My activity
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Jennifer Hammock commented on "B. Duygu Özpolat":
I would like to invite you to join "EOL Research Ideas".
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Jennifer Hammock commented on "What is the distribution of the ability to regenerate lost body parts across animal phyla?":
From the author: Regeneration is such a complex phenomenon and what we know about this fantastic ability only comes from a limited number of species. We also do not know how regeneration is gained or lost in a particular taxon. It will be very interesting to know how the distribution of regeneration among different taxa is, in order to have a better understanding of its loss or gain. There is a publication bias towards the animals which can regenerate and we only rarely see publications that report the lack of regeneration ability (negative data). I believe EOL would be a perfect source for gathering information on the presence or absence of regeneration ability and obtaining a detailed map of its distribution.
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Jennifer Hammock commented on "EOL Curators":
@Kelly O'Donnell: Kelly, it's supposed to be okay to have multiple names at the same rank (don't add any higher ranks!) but check afterwards, and if you run into trouble, you can remove one of the names on flickr and associate the video with the missing taxon manually on eol with the "add association" button.
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Jennifer Hammock commented on "Is blue coloration more likely to occur in high altitude or shallow depth plant and animal species?":
@Annette Olson: Indeed- I think several of the wishes imply automated content analysis, of either text or media.
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Jennifer Hammock commented on "Wayne Tyson":
I would like to invite you to join "EOL Research Ideas".
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Jennifer Hammock commented on "EOL Research Ideas":
Our collection now stands at ten wishes! If you haven't browsed them lately, click the "I Wish" link on the right to see the list. Feel free to comment or ask open questions on any of them. I've transcribed added commentary from the original wishers into comments on most of them already.
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Jennifer Hammock commented on "What are the requirements for, and the limitations to, the existence of life forms?":
From the author: "There will be objections that such a project is ""too daunting"" to undertake. But are not the most daunting projects the kind that have driven science in the past? In any case, there is no need for this project to be ""completed,"" or for the data to be ""perfect,"" only that it be relevant and useful for the development of hypotheses and the demonstration of its values or defects. Data on a single taxon will be useful, even if it consists only of one variable. Such data will demonstrate a need for a protocol which can be used to answer further questions in biology, ecology, and evolution, and, as the data assemblage grows over time, larger questions should flow naturally from it. (Analysis of the relevance of existing content should be a part of this project. )"
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Jennifer Hammock commented on "Scratchpads Community":
Hey all, The Scratchpads team sends their apologies. They've been having power issues at their museum's data center which is causing slowness on the platform. They're trying to work out a solution quickly but you may want to move your content activities offline for a little while. Sorry!!
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Jennifer Hammock commented on "Barbara Bauer":
I would like to invite you to join "EOL Research Ideas".
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Jennifer Hammock commented on "Barbara Pendergrass":
I would like to invite you to join "EOL Research Ideas".
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Jennifer Hammock commented on "What is the relative speed of evolution in those traits that are important for adaptation of species to global change?":
From the author: By comparing the two tables with methods already described and developed in the literature we can estimate which traits are largely conserved within one taxa (evolving slowly) and which are highly variable even among closely related taxa (evolving faster).
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Jennifer Hammock commented on "tanager":
I would like to invite you to join "EOL Research Ideas".
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Jennifer Hammock commented on "Which species of conservation concern could be most usefully targeted for student or citizen science research expeditions?":
From the author:
"Student projects/expeditions, if given the correct support and guidance, can provide important data to help the promote the conservation of individual species or places. Furthermore, students are often able to fundraise for expeditions without having to fall back on the few grants still available for conservation work. However, many students don't know where to start finding an achievable and worthwhile question to answer even though the vast majority of red-listed species are in need of further research.
It would be excellent to be able to develop a resource that provided students with the inspiration and ideas to carry out expeditions which can provide badly-needed information about species of conservation concern. It would require a tool that picked out research questions that could be addressed, in part, during a short-term study by fairly inexperienced surveyors (i.e. species need to be relatively easily recognisable and detectable and the research question needs to be pretty basic e.g. presence/absence of species within forest fragments).
Maybe this isn't possible - I don't know how clever EOL searches can be and exactly what information is accessible - but I think it could be a way of inspiring a new generation of field scientists to get straight to the coal-face of conservation science."
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Jennifer Hammock commented on "How many unknown (not yet described) species there are in world's biological collections?":
From the author:
A colleague once told me that 90% of the specimens in the Australian national collection of insects have not been identified to the species level. If these unnamed specimens were imaged, matched with each other in other collections at, say, world's 20 largest collections, we could derive an estimate of how many species there are on earth. Besides, that would accelerate species discovery (descriptions) dramatically.
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Jennifer Hammock commented on "Do the number of descriptions of taxa, at verious ranks, follow a mathematical curve? As in species per genus, per family? Are recently described taxa following a curve more closely?":
From the author:
Is general taxonomy underlain by physical/mathematical principles, for which formalization might guide future study?
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Jennifer Hammock commented on "Approximately how many coral reef associated marine invertebrate species are widespread across the tropical Indo-Pacific?":
From the author:
"To the best of our knowledge, there are about 492 species of tropical coral reef ray-finned fishes that are cosmopolitan throughout the tropical and subtropical waters on the Indian and Pacific oceans, excepting a few very remote and isolated peripheral localities, such as Easter Island. This is nearly ten percent of the estimated 5,000 coral reef fish species world wide. It is also known that the Coral Triangle, the uncontested seat of marine biodiversity is home to about 3919 reef fish species and that 40% of all coral reef fishes have species ranges that are greater than nine million km squared.
The same information is dismally lacking in marine invertebrate groups. Obviously one reason is because of the work involved in accumulating the data on the vast number of marine phyla found on coral reefs, biogeographic data that is scattered widely, and records that are incomplete. Nevertheless, this would be some very useful information to marine biogeographers."
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Jennifer Hammock commented on an older version of What is the most efficient way to extract existing knowledge about these interactions from the biological literature and the biological community and make it available in a useful fashion on the EOL platform?:
From the author:
"It would also be valuable to explore the extent to which preliminary association data might be generated automatically from the dataset. For example, if two species are recorded in the database as occurring in the same habitat and the same region, and one of them is a bird of prey and one is a mouse, then the database could generate a 'preliminary' association of predation between the two, and allow users to confirm or reject these.
Finally, regarding how to speed up and facilitate the input of new association data, I think it would be interesting for EOL to explore a Facebook-style mechanism by which users visiting a given EOL species page could 'eat' another EOL species page (to establish a predation association), in the same way that a person on Facebook can 'friend' another person on Facebook. Perhaps the 'preliminary' mechanism described in the previous paragraph could be used to make a drop-down list of, for example, potential prey items on a given EOL species page, in order to facilitate user input of association data."
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Jennifer Hammock commented on "Michael Bear":
Hi, Michael! Glad to have you on the site. I see your project is already hooked up to SON, which is great. If you're interested in sharing pictures and/or observations to EOL and some other research projects, drop me a line at hammockj AT si.edu and I can talk you through some methods. Thanks!
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Jennifer Hammock commented on "Richard Zander":
I would like to invite you to join "EOL Research Ideas".
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Jennifer Hammock commented on "Hannu Saarenmaa":
I would like to invite you to join "EOL Research Ideas".
