Community Service Learning: A First Year Transition Tool for Teacher Education

Community Service Learning (CSL) as a first year transition strategy into teacher education is a new concept not previously identified in either the CSL literature or the First Year in Higher Education literature. This paper reports on a study that investigated how first year preservice teachers experienced CSL and how this impacted on their current and future professional sense of self. The study showed that the students benefitted professionally, personally, and academically from undertaking community service. We argue that given these results and the similar framing discourses of both CSL and first year transition into Higher Education, that CSL can be readily reconceptualised as a transition strategy for first year in teacher education

Valuing assessment in teacher education - Multiple-choice competency testing

When our focus is on assessment educators should work to value the nature of assessment. This paper presents a new approach to multiple-choice competency testing in mathematics education. The instrument discussed here reflects student competence, encourages self-regulatory learning behaviours and links content with current curriculum documents and with collaborative and cooperative learning episodes

EcoMem: An R package for quantifying ecological memory

Ecological processes may exhibit memory to past disturbances affecting the resilience of ecosystems to future disturbance. Understanding the role of ecological memory in shaping ecosystem responses to disturbance under global change is a critical step toward developing effective adaptive management strategies to maintain ecosystem function and biodiversity. We developed EcoMem, an R package for quantifying ecological memory functions using common environmental time series data (continuous, count, proportional) applying a Bayesian hierarchical framework. The package estimates memory functions for continuous and binary (e.g., disturbance chronology) variables making no a priori assumption on the form of the functions. EcoMem allows users to quantify ecological memory for a wide range of ecosystem processes and responses. The utility of the package to advance understanding of the memory of ecosystems to environmental drivers is demonstrated using a simulated dataset and a case study assessing the memory of boreal tree growth to insect defoliation.Peer reviewe

Identifying and Separating the Processes Underlying Boreal Forest Understory Community Assembly

Identifying the ecological processes underlying community assembly remains an elusive goal in community ecology. We formalize assembly hypotheses as alternative models and apply each to predict 1,918 out-of-sample boreal forest understory communities to identify and separate the processes driving community assembly. Models are specified within a Bayesian joint species distribution framework that allows for the inclusion and separation of stochastic processes, environmental filtering, and two different species dependence structures. We found clear evidence that study communities are structured by both environmental filtering and compositional dependence highlighting the importance of selection in community assembly. The relative importance of environmental filtering was greater than compositional dependence in predicting both understory communities and the abundance of constituent species across broad suc-cessional and bioclimatic gradients. Contrary to ecological expectations, the inclusion of a flexible residual species dependence structure (accounting for more than compositional dependence) did not improve model predictions after accounting for the strong role of environmental filtering. Our results provide novel inference on the processes underlying community assembly facilitated by applying empirical approximations of alternative assembly processes to predict communities across a range of environmental conditions

Shifts in timing and duration of breeding for 73 boreal bird species over four decades

Breeding timed to match optimal resource abundance is vital for the successful reproduction of species, and breeding is therefore sensitive to environmental cues. As the timing of breeding shifts with a changing climate, this may not only affect the onset of breeding but also its termination, and thus the length of the breeding period. We use an extensive dataset of over 820K nesting records of 73 bird species across the boreal region in Finland to probe for changes in the beginning, end, and duration of the breeding period over four decades (1975 to 2017). We uncover a general advance of breeding with a strong phylogenetic signal but no systematic variation over space. Additionally, 31% of species contracted their breeding period in at least one bioclimatic zone, as the end of the breeding period advanced more than the beginning. We did not detect a statistical difference in phenological responses of species with combinations of different migratory strategy or number of broods. Nonetheless, we find systematic differences in species responses, as the contraction in the breeding period was found almost exclusively in resident and short-distance migrating species, which generally breed early in the season. Overall, changes in the timing and duration of reproduction may potentially lead to more broods co-occurring in the early breeding season-a critical time for species' reproductive success. Our findings highlight the importance of quantifying phenological change across species and over the entire season to reveal shifts in the community-level distribution of bird reproduction.Peer reviewe

Shifts in timing and duration of breeding for 73 boreal bird species over four decades

Breeding timed to match optimal resource abundance is vital for the successful reproduction of species, and breeding is therefore sensitive to environmental cues. As the timing of breeding shifts with a changing climate, this may not only affect the onset of breeding but also its termination, and thus the length of the breeding period. We use an extensive dataset of over 820K nesting records of 73 bird species across the boreal region in Finland to probe for changes in the beginning, end, and duration of the breeding period over four decades (1975 to 2017). We uncover a general advance of breeding with a strong phylogenetic signal but no systematic variation over space. Additionally, 31% of species contracted their breeding period in at least one bioclimatic zone, as the end of the breeding period advanced more than the beginning. We did not detect a statistical difference in phenological responses of species with combinations of different migratory strategy or number of broods. Nonetheless, we find systematic differences in species responses, as the contraction in the breeding period was found almost exclusively in resident and short-distance migrating species, which generally breed early in the season. Overall, changes in the timing and duration of reproduction may potentially lead to more broods co-occurring in the early breeding season—a critical time for species’ reproductive success. Our findings highlight the importance of quantifying phenological change across species and over the entire season to reveal shifts in the community-level distribution of bird reproduction