Meanwhile, it was impossible to treat the trees and the field ecosystem as mutually constitutive.
Panellists were also asked how to get more women into science, technology, engineering and mathematics – Stem subjects – to which Fulton replied that she was lucky to work in a field, ecosystem modelling, that women had helped to shape.
In the field, ecosystem-scale flux measurements of atmospheric H2 were made both above and below the forest canopy for over a year using a custom, automated instrument at the Harvard Forest.
This study can also provide important fundamental data on patterns in carbon and nitrogen stable isotope composition in rice paddy field ecosystems in the east-Asia region.
Detailed studies will be needed to more completely understand patterns in fish movement and behavior in irrigation ponds and paddy fields, food web structure, and trophic relationships in paddy field ecosystems in these agricultural landscapes.
Continued habitat conservation of irrigation ponds is important to sustain resident fish populations and maintain biodiversity in these agricultural landscapes and expanded use of stable isotope inventory approaches will be useful to quantify fish movement in rice paddy field ecosystems.
If a stable isotope approach can be shown to be as effective as mark recapture methods at identifying movement and understanding fish life-history, then incorporating less field-intensive stable isotope approaches in future studies on fish movement in rice paddy field ecosystems would be desirable.
In our study, the difference in loach δ13C between the irrigation pond and paddy field at station 1 (Fig. 2) shows the possibility to use detailed δ13C measurements of fish and other food web components to study fish movement even at the scale of these small irrigation ponds and paddy field ecosystems.
In these paddy field ecosystems, the higher δ15N at station 1 might reflect higher rates of one or more specific mechanisms of nitrogen loss from the system, such as denitrification, a process which results in a large isotopic fractionation (Wada et al. 1984; Diebel and Vander Zanden 2009).
Model systems (including experimental mesocosms or field ecosystems) should be identified or designed that can adequately test multigenerational reproductive effects.
They are as follows: aquatic meadow ecosystems, forest ecosystems, field ecosystems, flora and fauna, settlements, and cultural heritage (Table 2, Column 1).
