There are a number of great datasets available for doing macroecology and community ecology at broad spatial scales. These include data on birds (Breeding Bird Survey, Christmas Bird Count), plants (Forest Inventory &

If folks are interested in seeing what Weecology has been up to lately we have a bunch of posters and talks at ESA this year. In order of appearance: Tuesday at 2:30 pm in Room 9AB our new postdoctoral researcher Dan McGlinn will be giving a talk on looking at community assembly using patterns of with- and between-species spatial variation.

In the comments of my post on the Ecological Data Wiki Jarrett Byrnes asked an excellent question: As I started to answer it I realized that my thoughts on the matter were better served by a full post, both because they are a bit lengthy and because I don’t actually know much about DataONE and would love to have some of their folks come by, correct my mistaken impressions, and just chat about this stuff in general.

I’ve been waiting for a while now for Ted Hart’s blog to get up enough steam to send folks over there, and since in the last two weeks he’s had three posts, revamped the mission of the blog, and engaged in the ongoing conversation about Lindenmayer & Likens, it seems like that time has arrived.

As you may have seen earlier either on Jabberwocky, EEB and Flow, or over at Oikos’ new blog, the most recent piece about how some branch of ecology is ruining ecology has caused some discussion in the blogosphere.

There is an excellent post over at EEB & Flow on the empirical divide,inspired by an editorial by David Lindenmayer and Gene Likens in the most recent ESA Bulletin, titled “Losing the Culture of Ecology”. It was great to see some thoughtful and data driven consideration of the idea that we should choose to emphasize one broad area of ecology over another.

There is a new postdoctoral research position available in Jim Brown’s lab at the University of New Mexico to study some of the major patterns of biodiversity. We know a bit about the research and it’s going to be an awesome project with a bunch of incredibly bright people involved.

Thanks to an email from Jeremy Fox I just found out that Oikos has started a blog. It clearly isn’t on most folks radars (I represent 50% of its Google Reader subscribers), and Jeremy has been putting up some really interesting posts over there so I thought it was worth a mention.

There is an excellent post on open science, prestige economies, and the social web over at Marciovm’s posterous*. For those of you who aren’t insanely nerdy** GitHub is… well… let’s just call it a very impressive collaborative tool for developing and sharing software***. But don’t worry, you don’t need to spend your days tied to a computer or have any interest in writing your own software to enjoy gems like: Thanks to Carl Boettiger

Advertisements for three exciting postdoctoral positions came out in the last week. Interface between ecology, evolution and mathematics The first is with Hélène Morlon’s group in Paris. Hélène and I were postdocs in Jessica Green’s lab at the same time. She is both very smart and extremely nice, oh, and did I mention, her lab is in PARIS. Here’s the ad. If it’s a good fit then you couldn’t go wrong with this postdoc.