We have a postdoc position available for someone interested in the general areas of macroecology, quantitative ecology, and ecoinformatics. Here’s the short ad with links to the full job description: If you’re interested in the position and are planning to be at ESA please leave a comment or drop me an email (ethan.white@usu.edu) and we can try to set up a time to talk while we’re in Pittsburgh.

The peer review system has recently been under increasing pressure as the number of papers submitted has been skyrocketing.

Our inaugural Things you should read post is about Brian McGill’s new paper on unifying unified theories of macroecological patterns. One of the major challenges to understanding ecology is that there are so many different ways to characterize the structure of ecological systems. This means that we spread our intellectual efforts across a large number of different questions making progress in any given area relatively slow.

We’ve been thinking a lot recently about the idea that the social web can/should play an increasing role in filtering the large quantity of published information to allow the best and most important work to float to the top (see e.g., posts by The Scholarly Kitchen and Academhack). In its simplest form the idea is that folks like us will mention publications that we think are good/important and then people who think we’re worth listening to

Introduction I have been very encouraged of late to see more and more ecologists embracing the potential of the web for communication and interaction. I’ve recently blogrolled some graduate student blogs and in the last few weeks I’ve come across American Naturalist’s trial run of a forum system, Ecological Monographs’ blog, and a blog soliciting feedback on a new initiative to digitize existing biological collections.

It’s probably not really to our benefit to be advertising competing positions when we’re currently looking for a post-doc ourselves, but this is a great opportunity so I thought I’d pass it along. The Department of Wildland Resources at Utah State has a post-doctoral fellowship available to work with one (or more) of it’s faculty.

I’ve been meaning to get around to posting about Stuart Hurlbert and Cecilia Lombardi’s recent paper (2009; Ann. Zool. Fennici 46: 311–349) on the use of p-values in drawing scientific conclusions… but thankfully Jarrett Byrnes over at i’m a chordata! urochordata! wrote such a great post about it that all I need to do is point you over to his place. Just so you know what you’re getting into, Hurlbert &

Imperial College London is offering a new masters degree program in quantitative biology. It sounds like a great opportunity to get some good quantitative training via an intensive 1 year MS program. The best part of their pitch follows below. If you’d like to see the whole ad check out the flier that Dan Reuman sent me.

The Community and Conservation Ecology group at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, has a job opening for a tenure track assistant professor in Experimental Conservation Ecology (details below). This is a very impressive group that is headed by Han Olff and includes Rampal Etienne and David Alonso.

I just came across this great Robert MacArthur quote on Allen Hurlbert’s website: It seems to me that one of the real challenges for us as scientists is to make sure that even if we don’t understand what others see when they look at the ecological world, we need to consider the possibility that they simply have an alternative, and equally valid, perspective.