Marking the 10 ^th anniversary of the formulation of the FAIR principles, we have one of our GigaBlog Q&A’s with Peter-Bram ’t Hoen, Alain van Gool, Anna Niehues and Casper de Visser from the Netherlands X-omics Initiative and Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, authors of a new paper on publishing FAIR workflows.

It was my freshman year, 1991. I was enthusiastic to finally be learning about biology, after being forced to waste a year in the German army’s compulsory service at the time. Little did I know that it was the same year a research paper was published that would guide the direction of my career to this day, more than 30 years later. Many of the links in this post will go to old web pages I created while learning about this research.

In the beginning GigaScience was at the first AsiaEvo conference, which took place in Shenzhen, China in 2019. Back then, the chair of the first AsiaEvo Conference, Guojie Zhang (longtime friend and board member of GigaScience ) said of the history of the AsiaEvo meeting series:

We’ve been studying how rodent communities change through time in the Arizona desert for 40 years. About once a decade we see a rapid change. Is the next one about to happen? It might be!

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.

We start the new year with news from the deep, published in GigaScience : The genome of a sea cucumber, collected at a depth of 2400 m during a submarine trip to a hydrothermal vent, helps scientists to understand how marine animals can survive in extreme conditions. Hydrothermal vents are an unlikely environment for animals to flourish.

We started Jabberwocky Ecology back in 2008 when blogs were becoming the dominant medium for informal (online) academic discussions. About the same time a handful of other ecology blogs got going and for a while the academic “blogosphere” was the hub for the sorts of things we now often talk about on other social media platforms.

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.

It’s December, the festive season and the end of  year are approaching fast –  and it’s time for our traditional look back on the past 12 months at GigaScience Press . Once more, we are pleased with the view in the rear mirror.  In its 11th year, GigaScience again published exceptional “big data” science (read on for examples). And GigaScience’s