Jane Kavanagh of University College Cork wins a prize for most self-deprecating talk title, with “As dull as ditch water? Elevating the status of the undervalued drainage ditch”

Kavanagh studied a network of ditches draining several farms in County Cork, Ireland. As you can see from the photo to the right, which she kindly supplied, her ditches are lush and attractive. Her sampling of macro-invertebrates revealed that they also like streams in that they harbor quite a bit of diversity, with communities dependent on variables like nutrient composition and water flow.

“These are marginal habitats that are largely ignored,” says Kavabagh. “Farmers leave them alone. Nobody really cares about them. So they are fair game for us. They are significant habitats, important in overall gamma [landscape scale] diversity, and because they are so numerous, potentially important for conservation.”

This kind of space could fall under the rubric of “novel ecosystems”, a really fascinating concept I mentioned briefly earlier. The idea is that humans changed and ecosystem, but are not actively managing it, so that what one might call “natural processes” are still taking place, just with a new cast of characters and a new starting state. I expect to see more and more studies like this. Keep an eye out for the succession of street corners, the food webs of football fields and the trophic cascades of cracked tarmac.

Jane Kavanagh of University College Cork wins a prize for most self-deprecating talk title, with “As dull as ditch water? Elevating the status of the undervalued drainage ditch”

Kavanagh studied a network of ditches draining several farms in County Cork, Ireland. As you can see from the photo to the right, which she kindly supplied, her ditches are lush and attractive. Her sampling of macro-invertebrates revealed that they also like streams in that they harbor quite a bit of diversity, with communities dependent on variables like nutrient composition and water flow.

“These are marginal habitats that are largely ignored,” says Kavabagh. “Farmers leave them alone. Nobody really cares about them. So they are fair game for us. They are significant habitats, important in overall gamma [landscape scale] diversity, and because they are so numerous, potentially important for conservation.”

This kind of space could fall under the rubric of “novel ecosystems”, a really fascinating concept I mentioned briefly earlier. The idea is that humans changed and ecosystem, but are not actively managing it, so that what one might call “natural processes” are still taking place, just with a new cast of characters and a new starting state. I expect to see more and more studies like this. Keep an eye out for the succession of street corners, the food webs of football fields and the trophic cascades of cracked tarmac.