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BES ANNUAL MEETING
3 - 5 SEPTEMBER 2008
IMPERIAL COLLEGE LONDON, UK

WORKSHOPS AND SPECIAL SESSIONS

Aside from first class science, the BES is planning a wealth of workshops and special events for every delegates.  Below is just a list of the events arranged so far:

BES and NERC Grants Workshop
Following the success of last years BES and Royal Society grant workshop, the BES and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) will be giving presentations on their funding schemes.  The talk will include information on how grant applications are assessed and a general indication of Do's and Don'ts to follow when applying.  There will be a brief question and answer session and the chance to meet grant officers from NERC and the BES. 

NERC funds world-class science in universities and in their own research centres that increases knowledge and understanding of the natural world.

The BES aims to promote ecological research and training as widely as possible mostly through a wide range of grants.

Ecological theories for population and community dynamics: Requirements, Tests and Misconceptions: David Murrell
The workshop will be based on the idea of ‘Preconceptions; misconceptions and advances in ecological theory’, and will be split into three different ecological themes.  Each theme will aim to have one talk to explore some of the finer points of theory; a talk that focuses on some new statistical approaches that are suitable for testing the theory; and a talk with a more experimental/field based emphasis which will highlight where theory needs to be directed.  The overarching aim is to explore where theory and empirical studies are currently diverging and where they are converging.  More details of the workshop will feature in future editions of the Bulletin.

Ecosystem Services – developing scientific relationships and evidence as a basis for policy – Pete Carey, CEH Monks Wood, UK
More details to follow.

Introduction to Environmental Metabolomics – Matt Davey, University of Sheffield, UK
Metabolomics is the science of attempting to analyse the entire chemical composition of organisms. This technique allows the screening of potentially 100s of chemical traits without preconceptions or bias over which compounds are important for the organism. Environmental metabolomics is the application of metabolomics to the investigation of both free-living organisms obtained directly from the natural environment or laboratory conditions, where any laboratory experiments specifically serve to mimic scenarios encountered in the natural environment (Morrison et al 2007).

Environmental metabolomics is increasingly being used as a research tool for many ecological and physiological studies. However, the philosophy and technical approach is still new and unclear to the wider community. The objective of this workshop is to explain environmental metabolomics to new audiences and to show how this approach is applicable across many organisms and ecosystems. Open discussion about field sampling, techniques and data analysis among established and newly intrigued scientists in this field will be encouraged.

Teaching Ecology – the need for some blue-sky thinking
14:10 - 16:10 Thursday 4 September
Chair: David Slingsby,
BES Chair of  Education, Training and Careers Committee

Rationale:
To many young people ecology is little more than studying food chains several times over and memorising the Nitrogen Cycle diagram from a text book.  The Education session at the 2008 Annual Meeting will take the form of a workshop based meeting devoted extending the BES Starting from Scratch  (SfS) process with a focus on Higher Education. The SfS process began with an article in the March Bulletin (Slingsby 2008) which attracted a lot of interest. This emphasised the need for radical re-thinking if we are to attract able young people to become the ecologists of tomorrow, and to provide a positive image of ecology amongst the general public. In May 2008 the Education, Training and Careers Committee organised a meeting of stake-holders to initiate the process with a focus on the school curriculum. In this session the focus will shift to Higher Education. What is the ecological thinking which attracts and motivates A level candidates and prepares them for further study on leaving school? And once they have arrived in Higher Education - what do they need from an ecology course to prepare them for a professional career in research, in consultancy, in conservation or in education? 

Part 1: Input

• The Starting from Scratch process: the story so far. 
  David Slingsby, BES, Chair of ETCC
• The Higher Education perspective: nurturing the ecologists of tomorrow
  Malcolm Press: President of the BES and University of Birmingham
• Equipping professional ecologists
  Nick Jackson: Institute of Ecological and Environmental Management (IEEM)
• On teaching ecological thinking: the North American perspective.
  Bruce Grant, Widener College, Pennsylvania, and Ecological Society of America (ESA)

Part 2: Facilitated discussion in groups.
In answering the question ‘what is ecology’ emphasis is usually made in terms of content, for example, food webs, nitrogen cycle, energy dynamics, niche, selective pressure. In this workshop participants will be invited to lay aside familiar content, however cherished, and attempt to identify the essential concepts and the underlying ecological thinking which forms the core of what we seek to pass on to produce the next generation of ecologists. Each group will have a facilitator who will allow plenty of freedom in open-ended discussion about key aspects of ecological thinking but discourage consideration of specific content, progression and teaching methods. Such things represent the next stage of the SfS process.

Part 3: Plenary session – and where next?
It is intended to produce an interim report based on the outcomes of this workshop, together with those of the previous SfS event in May which defines the essentials of ecological thinking  and its conceptual framework. Only when we have achieved this can we rethink the kind of specific content needed to put flesh on the conceptual bones and the pedagogical methods needed to deliver it. We are not trying to produce a single perfect ecology curriculum but to initiate a dynamic process which will mean that the Society is always ready to inform curriculum developers, government and all those who teach ecology with a coherent and well thought-out set of ideas.

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