Brian Hayden

Earlier this year, I got a lovely invitation from Simon Johnston to head over to Edinburgh and give the keynote at the Freshwater Biological Association's annual scientific meeting. The topic? Stable isotopes — what I've been doing with them, what you can do with them, and (gently) what you should be doing with them. It went well enough that I recorded a version at home to share. Here's the short version. A word that started at dinner Our story begins, like all good ones, on a sunny day, in...

Where Did This Tree Come From? Isotopes as a Lie Detector for Timber Most of these Atomic Ecology Meets have featured postdocs, students and professors — people firmly in the academic world. This one's a little different. Last week I sat down with Dr. Victor Deklerck, Director of Science at the non-profit World Forest ID, to talk about isotopes in action solving som e'real world' challenges. (cheers to Mike Seed at Elementar, who first pointed me their way.) Whats a 'real world' problem?...

Over the Easter break, I had a really engaging conversation with Jessica Lueders-Dumont , Senior Research Associate at Boston College , for the latest Atomic Ecology Meets . Jessica uses stable isotope ecology to explore how ecosystems function — and how that function changes over time. In a recent paper in Nature , she demonstrates how nitrogen isotope analysis of fish otoliths can reveal shifts in reef ecosystem function over thousands of years. What makes this work especially exciting is...