The International Network of Next Generation Ecologists (INNGE) is a network of ecologists that aims to strengthen international ties and inspire new activities in a growing global community of early career ecologists.

In this newsletter, read about the launch of a blog aggregator for ecology, INNGE’s activities at the INTECOL conference in August of 2013, how to get your dream job outside academia, and the outcomes of the 1st IPBES plenary. To stay up to date with the latest news you can always go to INNGE.net, find us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.

Inside INNGE

These are exciting times for INNGE. The network is experiencing increased interest and we are pleased to share with you a number of upcoming activities. At the centre of current planning is the quadrennial INTECOL conference, which will be held in London in August of 2013.

INNGE at INTECOL 2013: The conference will be the venue for INNGE’s first global gathering of early-career ecologists. To encourage attendance from as many ecological organizations as possible, we have drafted a letter inviting ecological societies and related organizations to send early-career representatives to the meeting. A standard version of the letter is available publicly here, and we encourage you suggest that your organization send early-career ecologists to the meeting. Each society will have a chance to promote itself during a special INNGE event, focused on sharing the diverse ways in which each society is advancing next-generation ecology. Read more about INNGE’s activities in London and how to attend the meeting below.

Working group and Nodes: To manage a growing list of activities, INNGE recently expanded its working group to include Ellen Cieraad from the New Zealand Ecological Society, Lucía DeSoto from the Spanish Society for Terrestrial Ecology, and Jenny Talbot from the Ecological Society of America. At the same time, to achieve a broader and more inclusive dialog, the collective group of contacts in INNGE, known as the Nodes, now meet monthly via Skype to discuss a next-generation topic or organizational issue. If you want to join one of these meetings simply add “INNGE_Skypes” as a Skype contact and send us a note about your attendance. Meeting times and topics can be found on our online calendar. The topic for the next meeting on February 21st will be INNGE’s activities at the INTECOL conference.

Bylaws: At the London INTECOL conference, INNGE will have its first business meeting, including elections to the working group. A set of Bylaws for the Network is in the final phase of drafting and will be available online for comments during the month following its release.

EcoBloggers - open blog aggregator for ecology

INNGE recently launched EcoBloggers, a blog aggregator and accompanying RSS feed devoted to ecology blogs. The aim is to improve the open discussion of ecology by increasing the general readership of most ecology blogs. If you want your blog to be part of EcoBloggers, send us an email with your feed URL. Everyone can be part of the blogging party and we very much hope everyone will. Read Tim Poisot’s blog post describing the launch of EcoBloggers, and go to EcoBloggers to start reading.

EcoBloggers currently aggregates more than a dozen ecology blogs, and will hopefully only keep growing. 

INNGE featured in Journal of Ecology podcast

In November 2012, INNGE was the subject of a Journal of Ecology podcast. The podcast is now available for download from the JoE podcast page. In the podcast, Peter Søgaard Jørgensen sketches the history behind INNGE, the vision for the future, and not least how to get involved in some of the exciting initiatives being planned.

Next-Generation Point-of-View

Getting your dream job outside academia!

The second in our series of Next-Generation Point of View blog posts covers the topic of preparing for a successful career outside academia. We highlight two blog posts, based on an open-access paper in the journal Conservation Biology, entitled “Graduate Student’s Guide to Necessary Skills for Non-academic Conservation Careers”. The study was conducted by a group of eight PhD-students and one faculty member from the University of California, Davis, in the USA.

The road to London - INNGE’s activities at INTECOL 2013

INNGE has a number of activities planned for INTECOL 2013 in London, just a javelin throw from the Olympic stadium:

• Workshop: using modern networks for next-generation ecology. Confirmed participants include Walter Jetz, Ally Phillimore, Eric Lind, Tim Poisot, and Willliam Gunn.
• Business meeting: formalising INNGE as a global network of next generation ecologists, and making plans for the next four years.
• Pecha Kucha talks: Pecha Kucha is an innovative presentation format of 20 images, each of which advances automatically after 20 seconds.

We will also run three lunchtime sessions:

• What did the learned societies ever do for me? Officers from learned societies will advocate why we should join their society by telling us the ways in which they foster an engaged early career section.

• The most influential papers in modern ecology. Accompanying, but not restricted to, the BES’s 100 influential papers project [online in April], INNGE Nodes will showcase the paper that helped make them the scientist they are today. If you want to take part, you can sign up for the session by contacting Tom Ezard

• Building on the Journal of Ecology's 100 outstanding questions in modern ecology , members of that working group will present their favorite outstanding question in ecology.

London represents a major opportunity to formalise the role of INNGE, while energising it with new members and ideas for INTECOL 2013 and beyond. We hope to see you in London!

IPBES - what came out of the first plenary?

Negotiations prove slow - but important progress has been made When about 100 of the world’s governments (see ecology world map below) start building a scientific platform to evaluate the ecological state of the planet, ecologists should pay attention. At INNGE, we have made broad dissemination of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) part of our mission. Following up on a recent blog post, we briefly highlight some of the outcomes of the first plenary, IPBES–1, in Bonn, Germany (January 21–26):

• Who’s who?: IPBES now has a bureau and and a multidisciplinary expert panel (MEP). To put it simply, the bureau’s role is to take care of the politicical side of IPBES (the governance of the institution). Many parties have stressed the importance of the MEP functioning as an independent body that solely focuses on the science (as well as knowledge generated through other means, including traditional ecological knowledge). Here you can find out who will serve in these important positions in the bureau and on the MEP.
• What will the Bureau and MEP do? Until the next plenary, the bureau and MEP will be tasked with developing the initial work programme of IPBES for 2014–2018. That period will be concluded by the first IPBES report, which is tentatively scheduled to be ready by 2018. Importantly, an estimated budget for the work programme also has to be developed in 2013.
• IPBES and CBD It is becoming more clear that one of IPBES’ main roles will likely be to provide information usable by governments and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) for evaluating their progress toward their biodiversity targets - most notably the 20 Aichi targets.
• IPBES2 Will be held in December 2013 or January 2014. After this meeting, we will know more about the specific ways IPBES will generate and provide important ecological knowledge to decision makers.

For those interested in in-depth analysis of IPBES, we highly recommend the International Institute for Sustainable Development’s dedicated webpage, including post-hoc summary and analysis. In addition, IPBES has a FAQ site which may be helpful for answering some of your immediate questions.

The Ecology World Map (February 2013)

Key: Green – national ecological society, Yellow – multinational ecological society, Stripes – Ecological society with formal early career initiative.

With this map we try to keep track of the planet’s ecological societies. In this updated version of the world map, we have added (as of February 12, 2013) the 106 IPBES members (brown borders). Since last newsletter, an early-career initiative has been launched within the New Zealand Ecological Society.