Recent Developments
Beyond the usual research and teaching activities in the Department, the last few months has also involved a great deal of action (in some quarters!) related to our collaboration with The University of Nottingham's School of Biological Sciences in The Virtual School of Biodiversity.
Apart from the business of filling in applications for funding for the School and for travel grants related to its activities, we were also invited to participate in the Tertiary Education Expo, a University Management Sharing Session, and IJH was invited to officiate at the launch of a Secondary School digital classroom initiative "Learning through creativity by means of IT".
The Tertiary Education Expo was held in BP House and all the Tertiary Institutes turned out to attract applicants. The Virtual School display was well received and a number of people commented both on the display and on the excellent "performance" of our students who presented it. I have already thanked them individually, but I repeat -Wellcome, Yanna, Olive, Jimmy, Celesta, Captain, Wendy, Rose, Mony, Tik, Richard and Benny, thank you all!
At the Management Sharing Session, Gray Williams presented "Where we were at" and "Where we are going" with the school and, as usual, it was a competent, dynamic, entertaining, informative and superbly delivered performance. Again, many thanks to Gray and to those staff who attended to support him!
Also Leo Chan and Ken Wong are to be congratulated and thanked on the great technical job they did for both the above.
The digital classroom initiative came as somewhat of a surprise. We have been priding ourselves on our efforts to enlarge on the Vice Chancellor's IT campus initiative by producing multimedia teaching material and, it appears that at the same time a group of secondary school principals have been developing an initiative for "the digital classroom". Our paths crossed and I was invited to launch their "Learning through creativity by means of IT" seminar - Lion dance and all!
We are now investigating how we can interface with the secondary schools and help them in their moves to better incorporate IT into the classroom. Personally, I am pleased to have DEB involved in this since there are so few times when the Secondary / Tertiary "rift" is crossed.
John Hodgkiss (HoD)
Upcoming visits
Visiting Lecturer - Dr Lisandro Benedetti-Cecchi
In late April (probably a little late for this publication) Dr Lisandro Benedetti-Cecchi is visiting the Department for a week at the invitation of David Dudgeon and Gray Williams. Lisandro is an intertidal ecologist working on Mediterranean rocky shores from Pisa University in Italy. Lisandro's particular interests and skills lie in experimental designs to unravel spatial and temporal variation on different scales, using these designs to find out how general patterns and processes seen on shores actually are.
Visiting External Examiner -Prof Colin Townsend (from Prof David Dudgeon)
Every three years, the Department of Ecology and Biodiversity appoints an External Examiner to oversee the examination process. He/she reviews our examination questions, check marks samples of the scripts arising from all courses, and advises us on borderline cases and procedures. The External Examiner visits the Department at least once during this three-year period, during which time we take the opportunity to review our teaching / examination practices, and discuss academic direction and the like. This year we are extremely fortunate to be hosting Professor Colin Townsend as our External Examiner. Colin is Professor of Zoology at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He has published widely, but is perhaps best known for his co-authorship of the textbook Ecology: Individuals, Populations and Communities (Blackwell Scientific Publications). This encyclopedic volume (the most recent – third - edition contains over 1000 pages) is widely used as a teaching aid in Universities (including HKU), and the content is notable in its successful integration of the ecology of plants and animals from marine, freshwater and terrestrial environments. Colin is also well known for his work as a freshwater ecologist, and he has devoted a considerable amount of effort (plus many papers) to understanding the forces which structure communities in streams. His main interests comprise three strands:
i) The ecology and behaviour of invertebrates and fish in streams;
ii) The influence of land use on river systems;
iii) The impact of flow disturbances on stream communities.
In addition, Colin has been researching the biology and ecology of galaxiid fishes in New Zealand, and investigating the nature of their interactions with - and the threats posed by -introduced trout.
Colin will be visiting Hong Kong between May 16 and May 26, and will be giving a seminar. Announcements of that event will be sent out in due course. Be sure to mark it in your diary!
Departmental Invited Visiting Professor - Professor Richard Primack (from Richard Corlett)
Richard Primack has kindly accepted our invitation to be the invited Visiting Professor, 1999 in the Department of Ecology & Biodiversity. He will be in Hong Kong from 30 May - 8 June. During this period he will deliver a public lecture, a postgraduate seminar and chair a small workshop session based around conservation biology issues, specifically protecting biological diversity and rare species. The exact dates and titles will be announced - for more information please contact Richard Corlett - below Richard mentions some of the reasons why Prof Primack was selected as a Visiting Professor:
On his Boston University website, Professor Primack gives his research interests as: plant population biology, pollination ecology, tropical forests, conservation biology, and rare plant species. He is responsible for key publications in all these areas and, indeed, it is getting increasingly difficult to write anything without citing at least one of them. His papers are best described as "neat": clearly-written accounts of well-designed studies, using the most appropriate technology and the most appropriate time period. His research is clearly problem-driven, as opposed to so much recent ecological research, where the methods and time frame have apparently been chosen first, and a question has simply been tagged on afterwards. My favourite is an 11-year experimental study of the cost of reproduction in wild populations of the pink lady's slipper orchid, Cypripedium acaule (American Journal of Botany 85:1672-1679), from which one of the conclusions is that a 4-year study would have been too short, but 11 years is unnecessarily long! As if this was not enough, Professor Primack has also written several important reviews, has edited books on the conservation of both Southeast Asian and Central American rainforests, and has written two of the best Conservation Biology textbooks around.
Selected Recent Publications
Primack, R. and Stacy, E. 1998. Cost of reproduction in the pink lady's slipper orchid (Cypripedium acaule, Orchidaceae): an eleven-year experimental study of three populations. American Journal of Botany 85:1672-1679.
Primack, R., Bray, D., Galletti, H. and Ponciano, I. (eds.) 1997. Timber, Tourists and Temples: Conservation and Development in the Maya Forest of Belize, Guatemala and Mexico. Island Press, Washington D.C.
Drayton, B. and Primack, R. 1996. Plant species lost in an isolated conservation area in metropolitan Boston from 1894 to 1993. Conservation Biology 10:30-39.
Primack, R. and Lovejoy, T.E. (eds.) 1995. Ecology, conservation, and management of Southeast Asian rainforests. Yale University Press.
Primack, R. 1995. A Primer of Conservation Biology. Sinauer Associates, Sunderland, MA. Primack, R. and Miao, S. 1992. Dispersal can limit local plant distribution. Conservation Biology 26:513-519.
Primack, R. and Hall, P.1992. Biodiversity and forest change in Malaysian Borneo. BioScience 242:829-837.
Memorandum of Understanding
The Department has recently signed two new Memorandums of Understanding to go alongside the first link with the Fungal Group and the University of Goa, India. The first is with Prof Guidio Chelazzi and his group at the University of Florence, Italy. Prof Chelazzi is an expert in behavioural ecology and his group focuses on intertidal invertebrates and he has been to Hong Kong a number of times to work with Gray Williams. Currently Claudia Bruschini is in Hong Kong for a year sitting in on undergraduate courses and conducting a collaborative project on the effects of anaerobosis on limpet physiology. Prof Chelazzi will visit Hong Kong again in September-October 1999.
The second new link is with Prof Subramanian and his research facility in India. Prof Subramanian is head of the National Facility for Marine Cyanobacteria at Bharathidasan University, India and will develop collaboration with Dr Sanjay Nagarkar and Gray Williams at the Department and Dr Geoff Brown in the Chemistry Department looking at natural products in marine epilithic cyanobacteria (see Sanjay's article in this issue of Porcupine!). In a recent visit to Hong Kong, Prof Subramanian gave a very interesting seminar which has stimulated ideas for future collaborations with Dr Gu and Dr Pointing at the Department.
Upcoming conferences
The Second Asia Pacific Phycological Forum: "Asia-Pacific Phycology in the Twenty-first Century, prospects and challenges". This conference will be held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong between 21-25 June, 1999. For further information contact Dr Put Ang of the Chinese University (e-mail put-ang@cuhk.edu.hk: web site for conference http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/bio/for/um/forindex.htm), or Dr Gray Williams at HKU.
The Fourth International Conference on the Marine Biology of the South China Sea; to be held on 18-22 October 1999 in Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines. For further information see http://msi0l.cs.upd.edu.ph/conferences/SCS.
P.2-4
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