The excavation report as a literary genre: traditional practice in Britain

Although ways of thinking about the past have changed, in Britain the reporting of excavations has followed a series of shared conventions for nearly 100 years. This article considers two of them. It investigates the relationship between accounts of stratigraphic evidence and the publication of the associated artefacts and ecofacts and suggests that it results from the combination of two separate intellectual traditions in the late nineteenth century. It also identifies certain widely shared proportions between the separate components of excavation monographs published over a long period of time. Their existence has never been acknowledged. The excavation report has become a well-established literary genre and authors who are familiar with such texts unconsciously reproduce the same structures in their writing.

Does changing the taxonomical resolution alter the value of soil macroinvertebrates as bioindicators of metal pollution?

Ecological indicators are taxa that are affected by, and indicate effects of, anthropogenic environmental stress or disturbance on ecosystems. There is evidence that some species of soil macrofauna (i.e. diameter > 2 min) constitute valuable biological indicators of certain types of soil perturbations. This study aims to determine which level of taxonomic resolution, (species, family or ecological group) is the best to identify indicator of soil disturbance. Macrofauna were sampled in a set of sites encompassing different land-use systems (e.g. forests, pastures, crops) and different levels of pollution. Indicator taxa were sought using the IndVal index proposed by Dufrene and Legendre [Dufrene, M., Legendre, P., 1997. Species assemblages and indicator species: the need for a flexible asymetrical approach. Ecological Monographs 67, 345-3661. This approach is based on a hierarchical typology of sites. The index value changes along the typology and decreases (increases) for generalist (specialist) faunal units (species, families or ecological groups). Of the 327 morphospecies recorded, 19 were significantly associated with a site type or a group of sites (5.8%). Similarly, species were aggregated to form 59 families among which 17 (28.8%) displayed a significant indicator value. Gathering species into 28 broad ecological assemblages led to 14 indicator groups (50%). Beyond the simple proportion of units having significant association with a given level of the site typology, the proportion of specialist and generalist groups changed dramatically when the level of taxonomic resolution was altered. At the species level 84% of the indicator units were specialist, whereas this proportion decreased to 70 and 43% when families and ecological groups were considered. Because specialist groups are the most interesting type of indicators either in terms of conservation or for management purposes we come to the conclusion that the species level is the most accurate taxonomic level in bioindication studies although it requires a high amount of labour and operator knowledge and is time-consuming. (c) 2005 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Measuring bee diversity in different European habitats and biogeographical regions

Bee pollinators are currently recorded with many different sampling methods. However, the relative performances of these methods have not been systematically evaluated and compared. In response to the strong need to record ongoing shifts in pollinator diversity and abundance, global and regional pollinator initiatives must adopt standardized sampling protocols when developing large-scale and long-term monitoring schemes. We systematically evaluated the performance of six sampling methods (observation plots, pan traps, standardized and variable transect walks, trap nests with reed internodes or paper tubes) that are commonly used across a wide range of geographical regions in Europe and in two habitat types (agricultural and seminatural). We focused on bees since they represent the most important pollinator group worldwide. Several characteristics of the methods were considered in order to evaluate their performance in assessing bee diversity: sample coverage, observed species richness, species richness estimators, collector biases (identified by subunit-based rarefaction curves), species composition of the samples, and the indication of overall bee species richness (estimated from combined total samples). The most efficient method in all geographical regions, in both the agricultural and seminatural habitats, was the pan trap method. It had the highest sample coverage, collected the highest number of species, showed negligible collector bias, detected similar species as the transect methods, and was the best indicator of overall bee species richness. The transect methods were also relatively efficient, but they had a significant collector bias. The observation plots showed poor performance. As trap nests are restricted to cavity-nesting bee species, they had a naturally low sample coverage. However, both trap nest types detected additional species that were not recorded by any of the other methods. For large-scale and long-term monitoring schemes with surveyors with different experience levels, we recommend pan traps as the most efficient, unbiased, and cost-effective method for sampling bee diversity. Trap nests with reed internodes could be used as a complementary sampling method to maximize the numbers of collected species. Transect walks are the principal method for detailed studies focusing on plant-pollinator associations. Moreover, they can be used in monitoring schemes after training the surveyors to standardize their collection skills.

Copyright and research: an archivangelist's perspective

Conflation of academic copyright issues with respect to books (whether text books, research monographs or popularisations) and research articles, is rife in the academic publishing industry. A charitable interpretation is that this is because to publishers they are all effectively the same: a product produced for commercial benefit. An uncharitable interpretation is that this is a classic Fear Uncertainty and Doubt approach, in an attempt to delay the inevitable move to Open Access (OA) to research articles. To authors, however, research articles and books are generally very different things. Research articles are produced without the expectation of direct financial return, whereas books generally include some consideration of financial return. Taylor’s “Copyright and research: an academic publisher’s perspective” (SCRIPT-ed 4:2) falls wholesale into this mental trap and in particular his lauding of the position paper of the Association of American Professional and Scholarly Publishers, shows a lack of understanding of the continuing huge loss to scholarship of a lack of OA to research articles. It should be regarded as a categorical imperative for scholars to embrace OA to research articles.