2024 HARPER PRIZE SHORTLIST: For the next two weeks, we are featuring the articles shortlisted for the 2024 Harper Prize. The Harper Prize is an annual award for the best early career research paper published in Journal of Ecology. Fiona Seaton’s ‘A diversity of diversities: Do complex environmental effects underpin associations between below- and above-ground taxa?’ is one of those shortlisted for the award.
About the paper:
Our paper is on the relationships between the diversity of different taxonomic groups, and specifically whether a high diversity of plant species is associated with a more diverse soil animal, microbial, pollinator or bird community. We were particularly interested in testing the hypothesis that diversity begets diversity – are biodiversity hotspots due to a shared response to environmental factors or due to biotic associations? For that reason, we looked not just at overall species richness but also community composition and individual species, testing for all of these whether including environmental gradients explained away biotic associations. We were working with observational data from a field survey across Wales so we can’t be sure of any mechanistic explanations of our results, but it gave us a really valuable opportunity to consider the relative roles of environmental conditions and biotic associations across a wide array of natural systems.
Our results were quite a mix, although overall environmental factors did explain quite a bit of the relationships between the diversity of different groups. In some cases, this was a bit of a surprise, for example we were expecting to find much stronger relationships between plant diversity and soil microbial diversity even after accounting for environmental gradients. However, we found a much stronger non-linear response to the environment in soil microbial groups than we expected. On reflection, our surprise at this was probably due to the literature not having so many examples of including acidic heathlands, bogs, and conifer woodlands in the same analysis as pasture grasslands and croplands. It did lead to quite a challenge in trying to identify ways of accounting for non-linear relationships that were comparable to methods with the more commonly used linear relationships, but it also led to some of the more interesting results so I can’t complain!
Moving forwards within this field, I think accounting for non-linear dynamics are going to be increasingly important as we try and answer ecological questions at broader scales, and in such a dramatically changing world. Methods for ecological monitoring, especially soil community characterisation, are also changing rapidly, and we’re continually learning new things about not just taxonomic composition but also functional composition. I think that trying to get the most ecological insight from these different methodologies will continue to be a huge challenge, particularly in trying to figure out how these kinds of results translate into policy and practice and which specific methodologies should be used to best monitor ecosystem condition.
About me:
It’s difficult to pinpoint when I (she/her) decided to go into ecology but if I had to pick a specific instigating event, I think it would be sometime in my teens when I was busy working my way through the city library (I’d already read most of the local library, no prizes for guessing who the nerdiest kid in school was). I picked up a book on mass extinction events, specifically the end-Permian mass extinction, and I realised just how fragile the ecosystems that surround us are. I’d always loved spending time outdoors, and at school we had learnt about how humans had released loads of greenhouse gases. So, I put two and two together to realise that we might be living through the start of another mass extinction on the scale of the end-Permian. So, after the panic and despair had died down a little, I decided I wanted to do something about it.
Now, I work as a quantitative ecologist at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology in Lancaster, England. This is a research institute in the environmental sciences, and I work within the Land Use team analysing data from a variety of different field surveys looking at how biodiversity and soil properties are changing across the UK in response to environmental stressors. This paper actually came out of the last chapter of my PhD (it took a while and a lot of reanalysis to publish!) and since then I’ve continued to work on analysing national-scale field surveys. I’m still really interested in how we best analyse data from multiple species and groups at once and have been working on various projects trying out different methods. More and more I’m working on data integration problems, where we have data from different sources on the same species and are trying to bring them together to maximise our ecological insight. Sadly, it doesn’t always work as well as we’d like but with the proliferation of new methodologies within ecological monitoring it’s really important that we try and figure out how to bring them all together.
My advice for working as data analysts within ecology would be to (a) always take good notes (this can come back to bite you if you don’t – and yes, I’ve not always learnt that lesson as well as I should have), and (b) try and talk to people who actually collect the data and know more about the species you’re working on. I spend so much of my time sitting at a computer and working on a really wide variety of species and ecosystems. Actually speaking to people who know these systems and how the data was collected is invaluable for understanding how I should be carrying out my analysis, and whether I can trust the results I’m seeing!
Find the other early career researchers and their articles that have been shortlisted for the 2024 Harper Prize here!
