Allison K. Barner, Ph.D.
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Featured on OSU Graduate School homepage

4/8/2016

 
I'm so pleased to be featured on the Oregon State University Graduate School homepage! The image is definitely representative of my graduate dissertation field research: a joyful and excruciating exercise in navigating among waves to collect data in the early hours of the morning.
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Interview: after sunset in the rocky intertidal

3/19/2016

 
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A few months ago, after posting the above image on Twitter, I was contacted by Natalie Sopinka, who writes for the "Back Page" section of the American Fisheries Society's magazine (Fisheries) to share the story behind this photograph. You can find the full-text of the article at this link. Here, I wanted to share a few additional photographs about what it's like to work in the intertidal after dark.
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What are the conditions like at night compared to daytime?
Working the night-tide is a visceral experience. As the sun slowly sets and your eyes adjust to the limited scope that your headlamp provides, a new practice of fieldwork emerges. You listen for the pulse of the waves in case one sweeps up closer than is safe. You scan the horizon with the scant headlamp aura, searching for familiarity in the dark ridges of the looming mussel beds. The ever-present mist and rain limit visibility further, so your other senses must take center stage. You crouch close to the ground to lower your center of gravity as you walk, because now you can’t discern villainous, slippery algae from bare rock. You scrabble on your hands and knees, feeling for the bolts that mark a permanent survey plot, and rummaging through blades of algae as you might rifle through a stack of papers. Perhaps the dark always acts to make humans feel alone, but it’s a much more solitary experience working the night-tide and in the silence I always have to remember to lift my eyes from my work to admire the unearthly landscape and smattering of stars.
- Interview Excerpt, Intertidal after Dark, Sopinka & Barner
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Counting mussels quickly before the sun sets. Location: Strawberry Hill, Oregon
As the sun sets, it becomes exponentially more difficult to get work done, so we often arrive at a site hours early, waiting for the first chance to work as the tide "goes out". Ideally, the most difficult tasks are done in the remaining light, however dim. For example, above, we are counting thousands of tiny mussels and barnacles on the rock within the white PVC square "quadrats". We use quadrats to make sure we always are counting plants and animals in the same sized area - a square quarter-meter. This way, all of our data are comparable.
Getting darker and darker.
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Sun, moon, and planets at dusk over the intertidal. The far-off light on the horizon is from a boat, likely folks fishing late into the evening.
We use high-powered headlamps to work at night, each of us often wearing more than one headlamp and using additional flashlights if we have to take photographs. We work in pairs for safety in the dark. On wavy days, one person will work while the other stands looking out for sneaker waves.
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The dark emerges & we keep working.
The tools of the trade: PVC pipes, waterproof cameras, rulers, pencils & Rite in the Rain paper, headlamps and our trusty brightly colored "foulies"
PVC pipes (left) can be easily assembled (and disassembled) into a stable frame to hold a camera - especially at night when the dim light means camera shutter is open for longer and thus the camera must be very still to capture a clear picture. We often take pictures (center) in standardized ways (with a ruler, or with a consistently sized plot) to speed up the fieldwork process. Take pictures now - analyze later! (right) Headlamp illuminates a clipboard of waterproof paper, our datasheets.
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A gunnel hiding under a blade of kelp, in the damp, cool coralline algae understory.
Animals in the dark
(clockwise from top left) Pycnopodia helianthoides, a limpet cruises across a nice bare rock, a field of purple sea urchins, and Henricia leviuscula amid the urchins
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Working late into the night at Strawberry Hill, Oregon.

Scientists & the Sustainable Development Goals

10/19/2015

 
To guide international humanitarian efforts over the next 15 years, the United Nations has ambitiously proposed 17 goals to work toward environmental, economic, and social prosperity for all. These Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) tap into the fundamental aspirations that cross all cultures and nations, and into our most fundamental humanity:
This Agenda is a plan of action for people, planet and prosperity. It also seeks
to strengthen universal peace in larger freedom. We recognize that eradicating
poverty in all its forms and dimensions, including extreme poverty, is the greatest
global challenge and an indispensable requirement for sustainable development.
All countries and all stakeholders, acting in collaborative partnership, will
implement this plan. We are resolved to free the human race from the tyranny of
poverty and want and to heal and secure our planet. We are determined to take the
bold and transformative steps which are urgently needed to shift the world on to a
sustainable and resilient path. As we embark on this collective journey, we pledge
that no one will be left behind.
In this framework, all people have a role to play in achieving the SDGs. For scientists in particular, what role can we play in service to these humanitarian goals? In concert with the recent finalization of these goals, we recently published a commentary in Nature Geoscience [pdf] discussing the different ways that scientists could participate in the global effort. The Goals set a formidible, and seemingly overwhelming, task for individuals to make a difference, but there are tangible ways in which all scientists can embed their work and their practice in this global framework.
  1. If you are already doing science relevant to the 17 SDGs and their respective targets, help get that information out there. Engage with stakeholders, politicians to encourage evidence-based policymaking. Collaborate with boundary organizations that can help communicate science. Take advantage of organizations already facilitating knowledge transfer and engagement with stakeholders (AGU's Thriving Earth Exchange)
  2. Participate in scientific assessments that specifically serve the SDGs (e.g., Future Earth, IPBES)
  3. Broaden your network of collaborators to facilitate trans-disciplinary collaborations. The SDGs focus on issues that cross scholarly boundaries, so research must also integrate the hard sciences, the social sciences and the humanities.
  4. Practice science and education in a way that reflects the SDGs: to ensure inclusive and equitable education and increase the participation and representation of undrepresented groups in science.
KBVR
Jessica Reimer & Allison Barner (background) with KBVR Chariots of Curiosity host Sami Al-AbdRabbuh in the Oregon State University KBVR studio.
This past week, we (co-author Jessica Reimer and I) joined Sami Al-AbdRabbuh on his show Chariots of Curiosity in the KBVR studio at Oregon State University. We had a great hour of stimulating conversation about why aspirational goals like the SDGs are necessary, and how any individual (not only scientists and politicians!) could participate. In particular, there are multiple different local and global efforts to involve individuals in SDG action and even a special assembly of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network focused on the participation and perspective of the global youth.

Lenore Bayley Fellowship Award

10/19/2015

 
This past spring, I was awarded the Oregon State University Lenore Bayley Fellowship from the OSU Graduate School. This month, the Graduate School sponsored a special luncheon for all graduate student award recipients, a summary blog of which features me and my Ph.D. advisers. Thanks again to the Graduate School for their continued support of graduate students at Oregon State University!

Blog post on the benefits of TURF-Reserves

9/16/2015

 
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​A new piece in The Conversation by Jane Lubchenco and Steve Gaines highlights our recent review in Oceanography on the benefits of pairing rights-based fisheries management and marine reserves.  In our review, we discuss the various solutions to managing an overfished ocean, and how so-called TURF-Reserves offer a way forward to sustainable harvest, healthy local economies, and the preservation of marine biodiversity.

New publications: examining spatial and temporal variation in marine biodiversity

8/26/2015

 
After almost four years, the fruits of our Oregon State University graduate student biodiversity collaboration has paid off! Starting in fall 2011 as a NSF-sponsored Dimensions of Biodiversity Distributed Graduate Seminar, we have continued to work on our two projects and this summer we see both of our papers published in PLoS ONE!

Evaluating Temporal Consistency in Marine Biodiversity Hotspots

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Fig 5 from Piacenza & Thurman et al. 2015. North Biogeographic region—location of 1600 km2 grid cells with ≥ 3 scientific trawls/year and hotspots for A) benthic fish species richness, and B) benthic fish Shannon diversity, H′.


​Quantifying basic ecological patterns, like hotspots of biological diversity, becomes even more important as global ecosystems are changing with increasing velocity. We further develop previous methodological approaches to quantify and identify biodiversity hotspots, and apply this technique to data from the US West Coast Groundfish Bottom Trawl Survey. This method is spatially and temporally explicity, and thus can identify regions where biodiversity is consistently high, with direct application for resource managers.

Piacenza SE, Thurman LL, Barner AK, Benkwitt CE, Boersma KS, Cerny-Chipman EB, et al. (2015) Evaluating temporal consistency in marine biodiversity hotspots. PLoS ONE 10(7): e0133301.

Patterns and Variation in Benthic Biodiversity in a Large Marine Ecosystem

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Fig 3 from Piacenza et al. 2015. Relationships among depth and latitude and (A) fish species richness, (B) fish Shannon diversity, (C) invertebrate species richness, and (D) invertebrate Shannon diversity.
Despite ample evidence from the terrestrial environment for a globally coherent pattern of increasing biodiversity towards the equator, patterns of marine biodiversity don't always follow this pattern and show inconsistencies in large-scale macroecological patterns of biodiversity. We explored taxonomic and functional biodiversity patterns for groundfish and benthic invertebrates along 15-degrees of latitude on the US West Coast, with data gathered from the same trawl survey as Piacenza & Thurman et al. 2015 (above). The patterns of bentic diversity are complex, whereby fish and invertebrate diversity differed most strongly along a depth gradient, rather than a latitudinal gradient. In particular, invertebrate diversity increased at depth, but fish diversity peaked at shallow depths along the continental shelf.

Piacenza SE, Barner AK, Benkwitt CE, Boersma KS, Cerny-Chipman EB, Ingeman KE, et al. (2015) Patterns and variation in benthic biodiversity in a large marine ecosystem. PLoS ONE 10(8): e0135135.
See more about our DBDGS group at Oregon State University, featured in Nature News.

#ESA100: musings & many thanks

8/26/2015

 
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Standing room only at our organized session on species distributions (Photo: L. Thurman)
I'm still reeling from a great week at the annual Ecological Society of America meeting earlier this month in Baltimore! The session organized by myself and Lindsey Thurman on biotic interactions & species distributions was a huge success! Thanks to all our great speakers for joining us and stimulating such great conversations. You can find more information about the session at our unofficial website. If you couldn't make it, check out the associated papers for two of our speakers: Dave Harris & Phoebe Zarnetzke.

As for the other talks I attended, my new strategy of sitting through entire organized sessions and symposia paid off: investing in thinking about a single subject for several hours was intellectually rewarding (and much less exhausting than running between talks). I particularly enjoyed the symposium "Understanding Temporal Trends in Biodiversity", organized by Nick Gotelli, Maria Dornelas, Brian McGill and Anne Magurran. The speaker list was phenomenal and they tackled a difficult and controversial subject with brilliance and thoughtfulness.

Of the individual talks I attended, I noticed two emerging themes (likely more a reflection of my own research interests):
1. In the context of thinking about ecological states and changes between them (i.e. "regime shifts", but also no-analog communities with climate change), there is much discussion on the commonness of disequilibrium between species distributions/community structure, and climate.
  • Inspired by: Amy Henry's excellent talk on experimentally testing regime shifts between seagrass and sand dollars, Simon Levin speaking on predictability in complex, adaptive, socioecological systems (particularly interested in his discussion of "flickering" between ecological states), Jacquelyn Gill's talk on vegetation disequilibrium after deglaciation and the formation of no-analog communities, and Ben Blonder's talk (& paper) describing a quantitative framework to measure community-climate disequilibrium.
2. Resurgence of interest in scaling individual level traits/behavior to system level processes and properties.
  • Inspired by: Simon Levin's talk again, Jim Clark's talk (& oevre of work on) linking individual level traits to ecosystem processes, work by JP Gibert, Peter Zee's talk on how trait evolution can influence the complexity of food webs

Finally, I am so pleased to have won the Best Student Talk Award from the Aquatic Section!

Congrats to @algaebarnacle, winner of this year's @ESAAquatic Best Student Talk Award!

— Meghan Duffy (@duffy_ma) August 24, 2015
This is such an honor and I am so grateful to all that attended. I'll post the slides from my talk here as soon as possible.

Purple Pale Ale available for order online!

8/25/2015

 
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Members of the Menge lab attend the launch for Rogue's Wasted Sea Star Purple Pale Ale.
Rogue Ale's new Wasted Sea Star Purple Pale Ale is now available! In May, members of the Menge lab and OSU PISCO attended to taste & to hear members of the Rogue community, representatives from the Oregon Coast Aquarium, and our very own Jenna Sullivan talk about the collaboration between Rogue, OSU, and PISCO. Now you can order it online (for delivery to WA or CA only). A portion of the proceeds go towards research on the sea star wasting syndrome epidemic now in it's second summer in Oregon.
More information can be found below:

  • http://www.rogue.com/rogue_beer/wasted-sea-star-purple-pale-ale/
  • http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2015/may/debut-new-pale-ale-assist-research-sea-star-wasting-disease
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  • home
  • about me
  • my work
    • projects
    • publications
    • teaching
    • data
    • talks
  • news