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British Ecological Society and Society Francaise d’Ecologia
9-12 December 2014 in Lille, France
Last month, I had the chance to attend the Joint Annual Meeting between British
Ecological Society and Society Francaise d’Ecologia. The meeting was held on 9-12
December 2014 in Lille, France and was attended by around 1200 ecologists from around the
world.
This meeting was restricted to ecological topics and presented 12 recent ecology
themes, from its basics to its applications. Some of the themes outlined were: Accelerating
ecology and biodiversity research, Biological impacts of climate change, Eco-evolutionary
feedbacks, and Ecological networks. As well as the general themes, some specific topics such
as: Extending freshwater management beyond shoreline, genomics in marine monitoring,
Pan-Europian parasite ecology and Ecological implications of tree diseases were also
discussed. This conference in all invited 23 of Ecology experts from around the world as
keynote speakers in specific topic symposia.
Beside those 23 invited speakers, there were also four amazing plenary speakers in
this conference, namely: Anne Larigauderie, Pedro Jordano, Camille Parmesan and Grrl
Scientist. Anne as an executive secretary of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity
and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) focused her speech on how the IPBES can provide
suggestions and recommendations to the government based on the scientific data. Pedro
underlined his presentation on the importance of ecological interactions in preventing the loss
of biodiversity. Camilla presented about the impact of climate change on ecosystems, while
Grrl talked about how social media can have a big effect in spreading science.
I presented a poster in this meeting with The Ecology of Life History Variation in
Three-spined Stickleback as a title. During my presentation in poster session two, 11
December 2014, I got some feedback and discussion from the audience. The most interesting
discussion for me was when one of the audience from Switzerland told me that their research
team are doing the opposite topic to mine. While I am analysing how the environment alters
the life history of stickleback, they try to analyse how stickleback change their surrounding
environment by doing mesocosm experiment.
Outside the poster presentation and plenaries time, I spent my time in some symposia
about evolutionary ecology and life history, biology and ecology of freshwater, and the
impact of climate change into ecosystems. One of the new ideas that I have gotten is how the
age of parents can change the trade-off between number and size of the yearlings. I also
attended a workshop about practical issues in peat land restoration.
Overall, this was a really valuable conference and was a great experience for me. I’d
like to give thanks to the School of Life Sciences and the Carr Scholarship Foundation that
helped fund my travel to attend this meeting. Great thanks also to Dr. Andrew MacColl and
The University of Nottingham’s Stickleback team for their help in collecting data and
discussion of the ideas. Special thanks to Dikti Scholarship and the Government of
Indonesian Republic, that funded my PhD.
Abdul Rahman, PhD Student, supervised by Dr Andrew MacColl