Shalene Jha Postdoctoral Fellow and Hillary Sardinas College of Natural Resources grad student at UC Berkeley discuss their research in native bee populations, landscape genetics, foraging ecology, ecosystem services. They talk about research funding and collaboration.
Transcript
Speaker 1: Hmm
Speaker 2: [inaudible].
Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology [00:00:30] show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program with news events and interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists. My name is Brad Swift. Today's interview is with Shalani Sha, UC president's, postdoctoral fellow and Hillary Sardinia graduate researcher. They're both members of the environmental science policy and Management Department of the College of natural resources at UC Berkeley. We talk about their research of native bumblebees and bee habitat [00:01:00] during the interview, colony collapse disorder as mentioned, but not explained. Colony collapse disorder is a still unsolved mystery that since 2006 has killed approximately 50% of kept European honeybees in North America. The disorder is characterized by the complete disappearance of all the bees in a colony. The kept European honeybees are essential pollinators of many commercial scale fruit and nut crops throughout the world. The suspected causes of colony collapse disorder include fungus, [00:01:30] viruses, pesticides, Mites, diet, antibiotics, and whether the breakthrough mentioned in the interview is not a solution, but possibly a forward step to a solution. This interview is prerecorded and edited.
Speaker 3: My guests are Shalani jaw and Hillary seediness. They're both at the college of natural resources. And why don't you, shall any describe the research that you're currently doing together?
Speaker 4: [00:02:00] Sure. So Maria and I are both in Claire Cremins lab and this particular lab group actually has very diverse interests, mostly related to conservation, biology and ecological interactions between people and animals. And our work is related to pollinators. So how do you conserve pollinators in agricultural habitats? That's sort of one of our research closed side and we worked and some of the farming communities [00:02:30] in northern California around Yolo, Solano in Sacramento County, looking at native bees and how agricultural landscapes and regions impact the way bees move and nest disperse across agriculture tools.
Speaker 3: Is there also an element of working with, or at least understanding the, the beekeeping community in those, those very same areas or is there an overlap and interface that happens? Yeah, so a lot
Speaker 4: [00:03:00] of the farms that we work in manage TVs as well that managed European honeybee colonies provide pollination services in addition to native bees. So, um, the other portion of our outreach has to do with working with land managers and farmers. We're interested in promoting native bee diversity. These are farmers that often have some incentive from the USDA or have some resources that they can use for restoration. So we kind of [00:03:30] provide some of the research based tools to inform restoration does this, if that's sort of where we hope our work is moving towards. No one in our lab right now is currently working on honeybees, but we do work with a number of labs at Davis that have at UC Davis [inaudible].
Speaker 5: However, previous work that Claire has done with a former student of her, Sarah Greenleaf did look at how native bees and honeybees interacted and was able to show that the presence of native bees actually [00:04:00] enhanced honeybee pollination of certain crops that where they did their study was in sunflowers. And I'm working in some flowers too, and one of the things we do, we do collect honey bees and our studies and are able to see how much they're utilizing hedgerows and whether or not they're actually hedgerows linear strips of native plants. These restorations that were moving entire cultural landscapes. If they're actually providing additional resources that are important to honeybees. And [00:04:30] by looking at their movement, we can see if the honeybees are going into the hedgerow and then into the crop or different distances to try and understand a bit about their biology as well. [inaudible]
Speaker 4: some of these landscapes only have five, five or less percent of their natural habitat still maintained. So we've got places where restoration or nightmare would be necessary in order to bring back native communities and some of our other sites sort of as a comparison, we have more complex landscapes like [00:05:00] a in the k value where, um, some of these farmers are just surrounded by natural habitat. And we're also trying to get a sense of what landscape features are important for native bees for honeybees and sort of what does that mean in terms of pollination services that farmers receive from the fields.
Speaker 3: Are there other pollinators besides visa, you're, you're studying as well.
Speaker 4: Many of the people in the lab, um, have more expertise with these. But definitely, uh, in a lot of these [00:05:30] surveys they're looking at, you know, butterflies surf with flies, Wasp. So organisms that aren't primarily pollinators, maybe they serve other ecological functions, like some people are understanding pest predators. And how can these natural habitats not only support pollinators, but also support the organisms which control pests.
Speaker 3: Hillary, tell me about when you wanted to become a scientist.
Speaker 5: When I wanted to become a scientist,
Speaker 1: or when did you [00:06:00] first start to think about it and say, this is interesting and I could see myself going this direction? I guess
Speaker 5: when, what really sealed it for me? I went to the University of California at Santa Cruz, and within the first few weeks I found this garden called the Alan Chadwick Garden, which is very magical and has been there since the 60s. Um, and I started interning and then working there. And so that's what got me really interested in agriculture and native plant propagation and just in botany in [00:06:30] general. So after graduating from college, I decided to work in native plant nurseries and ecological restoration cause that seemed to be a place where you could kind of garden with nature. And in doing that, discovered that a lot of plants when I would go to collect their seeds and propagate them, there didn't seem to be a lot of seeds. And when we were doing these restoration projects, we weren't considering the pollinators at all. So after kind of digging more deeply, finding that there is this major disconnect in [00:07:00] that I found I really wanted to go study this for some reason. Um, and the university just the whole academic setting was fascinating.
Speaker 4: Inshallah. Any hip hop for you. Right. So, um, my experience also started when I was an Undergrad. I was working on a project related to plant populations and understanding how weather and soil attributes, etc. Effectively as, [00:07:30] and then separately also working on blossoms. And so, uh, I was really interested in both of these systems and then started thinking about the really important connection between insects or animals that provide these pollination services, um, and the plants that require them in order to reproduce. And I just thought it was a really magical interaction that this, this, this, this interconnectedness between plant communities and pollinators. It's really fascinating. And [00:08:00] in order to have a really holistic understanding of plants or pollinators, you really have to understand both. But especially also like Hillary said, because of pollination is so important for our agricultural system, nuts and berries and all that, you know, all the wonderful things that we appreciate it on our kitchen table. I thought what better place to study pollination in an agricultural system?
Speaker 6: [inaudible]
Speaker 1: [00:08:30] a lot of clean water focus and interest in the agricultural realm is in creating spaces between rivers and farm lands,
Speaker 3: which would be natural areas for your pollinators to live in. [00:09:00] Is their activity in trying to blend the research
Speaker 4: [inaudible] that's one thing that many biologists complain about is that there are many of these projects taking place, but we need to work on communicating and making sure that multiple projects can potentially meet multiple needs. And so we do have members in our lab that are working in or plan on working in that right now are being conserved for the [00:09:30] Berman out. We'll actually Abram, UC Davis. So these are conservation areas that people have, have managed in order to promote the bird but potentially could also provide support for pollinators. So definitely what we're trying to look at restoration in many different of many different uh, ecological systems. So whether that's water systems or you know, mammalian systems or working at conserving birds and thinking about how we can do Lilly also conserve native [00:10:00] pollinators are pest creditors.
Speaker 5: I would say that the term for this, it's often uses multi-functionality and it seems in a lot of ways in agricultural areas. Europe is very much with the vanguard kind of preserving their agricultural areas for biodiversity, for cultural heritage of the size as well as nutrients. Like lame, preventing, you know, water from entering waterways. And that's one of the things we need to talk to farmers about. The benefits of a hedgerow for example, you can say it has the advantage of being a wind break [00:10:30] and preventing, um, soil from moving across. And so there's all of these different benefits that it has, but there's also some, you know, this services, if we're talking about ecosystem services that has roads could potentially create, and so trying to show the entire spectrum of what they can and cannot do. And often a single lab doesn't look at every aspect, but when you try and present it to the public or even write it up in a p in a journal, you want to try and pull [00:11:00] from all of those bodies of knowledge on, on it to create a holistic picture.
Speaker 3: So it's, it's somewhat difficult and problematic to try to add your level, bring all of this information together
Speaker 4: in the sciences or you're talking just strictly about research. It is often necessary to kind of focus because there's just so much that, so many factors that play a role in understanding the communities or understanding water filtration systems or hydrology. [00:11:30] I think you're right. You know, we definitely need collaboration across institutes, but I think even within research people are trying to make connections between labs that work on range land, plant conservation and lots of work on these are our pollinator conservation. So there's those kind of within um, institute cross collaboration that's necessary and across as well with these. Who would be Sangiovese and some of these funding agencies?
Speaker 5: No, it does seem like [00:12:00] at least here at Berkeley, there's this group that's arisen called the diversified farming round table round table and the diversified farming round table. And basically they're, they bridge a lot of these gaps. Do they bring a professor like Claire Who's really interested in conservation biology with somebody who's much more in touch with agro ecology like Miguel LTE, Arie and a lot of their Grad students and create this forum to talk about a lot of different issues and from [00:12:30] that can come review papers where we look at some factors say pesticide use in Agora ecosystems and how that would affect all of these different organisms, not just the one that we're focused on. And it also creates opportunities to build those research associations.
Speaker 3: [inaudible] you mentioned applying for grants and so ongoing. Do you have things you're looking to a present?
Speaker 4: Yeah, sure. I mean I think that's the [00:13:00] challenging and exciting thing about research is every question that you start to answer leads to more questions and, and so you know, with my work, so I focus on the native bumblebees. I'm looking at how these agricultural landscapes or whether they can actually support native bees or not and how these bumblebees are moving across agricultural landscapes. When I first began this work, the question was just, well, you know how many bees does a certain landscape support? And the more you dig into it and you realize [00:13:30] that, well not only is that important, but if you want these populations to be healthy and to persist in the landscape, they have to be able to reproduce and move and colonize new areas, etc. So now understanding their dispersal processes becomes the next big challenge. Okay, we know how many they are. We know we'd have 50 colonies in a particular landscape, but are they integrating I, they, um, are they moving across the landscape? Are they able to reproduce successfully? [00:14:00] So those are some of the next steps. And understanding how the landscape affects these ecological processes or these reproductive processes is very important if we want to conserve these native bees.
Speaker 3: Did you, uh, see recently the, the information about the, or the breakthrough, I guess you could call it in the colony collapse research, that was kind of impressive. Did that surprise you that the, those two organizations got together to work on at the U s army, and [00:14:30] I guess it was the University of Montana.
Speaker 5: The military is actually using honeybees for a lot of different purposes. There's a professor in the geography department, j Co sac, who's really looking at using them for looking at unexploded ordinances and how they can put honey bee colonies all over the world and their honey to see if there's radioactive material to see if there's, you know, nuclear testing going on. So for me, I was actually shocked when he had [00:15:00] spoken that there wasn't more looking at colony collapse disorder because if they're thinking about, you know, food security or threats, I would think, well this is a major threat to our, you know, national security. And so when I read that they'd been working out, I was like, oh, I'm so glad. Right. I mean, I think
Speaker 4: it comes back to this question of if you have multiple agencies working on, whether it's persistence of 10 populations or ecosystem services or conservation of our natural [00:15:30] resources, having multiple agencies working on the same problems but not working together can be a big barrier. And so it would be great if there was more of these cross collaborations and yeah, the military apparently has been interested in a lot of social insects for a number of reasons. So there are entomologists that work very closely with the military, you know, to understand how insects communicate with each other and navigate unknown landscapes. And so [00:16:00] there's a lot of potential for core collaborative work just about stepping out of your comfort zone. Maybe, you know, talking to people in other agencies,
Speaker 5: there are more and more grants offered through the Department of Defense and Department of Energy that I'm ecologists are becoming really interested in their offering them as fellowships to graduate students that I know a number of people in SPM have applied. And it's true, like in some ways you wonder kind of how this research will be [00:16:30] used and the knowledge. But at the same time it's creating this large pool of money to study all of these incredibly valuable things. And I think with this increasing interest in food security in all of these global crisis taking place right now, and there's really just such a great opportunity for collaboration across people who study food systems or study biological systems and government agencies who are really interested in conserving [00:17:00] and then making sure that people have access to good food and are not Melanie [inaudible] are not starving. So that's a really important overlap that we should be capitalizing.
Speaker 6: [inaudible] you're listening to spectrum KALX Berkeley [inaudible]
Speaker 3: [00:17:30] is there an international element to the research that you read? Are there good sources out there that you did you go to or
Speaker 5: yeah, they, I think just the nature of the world right now is so global as therapy people, you know, say in Germany there's m k has sharky like in his lab looks at a lot of the same systems and so we kind of try and compare like our systems to [00:18:00] their systems. And that's not just in Germany but in [inaudible]
Speaker 4: Zealand and all over. So every little bit that you learn from one place, you want to see if that's happening in your system. To be able to draw conclusions and just the nature of journals now and the quality of science. And there's a lot of these, I mean there should be more, but there was, for example, the national center for ecological analysis and synthesis as quad as NZ is. It was this federally funded institution [00:18:30] where basically they funded people to come from all over the world who were studying similar problems but just didn't have the chance to synthesize it information come up with a general model or general understanding of these processes. So in many of these systems you find that the rules are the same regardless of your, your bioregion or maybe the rules are totally subverted, but it's really essential to understand ecological systems or ecological and [00:19:00] human interactions at this global scale. So we definitely need more institutes like NCS or like these international synthesis groups. But it's happening a lot. And I think with, um, especially with connections like the Internet and international conferences, etc, you can really bridge across nations and get a better understanding of what's happening on a global scale
Speaker 5: in a sense to challenge your assumptions. Yeah. Yeah. By seeing [00:19:30] other people's work. Absolutely. But also I think there are some efforts to try and frame your research within some of these larger international contexts. There's been the millennium ecosystem assessment, which was done by the UN or
Speaker 4: red. So that was, yeah, it was done by the UN and I think there were a lot of people at Columbia also that are also working on that. But yeah, it was this international project where they had separate villages as millennium ecosystem villages [00:20:00] where they were monitoring ecosystem services, impacts ecological and the relationships between ecological systems and humans and in these different villages. And trying to come up with what the general governing principles are for how humans and ecological systems interact and sort of what ecosystem services humans can obtain from their ecological surrounding college or the system. So things like water infiltration and pollination service and um, [00:20:30] erosion control, etc. In order to come up with a general framework like this is these are the essential components of a sustainable society.
Speaker 5: And I think just in terms of when you do your research, you want it to touch upon, you know, these touchstone theories in to be able to examine those or connect to these bigger global issues that people are constantly examining and considering is important to policymakers to just people's basic livelihoods on a day to day basis. [00:21:00] So knowing that even though you have your local system that you're looking at, it has wider implications that you want to be able to tie it into. So it doesn't just exist in a bubble.
Speaker 3: Is your relationship to science changed as you've gone from high school to college to postgraduate work?
Speaker 4: Well, I think, you know, definitely as you spend more time working on science and writing papers, you get [00:21:30] a better understanding of how much work it takes to come up with a particular understanding of a system. And you, you start to realize that a lot of times when a certain theory or a certain principle finally gets public understanding of public public acknowledgment, it's because hundreds of scientists have worked on it and have really put all their efforts together. It really just takes that last a hundred and first [00:22:00] study to really have a strong feeling. This is the pattern that we see. Um, so I think one of the things that you learn or you gather as a scientist is that it's really a multi year multi person, you know, Multi University or multi research institute effort to understand the processes and that it requires a lot of collaboration.
Speaker 4: And I think the other thing is that you get a better understanding of uncertainty because in science there's always uncertainty. It's [00:22:30] never black and white. And so if you're looking for a true false answer to your question, you're just not going to get it because that's just not how nature works. There's always a gradient to things and there's always exceptions to the rule. And I think as a scientist you have to understand that there's always going to be a little bit of uncertainty, but you have to be okay with that. And you have to say that, well, there's a lot of power and there's a lot of value in saying that we are very sure about something. [00:23:00] You don't have to be 100% in order to take a certain management action or take a certain conservation or restoration action.
Speaker 3: How about for you Hillary? What's, what's changed in your, your view of it?
Speaker 5: I think a lot of people, like he said, they can, you see science is kind of this monolith that has the scientific process and it creates these results and that's what it is. But really it's this very iterative process that [00:23:30] is constantly reevaluating hypotheses. And in a lot of ways what you choose to focus on is based on what other people have seen. But it's also, I'm noticing a product of the social, political, economic
Speaker 4: paradigms of whatever time you're in that helps you decide on what to study, what questions to ask, what features did incorporate. So not that it's subjective because they're, you know, these standards that you can kind of incorporate to try and find out. But that [00:24:00] I do think it's very much driven by probably a lot more processes than we kind of give it credit for it and that it's not as sometimes when I talked to other people who are not scientists, they see it as very divorced from the rest of our social ecosystem. And I think it's very much embedded in it. And I think it comes back to her whenever our first discussion topic. So where do we get our funding to do the science? And so when we are applying to these different agencies, [00:24:30] we really have to think about, well what is it that they're interested in? Are we, are we meeting their target objectives? And those agencies write up those objectives based on the public and based on what you know, the public thinks is important.
Speaker 2: Woo.
Speaker 7: [inaudible]
Speaker 1: thanks to Shalani Shai and Hillary Sar Danios for joining us today.
Speaker 7: [inaudible]
Speaker 1: [00:25:00] irregular feature of spectrum is to mention a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next few weeks in San Francisco. Tomorrow. There is a big splashy free Earth Day event being put on by a group named sustainable living road show. It is from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM they bill it as a carnival was [00:25:30] simultaneous events, a mixture of music, workshops, exhibits and speakers. The event is being held at the civic center and it is free. The website is Earth Day s f.com the art technology and culture colloquium presents a lecture titled Pure Engineering, decoupling technical innovation from utility and consumerism. The Speaker is Raphaelo deondrea professor of dynamic systems and control at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology [00:26:00] in Zurich. This event will take place at [inaudible] Hall on the UC Berkeley campus in the Beneteau Auditorium. April 25th, 2011 7:30 PM to 9:00 PM the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden Spring Plant Sale Is April 29th and 30th Friday the 29th is for members only and will run from 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM the public sale is April 30th from 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM the garden is located at 200 centennial [00:26:30] drive that is in Strawberry Canyon, east of Memorial Stadium.
Speaker 1: Steven squires and astronomer at Cornell University will present the Hitchcock lectures over two days. In May, the first lecture will be held at International House on the UC Berkeley campus in the Chevron Auditorium. May 2nd, 2011 at 2:00 PM Steven Squire's, his first lecture there. We'll describe his odyssey with NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission. The second lecture [00:27:00] is the following day, May 3rd at the same location, international house, and the same time 2:00 PM the second lecture, we'll discuss the future of solar system exploration to news stories of interest. The Messenger spacecraft successfully entered the orbit of the planet Mercury March 17th, 2011 this is the first spacecraft to orbit mercury. It has taken six and a half years for messenger to reach mercury. It is now sending back images of [00:27:30] mercury than you can view on numerous websites. The home site for Messenger is Messenger Dot j h u a p l.edu. Those initials stand for Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab. The Messenger mission is designed to answer six broad scientific questions.
Speaker 1: Why is mercury so dense? What is the geologic history of mercury? What is the nature of Mercury's magnetic field? [00:28:00] What is the structure of Mercury's core? What are the unusual materials that Mercury's poles? What volatiles or vapors make up the thin outer layer of the atmosphere? Messenger will gather data to answer these questions over the next year. Then the spacecraft will eventually fall out of orbit several years later and crash on mercury. Surface Messenger is part of NASA's discovery program. The agencies low cost, scientifically focused planetary missions. [00:28:30] The New York Times blog, the sixth floor on March 31st, 2011 speculated as to who designed the radiation symbol that is now ubiquitous. The Times attributed the design to Nell's garden and the health chemistry group at UC Berkeley in 1946 on April 1st in a reader comment to the blog, PJ Patterson of Berkeley offered up Cyril Orally, a mechanical engineer at the Lawrence radiation lab as the symbol designer or least version of the symbol hand painted on wood [00:29:00] is said to be on display at the Lawrence Berkeley lab. Does anyone in the radio audience have more information to further clarify the origin and evolution of the radiation symbol? If you do let us know, send an email to spectrum dot k a l x@yahoo.com
Speaker 2: Musa character shows by the stone of David from his album, folk in acoustic, made available through creative Commons license 3.0 attributes. Thank you for listening to spectrum. We're happy to hear [00:29:30] from our listeners. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot Calex and yahoo.com and join us in two weeks at the same time. [inaudible].
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