Congratulations to FRAMEwork Doctoral Candidate researcher Laura Mansier, who has been busy sharing insights from her project work at recent conferences, ahead of her research being published.
Congratulations to FRAMEwork Doctoral Candidate researcher Laura Mansier, who has been busy sharing insights from her project work at three recent conferences, ahead of her research being published.
Laura has been developing a model, which provides insights on optimizing agricultural landscapes around arable fields for natural pest control, with Paul van Rijn as part of their FRAMEwork-funded research at University of Amsterdam (UVA). As covered on the blog, she presented work on the topic at last year’s European Congress of Entomology and National Entomology Day.
The first presentation was to the 15th Conference on Dynamical Systems Applied to Biology and Natural Sciences (DSABNS 2024), a well-established international event involving lectures, talks and a poster session on methodological topics in the natural sciences and mathematics. Laura won a travel grant from UVA to attend the conference, which took place in Lisbon from 6-9th February. She said:
“I wanted to go to this conference to learn more about how we can use mathematics to answer more applied questions, which is what I do with my model, and get feedback from other mathematicians. I mostly just got positive feedback on my work so that was exciting and reassuring, as I am not a schooled mathematician but an ecologist.”
Laura explained that the next two conferences were quite different, as they were targeted towards applied ecology more specifically.
On 13-14th February, Laura presented at a second conference, the Netherlands Annual Ecology Meeting in Lunteren. Here, the theme was “Biodiversity, Bending the curve from theory to practice” and discussions were geared towards strengthening the network of ecologists in the Netherlands, Belgium, and surrounding countries and providing an overview of their recent work.
On 20-22nd March, Laura presented again, this time at the 10th meeting of the IOBC-WPRS WG “Landscape Management for Functional Biodiversity” in Pisa, Italy. Co-organised by FRAMEwork partner SSSA, the meeting focussed on landscape management for functional biodiversity and comparing approaches to the management and monitoring of biodiversity in perennial (orchards) and herbaceous (arable or vegetable) cropping systems.
Laura’s presentation engendered a different type of conversation at these conferences:
“Empirical researchers are often hesitant about theoretical models and their practical applications, questioning their legitimacy due to the assumptions made to make these models. I explained that all research, including empirical studies, relies on assumptions since we can’t measure and think of everything. Often we have to think more about our assumptions in theoretical research as it is the basis of our work, whereas in empirical research this is often overlooked. Therefore, theoretical research can reveal flaws and assumption-based results in empirical work. Besides, models can give insights that we cannot gain from the field, and vice versa. For example, model studies can dissect population dynamics and how they are impacted by the landscape, while empirical studies can use this knowledge to test and gain further insights in the field. ”
Thank you to Laura for sharing these fascinating insights with us, and for taking her research out into the world.
Laura and Paul have now begun updates for the model to make it spatially explicit, so that it can be used more easily for studying different landscape compositions and specific case studies.
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