Interested in understanding how ecological systems change through time? Morgan Ernest’s Lab at the University of Florida has an opening for a PhD student to start Fall 2025. The new student will work with our long-term field site in Portal, Arizona to study biodiversity dynamics of mammals and plants to understand and predict changes in species abundances and biodiversity in response to changing climate and biotic conditions.
(Blog post) “MIT libraries are thriving without Elsevier” by Cory Doctorow. This blog post is about the collective action problem of moving academic publishing away from the big corporate publishers that extract millions of dollars/year from scholarly research while contributing very little in return. It reports on an encouraging report by SPARC about MIT’s success in canceling their Elsevier subscriptions.
One of the joys of posting a preprint is seeing that people are viewing, downloading and (hopefully) reading your paper. On bioRxiv you can check out the statistics for your paper in the metrics tab. We posted a preprint recently and it clocked up over 1,000 views in the first day or so. This made me wonder: is that a lot of views or not? How does it compare to other preprints in our category?
Ethan White’s lab at the University of Florida has an opening for a PhD student starting in Fall 2025 to study ecological forecasting of wading birds in the Everglades.
To share things we’re excited about in a less platform specific, more discoverable, way we’re going to do semi-regular posts sharing a few things we like. To start: A paper led by Laura D’Acunto &
One of weecology’s newest projects involves monitoring wading birds in the Everglades using drones. We need to quickly turn this imagery into data to drive ecological forecasts & guide management decisions. We do this in near real-time using computer vision models to detect birds in imagery & automated workflows to update this data as soon as new imagery is available.
We just published a dataset of canopy tree maps for 100 million trees in the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) with information on location, species identify, size, and whether the tree is alive.
Welcome back to our next installment of: what the heck is happening with the Portal rodents? For those just tuning in, I might recommend reading our first two installments: Regime Shift Cometh? and Regime Shift Still Cometh? June in the Arizona desert can be a brutal time for conducting the Portal rodent trip.
The debate between Yann LeCun and Elon Musk, reported in Nature, questions whether science necessitates publishing results. My position is that science depends on how you produce your knowledge, not necessarily requiring publication. Only if you face the public, you need to publish about your work.
tl;dr : metrics-obsessed capitalism is the reason why we can’t have nice things – and watch @tante’s talk Back in Paris, I was semi-joking with friends about how the rate of technological innovations seem to have slowed down or come to a halt. The last “big” innovation that we could think about were smartphones, as carrying the internet permanently in our pockets was quite a change.