Other than the papers referenced in the DGS proposal, what other papers or books would be essential in a course "reader"? I plan to assemble a useful body of work for all students and then parse papers into folders either by topic or by week of the seminar (whichever seems more logical). Please post ideas as part of this forum or send references (titles, authors, full citations) to me via email as soon as you can.

As for data, I'd like to get a better sense of the data sets you would feel comfortable submitting for use by groups of students. I'll make a list of the available data sets by topic. Please send me a brief description of the data you will share: size of the data set, file type it is saved in, where/when collected, general overview of what type of data it is, other papers in which it has been used. If you would rather I send a spreadsheet with blanks for you to fill in, I can post one to the site.

Thanks, everyone!

Hi Ashley and all -

I've begun to think about the intial course meetings and assembling some readings. For the introduction I think that we discussed several papers, I think that we need to keep these to a minimum, but ask the students to read them BEFORE the first meeting.

The group suggested Balvanera et al 2001. I took a look at it, its a quick 1 pager that seems appropriate and could replace a chapter from Nature's Services. I also recommend the EcoAgriculture partners papers on EcoAgriculture and the Millennium Development Goals. Though I do not think that our focus should be in developing countries, the paper hits the salient points, and again is brief and to the point.

I would hold off on Costanza until lecture 2 and make it the PES reading.

For the second and third course meeting, the reading will be a little heavy since there are 5 topics to be covered during each lecture, and we should try to get one per topic.

Since I have been designated as the lead for the carbon and the functional diversity session I am going to proposal the Diaz and Cabido 2001 paper "Vive la Difference: Plant Functional Diversity Matters to Ecosystem Processes". It it a simple read and I will include some of its figures in my lecture presentation.

I think that I am going to recommend that we use the Bunker et al 2005 paper "Species loss and above ground tropical forest" because it focuses the theme on the role of biodiversity unlike many other papers.

I am attaching the Bunker, Diaz and EcoAgriculture papers here, Ashley could you place them in folder according to their lecture (we should make one folder for the introductary lecture, lecture 2 and lecture 3.

Thanks!

Fabrice

Could not put the attachments, I kept getting a message that they were too large, so will throw them in the central folder.

Hi Ashley,

I think that the excel sheet with the information would be good, or should people use Morpho?

Fabrice

For now, we'll stay away from Morpho. Once we know the themes and the data sets that will be used, we'll add data to Morpho. Each of you should just list the types of data you have in your thematic slides.