from the University of Queensland, Australia, the software is free to download and use (www.uq.edu.au/marxan). Agenda: Saturday, September 22nd - Day 1 – Structured Decision-making Topic 1: What is decision science and why would I use it? Examples of using structured decision-making in the real world including: an introduction to spatial action mapping, cost-effectiveness, multi-criteria decision-analysis, and value of information theory (why monitor?) Topic 2: Solving participants problems Before the workshop, participants will be asked to describe a spatial or non-spatial conservation problem they are working on and we will formulate and solve the problem using structured decision-making. Sunday, September 23rd - Day 2 – Marxan Topic 3: What is Marxan? Trends and key concepts in systematic conservation planning When and how decision support tools are useful Topic 4: Goals, Objectives, and Targets Topic 5: “Costs” – the social, economic, and cultural sides of Marxan How cost layers have been developed to address socio-economic interests and values Examples of costs that have been used in Marxan Topic 6: Introduction to Marxan input files and parameters Design a reserve by hand activity Intro to British Columbia, Canada case-study Defining planning units, creating proper feature data format, inputting targets Creating input files Topic 7: Introduction to Zonae Cogito How the software works and hands-on exercises How Marxan finds efficient solutions (simulated annealing) Topic 8: Introduction to Marxan output files Understanding Best Solution and Selection Frequency results Interpreting output tables Topic 9: Advanced Marxan (time permitting) This course is free for the Yale community. Registration for this workshop is required. REGISTER soon as there are a limited number of seats available for this workshop. Once receiving registration confirmation, please fill and submit the questionnaire by September 14.

Steven Chown is the President of Antarctic Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research and Professor at Monash University. His research focus is on understanding the patterns in and processes underlying biodiversity variation across a range of spatial and temporal scales. In particular understanding the impacts of the major global environmental change drivers on biodiversity and what can be done to mitigate and adapt to the change.

Please join us for a conversation with David Skelly and Michael Donoghue about the University Science Steering Committee (USSC) recommendations for new scientific endeavors in ecology, evolution, and climate science.

This talk explores a Bayesian modeling approach for co-estimating phylogeny and historical biogeography, and shows how the strategy can be tailored to help date divergence times, place fossil taxa, and reconstruct ancestral ranges for two plant groups, the genus Viburnum and the Hawaiian silversword alliance.

Microbes live in highly complex and diverse communities. What processes govern the assembly, structure and function of microbial communities? Can we predict how communities will assemble in a given environment and respond to perturbations? I will show how using a high-throughput approach that combines highly diverse soil microbial communities with minimal, well-defined environments can allow us to quantitatively predict microbial community assembly and better understand the relationship between community composition and function.

We have been studying the evolution of a group of woody plants from multiple angles, concentrating recently on the repeated evolution of a particular set of leaf forms. I think this type of work might be called “systematics”, but I’d love your opinion.

The last 2.5 million years of Earth's climate have been unusual in cycling regularly between glacial and interglacial phases. Using computational modeling, phylogenetics, biogeography, and the fossil record, I'll explore how these cycles interact with speciation and phenotypic evolution and why the interactions may be fundamentally different than in non-cycling periods of Earth's history.

Join Isaac Overcast, co-creator of ipyrad, for an in-depth discussion about processing and analyzing (dd)RAD-seq data in ipyrad. This workshop will cover an introduction to command line RAD-seq assembly, an overview of data processing, and a discussion of the advanced features of the ipyrad analysis toolkit, including phylogenetic and population genetic analyses. The afternoon workshop will include a coffee break and additional time afterward to discuss individual projects with Isaac. Read more about ipyrad on the docs site (https://ipyrad.readthedocs.io/) and see the full workshop plan and supporting materials on the workshop site (https://radcamp.github.io/Yale2019/). RSVP REQUIRED: email stephen.gaughran@yale.edu Refreshments provided and workshop sponsored by YIBS Center for Genetic Analyses of Biodiversity Laboratory & Director Adalgisa Caccone

Animals use a diverse array of motion to feed, escape predators, and reproduce. The connection between morphology, performance, and fitness is a foundational paradigm in organismal biology and evolution. Yet, the influence of mechanical relationships on evolutionary diversity remains unresolved. I illustrate how simple mechanical relationships can be used to predict macroevolutionary patterns of diversity in fishes and crustaceans. Ultimately, the static laws of physics and the dynamic process of evolution are deeply intertwined.

At some point in our species’ past, we transitioned from an organism primarily driven by its environment to one that actively shapes it. However, pinpointing when this occurred complicates both practical and philosophical understanding of how to define the “Anthropocene”. New archaeological, paleoenvironmental, and geomorphological data from Malawi, central Africa, indicate the development of early anthropogenic biomes, or anthromes, as early as 85 – 100 thousand years ago, doubling the known time frame for such extensive human impacts.

Fish surfaces are tremendously diverse, but we have a poor understanding about how that diversity connects to function. I will address a small part of this gap in knowledge by discussing how mucus changes both fish surface morphology and function, and I will also illustrate how some new discoveries about shark skin are providing a way to study the hydrodynamic consequences of different surfaces.

Wild species are often profoundly affected by climate change, but predicting the long-term consequences remains a major research goal. Dr. Susan J. Mazer will discuss the ways in which herbarium specimens, evolutionary seed banks, and both short- and long-term observations of the seasonal cycles of plants can illuminate the effects of climate change on plants at a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. Reception to follow

Using logistic regression resource selection methods to quantify endemic butterfly oviposition preferences and avoidance of trees, I have documented the impact of centuries of encroachment by nutcracker-dispersed bristlecone pine trees into alpine butterfly habitat. Following large-scale catastrophic fire and loss of seed banks, butterfly host plants are surprisingly resilient, dominating perennial plant recovery on the scale of years, whereas the centuries long cycle of bird-dispersed tree emergence and encroachment unexpectedly begins first in the highest quality butterfly habitat.

Biodiversity is distributed unevenly from the poles to the equator (latitudinal gradient), and among branches of the tree of life (phylogenetic imbalance), yet how these enigmatic patterns are related is unclear. In this talk, I discuss how our efforts to improve the time-scaled phylogeny for all ~6,000 species of living mammals have revealed widespread speciation-rate variation as the main driver of species richness unevenness. In turn, we show that recent speciation has been faster in lineages that are mostly extratropical, diurnal, or have low dispersal ability. In contrast to narratives about 'adaptive' speciation processes, we hypothesize that gradients of low to high species turnover (extinction / speciation) in fact shape the majority of modern biodiversity patterns.

Aquatic systems are the foundation of much ecological theory. As such, it is important to understand how they function, but we often oversimplify or use mid-sized lakes as a proxy for all aquatic systems. Here I will present data from some of the smallest (ponds) and largest (Lake Erie) systems and challenge long-held assumptions about the community dynamics of aquatic systems at the extremes of size.