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.

Back when I had optimistic views of my time, I vowed to do more blogging this year. Sadly, life had other plans. But I return with an update to an earlier post on the Portal rodent community. To recap, in April 2023, my student Pat Dumandan and I were afraid. Afraid that Chaetodipus penicillatus (the Desert pocket mouse) was about to undergo a population explosion.

Author Amir Aryani: (ORCID: 0000-0002-4259-9774) Definition A research collaboration network is a group of researchers, and practitioners, or both, working together on joint research activities. These networks often span across disciplines, geographic boundaries, and sectors, enabling participants to share resources, expertise, and data to address common research goals more effectively than they could individually.

Hot on the heals of the post on how to downsize microscopy movie files, let’s look at ways to shrink the size of a PDF file. There’s several ways to tackle this – suggestions came from this thread on Mastodon. Scenario: you have created a preprint/manuscript/proposal in PDF format.