2012’s first research days and some reasonable progress on several fronts. The most significant element of progress is that the Ecology Letters manuscript was submitted on Friday - to be honest this is the third time the paper has been submitted and each time so far its been unsubmitted by the journal because we have transgressed some rule. This time we had to reduce the number of references to 80 from 132 - why is that a good idea? I have no clue, seems like poor scholarship to me. Anyway that has gone off now, fingers crossed, if it gets published it will be the most significant output from the systems ecology initiative so far. Remarkably I was also able to turn my attention to zebra finch genomics work - this has made very slow progress over many years but I have a finalised analysis conducted by Yongxiang at Liverpool which shows some interesting results. What is needed now is for someone to find out what we know about the significantly differentially expressed genes in each of the interesting contrasts - so the ones associated with the birds sex, their treatment group (high or low corticosterone selection) and their replicate. This is so close to being concluded now that I should be able to finish it this year. And not only that but I have also made progress on finding the data we need to parameterise the forest model SORTIE for UK forests. Unfortunately these data are not all conveniently in one place but scattered under various people’s ownership and in various forms. We have one already supplied by Yadvinder Malhi at Oxford which is a broad (many trees) but shallow (only two samples which are only two years apart), this is great but needs to be augmented by data covering a longer time period. This seems to be available from both Forest Research and the Environmental Change Network and both seem happy to collaborate - so onwards!
