As with children’s toys and clothes, books aimed at children tend to be targeted in a gender-stereotyped way. This is a bit depressing.

The big buzz over the past few years has been Data Science. Corporations are opening Data Science departments and staffing them with PhDs, and universities have started Data Science programs to sell credentials for these jobs. As a linguist I’m particularly interested in this new field, because it includes research practices that I’ve been using for years, like corpus linguistics and natural language processing.

Scaling-up ecological patterns and processes is crucial to understanding the effects of environmental change on natural systems and human society. We are piloting a Data Science Challenge where multiple groups attempt to use the same remote sensing data from low flying airplanes to infer the location and type of trees in forests. This will allow forests to be studied in detail at much larger scales than is currently possible.

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How has our collection of weather data at the Portal Project changed through time? Weecology Project Manager Glenda Yenni recounts the saga of the weather stations.

Today’s reblog from the Portal Project is a piece by Tom Valone how the site inspired him to ponder vegetation change.

Love to see paired photos of places in the past and now? My PhD student Erica Christensen has a treat for you. Here’s a post about her attempts to reshoot old photos from the site.

Someone (**cough** **cough** Morgan) fell down on their job rebloging the Portal Project 40th anniversary posts to Jabberwocky. But that means this week is the week o’ Portal as we reblog the various posts from the past few weeks. First up, what happens when we go out in the summer to count plants?

We have a new paper out. The title is New tools for ‘hot-wiring’ clathrin-mediated endocytosis with temporal and spatial precision . You can read it here. Cells have a plasma membrane which is the barrier between the cell’s interior and the outside world. In order to import material from outside, cells have a special process called endocytosis.

While the Portal Project focuses primarily on rodents and plants, there is more to our ecosystem than just those taxa. This week’s Portal Project post focuses on some insect work at the site.