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.

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.

Disease is something few people love. There are exceptions though, particularly among those who appreciate the diversity and ecological role of plant disease. The early conservationist, Aldo Leopold, described the role of tree diseases in creating food and shelter for the animals on his farm in Wisconsin: I met Chris Preston, a Cambridgeshire botanist, when I was in the first year of my degree.

If you’re interested in big ecological datasets, natural history, and predictive cross-scale ecology (like we are) then you should check out the upcoming Gordon Research Conference (GRC) on Unifying Ecology Across Scales (July 28 – Aug 2) and the associated Gordon Research Seminar (GRS;

After posting yesterday that we were ramping up the blog again, my RSS feed let me know that arguably the most impactful ecology blog of all time, Dynamic Ecology, was doing the same thing! We also heard from Terry McGlynn who has recently moved and renamed his really important blog, now a newsletter named Science For Everyone. And we heard from multiple other folks that they are in the process of spinning up new blogs/newsletters.

Since 2022 I have been recording the flora of some islands in Strangford Lough. I received a Plant Study Grant from the BSBI to work on this in the Summer of 2022 but as it turned out I had committed to a much bigger project than I first thought! I recently submitted my records and can now finally say I have finished my first large recording project.

This is an adapted version of my poster, which is also available as a pdf or png. As with all my work on this site it is CC BY 4.0 (free for use/adaptation as long as I am credited). The Meadow Maker Yellow Rattle ( Rhinanthus minor ) has become well known in restoration ecology and wildlife gardening as a “meadow maker”, which can transform a species-poor patch of grasses into a biodiverse and flower-rich one.

Slievenacloy Nature Reserve is an Ulster Wildlife reserve in Antrim. It is very well managed for upland grassland, with a wealth of Devil’s-Bit dominated grassland.

On the thirteenth of August, I was at Killard National Nature Reserve, Co. Down, with my mum. We were looking for Frog Orchids and other species rare in the county like Quaking Grass and Field Scabious. She found a plant she didn’t recognise and asked me what it was, and it was Autumn Lady’s Tresses. I knew I hadn’t seen it before and wasn’t sure it had been recorded anywhere near before.

The model in this post is based on the one in Cameron et al. (2009), improving how seed dispersal is modelled and the dynamics are visualised. I have become a bit obsessed with hemiparasitic plants recently. When I found Cameron et al.’s paper on how Yellow Rattle can create interesting spatial dynamics in grasslands¹, I got quite excited. I have been learning python this year so I thought I may as well try to replicate their model.