First a huge apology to my summer students. I promised to upload their posters, the fruit of their hard work from their summer internships. Sadly the semester started and ....that was it! I simply forgot. To my make up for this, I am writing a long overdue blog post on what they set off to do and their findings.
Brooke found a very interesting published dataset on the scarce and threatened beetles of Great Britain (Hubble 2014). She decided to focus on the change in stag beetles (Coleoptera, Lucaenidae) range distribution over the last four decades in southern England. She found that stag beetles have advanced north as the average temperature has increased. Luke and I collected data on plant/pollinator visitation rates in our gardens. Mine is in a rural location and Luke's is in the city of Lincoln. He compared visitation rates in the rural and urban gardens by date, according to climatic variables and then analysed the community structures at both sites. He looked at species richness, abundance and a variety of properties of the plant/pollinator communities, such as nestedness (a measure of the structure and co-occurrence of species in a community) and connectance (a measure of the complexity of species interactions). Luke found that while the country garden was more biodiverse and nested, the urban garden had more links per specie - which is a trait of a healthy community. It's been such fun to supervise Luke and Brooke - I wish them well in their studies!
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AuthorGraziella Iossa Archives
August 2023
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