Maybe that should read downs and ups. The down was to get a rejection from Ecology Letters for the big systems ecology concept paper. That has taken two years and much sweat and tears to complete, but I honestly think that it is time to give that piece of work up - no point in committing the Concorde fallacy. That will be only the second paper in my career that I have abandoned. But there are some ups, the first up would be hearing that the last paper from the house sparrow immunology project has been accepted - ten years after the work was completed, its quite a nice little piece showing that while adult house sparrows do have bibs that are affected by testosterone, juveniles do not - so the bib of first year males does not reflect testosterone. The second up, I have analysed ECN data and obtained the first parts of the allometric relationships needed to parameterise SORTIE for UK forests. It is clear now that this is not going to be easy, but it possible; it is also clear that this is new - for reasons that escape me, no-one has done this previously (which is good for us in the end). Third up is that Aris has the bird breeding evolution model working, written the methods and we spent an afternoon working out what hypotheses to test and sorting out the last pieces of information needed. The fourth up is that Greg has talked to Brasington (of Bithell and Brasington), who turns out to have moved to Queen Mary, and it looks like Greg is all set to couple a hydrological model to SORTIE.
