Figuring out how to teach well as a professor at a research university is largely a self-study affair. For me the keys to productive self-study are good information and self-reflection. Without good information you’re not learning the right things and without self-reflection you don’t know if you are actually succeeding at implementing what you’ve learned.

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 &

Recently, NSF has changed the process for proposal submission for the core panels in the Directorate for Biological Sciences. Wondering if this might be important to you? Please answer the following questions: do you study some aspect of biology (defined as anything from the molecular to ecosystem levels)?, do you intend to submit a proposal to NSF someday?

The Department of Zoology and Physiology at the University of Wyoming is advertising some postdoctoral fellowships (details below). There are a number of stellar people out there (including friend of Weecology, Jake Goheen, who sent us the ad), so we strongly recommend checking out the opportunity if you’re looking for a postdoc or know someone who is: Berry Postdoctoral Fellowships Berry Postdoctoral Fellowships are

George Monbiot has just published a piece in The Telegraph berating for-profit academic publishers that will surely be castigated by some as over the top hyperbole and praised by others as a trenchant criticism of the state of academic publishing*. Starting off with the, perhaps, ever so slightly, contentious title of Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist Monbiot proceeds to fire zingers like and backs up his position

As some of you may have heard, the BIO directorate at NSF has implemented some sweeping changes to the proposal process. Some of you youngsters may be unaware what the ‘old’ system was, but it involved two submission deadlines per year.

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.

Next week is the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America. If you’ve ever been to ESA, then you know it’s….big, often between 3000-5000 ecologists (which I thought was big until I heard about some of the biomedical conferences which have the attendance of a small city). It seems like most of those people are giving talks or posters.

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.