Last week I posed a GeoGuessr challenge, testing your ability to identify five famous ecology field sites. Thanks to everyone who played!
But there can only be one winner, and that winner is Avi Bar Massada, with a near-perfect 32,352! To score that high in GeoGuessr, you have to nail all five locations within tens of meters. Avi is nothing if not persistent, taking two hours to “drive” around as long as needed to figure out where he was. Good thing I didn’t pick any locations in, like, the Yukon, or Avi would still be driving.
Kudos as well to the runner up team of Andrew Tredennick and his girlfriend Kyle (both ecologists), who got 31,819. A very close contest!
For anyone unsure of what the locations were or why I picked them, here are the answers:
Location “A” was as close as I could get to Tatoosh Island, where Bob Paine did the experiment leading to the concept of keystone predation.
B was the Galapagos Islands.
C was as close as I could get to Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest.
D was as close as I could get to the Experimental Lakes Area.
E was as close as I could get to the Park Grass Experiment, the longest-running experiment in ecology (since 1856!).
Don’t read too much into my choices here, they were basically the first five locations that occurred to me that are included in GeoGuessr (a couple of other locations that occurred to me aren’t in GeoGuessr).
I’m going to do at least one more of these. Suggestions for future themes welcome in the comments (field stations? birthplaces of famous ecologists?)
Dynamic Ecology 
Thanks Jeremy! To return your favor (of not sending us to Yukon), I created a special challenge. This time, the objective is not only to find the right spot, but also to figure out what’s special about it (from an ecological point of view, obviously). Hint: all places are special in the same way.
Enjoy:
http://tinyurl.com/ljovyzg
Good idea! Thanks for sharing! Will give you a shoutout in the Friday linkfest so folks don’t miss this in the comments.