![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Conservation Webinars I watched in May
Jun. 1st, 2023 01:31 pmNorth American Firefly ID Course (May 1-3, 2023 | Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation)
I enjoyed this! I'm always down for people to tell me about their specialty and I learned a whole bunch about the fireflies in my area and also the world, a bit. Oliver Keller, who works with the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, delivered the course and he's a systematics and taxonomy guy which was fun because it translated into having really up to date phylogenetic trees. He was a bit more oral-based than I generally like and could have done a better job in giving his audience a solid basis in insect fundamentals, but I know all of this stuff about fireflies now and have a folder full of journal papers. He's also one of those dudes that is like - hit me up for scientific journals - which is really generous and something that I really appreciate because scientific publishing is like a vampire's castle. He used a lot of his own photos for this, which meant that sometimes the visual aids skewed tropical, which was neat from a diversity perspective.
The talk was set up as a three day training course for people interested in getting involved in the Xerces Society's Firefly Atlas, which is a global project, but is just launching and so has a very USA-centric focus since that's where they're based - the third day of talks was just key American firefly species that are very cool and also don't occur in Canada at all. One of the neat things about the project that sets it apart from the existing citizen science projects is the ability to upload videos, which is really useful in firefly identification because of how specific their flash patterns are. I'm excited about it.
Nothing but Native with Doug Tallamy (December 13, 2022 | Oak Ridges Moraine Land Trust)
Doug Tallamy of the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware is the front man for a lot of the discussion about the importance of native plants in North America - he's published popular science books on the subject and has done a lot of public speaking on it. This hour and a half long talk and Q&A was a good principles-based walkthrough of the work that he's done on native plants which he focuses on Lepidoptera (moths and butterflies). I've read two of his books so a lot of this was review for me, but I enjoyed the update on his attempts to lure zebra swallowtails to his property through their host plant (success!) and also his endorsement of Lorraine Johnson and Sheila Colla's 2022 book A Garden for the Rusty-Patched Bumblebee: Creating Habitat for Pollinators (Ontario and Great Lakes Edition) (because getting useful reviews of science books is really hard and having locally-focused resources is super useful, though I caught a bit of a talk by Johnson last year and the amount that she referenced Tallamy may make his recommendation slightly suspect).
Turn the Lights Out for Fireflies and Other Insects (May 11, 2023 | Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation)
A one hour talk given by Dr. Avalon Owens of the Roland Institute at Harvard University on the role of light pollution in insect declines. Super engaging and informative with lots of science communication best practices being deployed - there was this tiny moment in this where they started to use the scientific term for a thing and self-corrected to the lay-person term and I'm a little *hearteyes* about it. This talk was well-structured, they used symbology and consistently had good visual aids for everything while referencing everything, and used a variety of interesting insect examples while also presenting everything in human terms to explain and underscore relevance. An effective overview of the historical context of artificial lighting, its exclusion from conservation dialogues, and the science of how it effects insects biologically through temporal and spatial disorientation, desensitisation, phototaxis, and spectral confusion. This was great.
I enjoyed this! I'm always down for people to tell me about their specialty and I learned a whole bunch about the fireflies in my area and also the world, a bit. Oliver Keller, who works with the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, delivered the course and he's a systematics and taxonomy guy which was fun because it translated into having really up to date phylogenetic trees. He was a bit more oral-based than I generally like and could have done a better job in giving his audience a solid basis in insect fundamentals, but I know all of this stuff about fireflies now and have a folder full of journal papers. He's also one of those dudes that is like - hit me up for scientific journals - which is really generous and something that I really appreciate because scientific publishing is like a vampire's castle. He used a lot of his own photos for this, which meant that sometimes the visual aids skewed tropical, which was neat from a diversity perspective.
The talk was set up as a three day training course for people interested in getting involved in the Xerces Society's Firefly Atlas, which is a global project, but is just launching and so has a very USA-centric focus since that's where they're based - the third day of talks was just key American firefly species that are very cool and also don't occur in Canada at all. One of the neat things about the project that sets it apart from the existing citizen science projects is the ability to upload videos, which is really useful in firefly identification because of how specific their flash patterns are. I'm excited about it.
Nothing but Native with Doug Tallamy (December 13, 2022 | Oak Ridges Moraine Land Trust)
Doug Tallamy of the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware is the front man for a lot of the discussion about the importance of native plants in North America - he's published popular science books on the subject and has done a lot of public speaking on it. This hour and a half long talk and Q&A was a good principles-based walkthrough of the work that he's done on native plants which he focuses on Lepidoptera (moths and butterflies). I've read two of his books so a lot of this was review for me, but I enjoyed the update on his attempts to lure zebra swallowtails to his property through their host plant (success!) and also his endorsement of Lorraine Johnson and Sheila Colla's 2022 book A Garden for the Rusty-Patched Bumblebee: Creating Habitat for Pollinators (Ontario and Great Lakes Edition) (because getting useful reviews of science books is really hard and having locally-focused resources is super useful, though I caught a bit of a talk by Johnson last year and the amount that she referenced Tallamy may make his recommendation slightly suspect).
Turn the Lights Out for Fireflies and Other Insects (May 11, 2023 | Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation)
A one hour talk given by Dr. Avalon Owens of the Roland Institute at Harvard University on the role of light pollution in insect declines. Super engaging and informative with lots of science communication best practices being deployed - there was this tiny moment in this where they started to use the scientific term for a thing and self-corrected to the lay-person term and I'm a little *hearteyes* about it. This talk was well-structured, they used symbology and consistently had good visual aids for everything while referencing everything, and used a variety of interesting insect examples while also presenting everything in human terms to explain and underscore relevance. An effective overview of the historical context of artificial lighting, its exclusion from conservation dialogues, and the science of how it effects insects biologically through temporal and spatial disorientation, desensitisation, phototaxis, and spectral confusion. This was great.
.jpg){kind=link}