We’re excited to announce the initial release of crown maps for 100 million trees in the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) with information on location, species identify, size, and alive/dead status. Using NEON’s remote sensing data we’ve been developing computer vision models to locate tree crowns for all individuals visible from above and classify those crowns to species (Weinstein et al. 2019, 2020, 2023; Marconi et al. 2022).

We have a new paper out describing how vesicles move inside cells. The paper in a nutshell In science-speak We analysed how small vesicles are transported in cells. In contrast to large vesicles and organelles, which move using motors inside cells, our analysis revealed that passive diffusion is the main mode of small vesicle transport. In normal language Inside cells, molecules are moved in tiny transport packets called vesicles.

The Weecology lab group run by Ethan White and Morgan Ernest at the University of Florida is seeking a Project Manager to conduct and manage a long-term field study of breeding wading bird colonies in the Florida Everglades.

The Ernest Lab at the University of Florida has an opening for a PhD student interested in ecological forecasting of desert rodents to start Fall 2024. This position is funded on an NSF grant to study ecological forecasting under novel conditions using data from the Portal Project, our long-term field site located in southeastern Arizona.

The GSC23 international meeting was held in Bangkok, Thailand earlier this month (Aug 7-11th) and here we have an overview of this meeting. The Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC) is a volunteer-run non-profit organization set up nearly 20 years ago. At a time when “genomic” researchers were painstakingly producing near-complete genomes of just a few organisms.

This week in GigaScience , Hasindu Gamaarachchi and colleagues published a paper on their HARU solution for selective sequencing, to be used alongside the handheld (“tricorder” like) Nanopore MinION device . With the MinION, it is possible to kick out all non-target DNA strands before they are processed through the device’s pores, thus selectively sequencing specific target regions of the genome.

*Series Editors: Jue Ruan (Agricultural Genomics Institute at Shenzhen, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences) and Fritz J Sedlazeck (Human Genome Sequencing Center, Baylor College of Medicine) *   While the first draft of the Human Genome was announced back in June 2000 and declared complete in April 2003, it took 20 years for the publication of the first complete, gapless sequence of a human genome in March 2022.

Last week an exciting new addition to the R ecosystem was announced: webR. webR lets you run R from inside your browser, without installing R ¹ . This is a really exciting development for educational materials, because it makes it possible to provide interactive materials where students can modify, create, and run code right inside a web page with zero setup.

At GigaScience we see more and more of our published papers use computational workflows, as they provides researchers easy access to high-quality analysis methods without the requirement of computational expertise. However, systems are needed to enable the sharing of these workflows in a reusable form.

Frictionless Data improves not just machine readability of scientific articles, but also enables humans to directly interact with the data within the article itself.