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Info DEE # 37 - March 2022
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A WARM WELCOME TO OUR NEW COLLEAGUES
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Mr Hugo Corval has joined the group of Prof. Goudet as a Junior FNS Researcher. Hugo is located in office 4243, phone 43.23. Hugo.Corval@unil.ch
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Mr Ewan Flintham has joined the group of Prof. Mullon as a guest researcher. Ewan is located in office 4314, phone 42.72
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Mr Mesut Koken has joined the group of Prof. Chapuisat as a Research Collaborator. Mesut is located in office 3206.1, phone 42.06. Mesut.Koken@unil.ch
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Ms Saein Lee has joined the group of Prof. Van de Waal an External Scientific Collaborator. Saein is located in office 3223, phone 42.49. Saein.Lee@unil.ch
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Ms Natalie Lewis has joined the group of Prof. Wedekind as part of the MEME Program. Natalie is located in office 3223, phone 42.49. Natalie.Lewis@unil.ch
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Mr Luca Soldini has joined the group of Prof. Chapuisat as a Research Collaborator. Luca is located in office 3209.1, phone 42.07. Luca.Soldini@unil.ch
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Mr Luca Soutter has joined the group of Prof. Roulin as an animal handler. Luca is located in office 3206, phone 42.18. Luca.Soutter@unil.ch
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Please also welcome our student assistants : Mme Nora CORTHESY (group PANNELL), Mme Valérie HORVATH (group KELLER), Mr Nathan JOYE (group KELLER), Mr Jonathan PINI (group PANNELL), Mr Alexandre Roland (group SCHWANDER), Mme Cassandra WICHT (group CHAPUISAT).
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EXTERNAL SEMINARS
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Please note that External Seminars will now be
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live-streamed through the REC UNIL platform.
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Congratulations to Lucie Aulus (Bertelsmeier group) for winning the 2nd prize for her poster «Choosing beta diversity indices to delineate ant bioregions» at Biology 2022 in Basel.
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The Jorat Nature Park and the UNIL are joining forces to create a scientific study area on the outskirts of Lausanne. By signing an agreement, the two partners undertake to support and develop research, teaching and scientific dissemination activities by creating a common bridge. Philippe Christe is the president of the park's scientific commission.
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Marc Robinson-Rechavi represents Swiss researchers in the new round of negotiations for open access publishing and subscriptions (Publish + Read) with the big publishers (Elsevier, Springer-Nature, and Wiley).
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Erica van de Waal and her team have been featured on Uniscope about their observations of primates and trying to understand the culture of the apes while comparing it to that of humans.
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Dr Michel Genoud (external scientific collaborator in the Christe group) has published an article in the Journal of Thermal Biology. The study reviews data on the seasonal variation of the basal metabolic rate (BMR) of small mammals and demonstrates that it is linked to the expression of torpor at an interspecific level. BMR is highly flexible among birds and mammals, reflecting various functional and compositional adjustments that occur during the lifetime, including those made in face of environmental seasonality. In contrast to those entering daily torpor, small mammals entering long-bout torpor (i.e. hibernation, estivation), collectively tend to show a lower fall-winter BMR relative to their spring-summer BMR. This suggests a general tendency by these species to down-regulate more strongly important functions and organs (e.g. gastrointestinal tract) during fall and winter.
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Dr Nicolas Fasel and Dr Michel Genoud (both external scientific collaborators of the Christe group) have published an article in Biology Open in association with Dr Colin Vuilloud, from the Department of Evolutionary Genetics of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research. A novel Bayesian inference-based method is proposed for distinguishing torpor from euthermy in respirometry experiments on heterothermic endotherms. Past methods have largely been based on partly subjective criteria such as the use of a threshold rate of metabolism or body temperature below which the animal was deemed to be in torpor. Here, a probabilistic approach is used to assign measurements to torpor or euthermy under an explicited framework and on the basis of the observed variation of metabolic rate against ambient temperature. Using a variety of published respirometry datasets on heterothermic and homeothermic mammals, the method showed highly satisfactory results. An R-package (torpor) was developed to facilitate the use of the method.
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In collaboration with the Ethiopian Wildlife Conservation Authority, Ethiopia, Functional Agrobiodiversity, University of Göttingen, the Institute of Ecology and Evolution, Conservation Biology, University of Bern and the Swiss Ornithological Institute, Philippe Christe and Jérémy Gremion (master BEC student) published a paper in Journal of Applied Ecology entitled: High semi‐natural vegetation cover and heterogeneity of field sizes promote bird beta‐diversity at larger scales in Ethiopian Highlands
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We investigated how farming system (small- vs. large-scale farming) and landscape complexity (semi-natural vegetation cover) drive bird species composition, community turnover and beta-diversity patterns in Ethiopian Highlands' agroecosystems. Contrary to our expectations, beta-diversity was not significantly lower within large-scale farms (no biotic homogenization), and complex landscapes that still offer a high amount of semi-natural vegetation promoted community turnover in both farming systems. The heterogeneity in field sizes also enhanced bird community turnover, suggesting that a combination of both small- and large-scale farming systems within a given landscape unit would promote beta-diversity at larger scales, provided large-scale farms do not become dominant.
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(a) Map of Ethiopia (©GADM). (b) Location of all the transects displayed in orange (large-scale farms) or green (small-scale farms). (c) Example of five transects with their buffer near Ali (7.303511, 39.869763). In the background, we can see how contrasted these two farming systems are. Pictures illustrating small-scale farming in simple (d) and complex landscapes (e), and large-scale farming in simple (f) and complex (g) landscapes
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Romain Feron and Robert Waterhouse published a study in the journal GigaScience, in which they introduce an online community resource of data and quality of available genome assemblies from Arthropoda, the Arthropoda Assembly Assessment Catalogue (A3Cat). They implemented an automated workflow to collect data on all assemblies from the NCBI for a taxon of interest, assess their completeness using the relevant BUSCO datasets, and collate the results into an interactively browsable table. Using the A3Cat, they surveyed current taxonomic coverage and assembly quality in arthropods, examined how key assembly metrics relate to gene content completeness, and compared results from using different BUSCO lineage datasets. The workflow is available from https://gitlab.com/evogenlab/a3cat-workflow, contact Romain to find out more.
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While you are encouraged to place your publications into Serval, please make sure that your PI has validated the deposition first. Not all documents should be included in Serval, and they are complicated to remove.
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