Wednesday

  • CC0 license approved for use on CRAN

  • Update my DESCRIPTION files, use the new Author@R convention.

  • Rebecca’s comment on mntd in comparative methods

  • This lab notebook gets mentioned for good practices in academic workflow.

  • Working on treebase paper

  • ESA registration

  • Lecture notes for tomorrow

  • forage fish writing

Reading

Reading over (Munch et. al. 2005). I think this is a very nice treatment, a lot clearer I think than lots of other stuff I’ve looked at (thanks Tim & Jim!). I think it highlights one of the difficulties at the boundary between our sections though.

I did notice they introduce predator density as a parameter, μT, rather than as a function of forage fish density (N). They assume top-down effects aren’t density dependent (by assuming predator pop doesn’t grow when prey grows, though they could have added N in elsewhere in the T equation instead, they don’t). Since they’ve assumed top-down mechanisms are density independent, they can’t get an equilibrium size determined by top-down effects alone, equation (4) i.e. the pattern of control they report “finding” appears to me to be the pattern they “assumed” when they chose to make T independent of N. (Maybe I’m missing something but I feel I keep running into this kind of recursive argument).

Greatly enjoyed reading Walters 2007. The example of predictive disagreement between the two equally good-fitting shrimp-harvest models is a fantastic example, and quite evocative of what Steve Pacala talks about in the historic fits on the climate models.

References

Munch S, Snover M, Watters G and Mangel M (2005). “A Unified Treatment of Top-Down And Bottom-up Control of Reproduction in Populations.” Ecology Letters, 8. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1461-0248.2005.00766.x.