AN ODE TO BIVARIATE COUPLING: SOME REFLECTIONS ON WHAT I LEARNED FROM BOB STERNER

In celebration of Bob Sterner’s retirement, this talk will summarize some of my reflections on how Bob shaped the way I conduct and teach science. I spent much of the 2000s at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities under Bob Sterner’s supervision; first as a technician, then as a graduate student. If I learned anything during that period, it was how to plot one variable against another – a bivariate plot. There are examples of these bivariate plots throughout Bob’s publications; scatterplots of the relationship between seston carbon and phosphorus, organismal phosphorus content and body size, even spatial and temporal scales. Bob never stopped at calculating a correlation coefficient or fitting a regression equation. Instead he would encourage us to ponder what the intercept, slope, or even that weird cluster of points off to the right told us about the fundamental processes and rules governing ecological dynamics. For example, if the relationship between log seston carbon and log seston phosphorus has a slope less than one, what can that tell us about how carbon and phosphorus cycles change across productivity gradients? Bob was not the first to use these approaches. As a student of ecological history, he knew how his research built on that of Alfred Redfield, Robert Peters, Jim Brown, and many others. However, the cautious and thoughtful way in which he queried bivariant datasets and combined different approaches (e.g., fieldwork, experiments, and theory) advanced ecology and shaped how I and likely many others conduct and teach science.

Primary Presenter: James Hood, Ohio State University (hood.211@osu.edu)

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