eLearning

David W. Schindler
ABSTRACT
The results of bottle and mesocosm experiments
were compared with those obtained in whole-
ecosystem experiments at the Experimental Lakes
Area. Unless they can be cleverly designed to mimic
major ecosystem processes and community compo-
sitions, smaller-scale experiments often give highly
replicable, but spurious, answers. Problems with
appropriate scaling are difficult to deduce without
direct comparisons with whole-ecosystem experi-
ments. Reasons aremany, but include inappropriate
spatial scales to include whole communities, in
particular predators and nocturnally active animals;
temporal scales that are too short to assess accu-
rately the response of slow-responding organisms
and biogeochemical processes; and elimination of
key littoral–pelagic and catchment–lake interac-
tions. Identical studies of limnological processes in
lakes of a large …

Dan Binkley,
Yowhan Son,
and David W. Valentine
ABSTRACT
The nitrogen (N) cycle of forest ecosystems is un-
derstood relatively well, and few scientists expect
that major revisions will be necessary; most current
work on N cycling focuses on improving the preci-
sion estimates of pools and fluxes, or measuring the
magnitudes of well-known pools in response to
management or disturbances. However, in the past
few decades more than a dozen articles in refereed
journals have claimed very high rates of N input, far
beyond the rates expected for known sources of N.
In this review, we summarize the literature on N
accretion rates in forests that lack substantial con-
tributions from symbiotic N-fixing plants. We …

Ross D. King,
Jem Rowland,
Stephen G. Oliver,
Michael Young,
Wayne Aubrey,
Emma Byrne,
Maria Liakata,
Magdalena Markham,
Pınar Pir,
Larisa N. Soldatova,
Andrew Sparkes,
Kenneth E. Whelan,
Amanda Clare
The basis of science is the hypothetico-deductive method and the recording of experiments in
sufficient detail to enable reproducibility. We report the development of Robot Scientist “Adam,”
which advances the automation of both. Adam has autonomously generated functional genomics
hypotheses about the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and experimentally tested these hypotheses
by using laboratory automation. We have confirmed Adam’s conclusions through manual
experiments. To describe Adam’s research, we have developed an ontology and logical language.
The resulting formalization involves over 10,000 different research units in a nested treelike
structure, 10 levels …