Sarah Calba's PhD defense

I acted as president of the examining committee of Sarah Calba who defended her PhD in epistemology of sciences with the predictions in community ecology as a case study. The thesis was supervised by two clever colleagues of mine, Virginie Maris and Vincent Devictor. Sarah did more than well, and the discussions were lively and the debate vivid. As a general comment, I wish we, as ecologists, had more time as part of our training to think of why and how we conduct our scientific activities. Sarah has a nice paper showing that the identification of patterns and processes linking species diversity to functional or phylogenetic diversity depends on the methodological choices we make as analysts. This reminds me of the discussion about “Researcher Degrees of Freedom” on Gelman’s blog.