When last we left our rodent community at Portal, things were still…weird. Recap: In fall of 2023, one of our most abundant species, Chaetodipus penicillatus (Desert pocket mouse), experienced a population crash right before their seasonal torpor for the winter. Had they hibernated early or had we really lost individuals? We could only wait and see what happened in the spring. Spring came and still no Desert pocket mouse.
Interested in using computer vision to help understand, manage, and conserve nature? We hiring for a new position to join our team working on models, software, and community outreach in our existing projects using airborne imagery to monitor and understand natural systems at large scales. The Weecology lab at the University of Florida has an opening for a computer vision developer to join our team.
Interested in understanding how ecological systems change through time? Morgan Ernest’s Lab at the University of Florida has an opening for a PhD student to start Fall 2025. The new student will work with our long-term field site in Portal, Arizona to study biodiversity dynamics of mammals and plants to understand and predict changes in species abundances and biodiversity in response to changing climate and biotic conditions.
(Blog post) “MIT libraries are thriving without Elsevier” by Cory Doctorow. This blog post is about the collective action problem of moving academic publishing away from the big corporate publishers that extract millions of dollars/year from scholarly research while contributing very little in return. It reports on an encouraging report by SPARC about MIT’s success in canceling their Elsevier subscriptions.
Ethan White’s lab at the University of Florida has an opening for a PhD student starting in Fall 2025 to study ecological forecasting of wading birds in the Everglades.
To share things we’re excited about in a less platform specific, more discoverable, way we’re going to do semi-regular posts sharing a few things we like. To start: A paper led by Laura D’Acunto &
One of weecology’s newest projects involves monitoring wading birds in the Everglades using drones. We need to quickly turn this imagery into data to drive ecological forecasts & guide management decisions. We do this in near real-time using computer vision models to detect birds in imagery & automated workflows to update this data as soon as new imagery is available.
We just published a dataset of canopy tree maps for 100 million trees in the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) with information on location, species identify, size, and whether the tree is alive.
Welcome back to our next installment of: what the heck is happening with the Portal rodents? For those just tuning in, I might recommend reading our first two installments: Regime Shift Cometh? and Regime Shift Still Cometh? June in the Arizona desert can be a brutal time for conducting the Portal rodent trip.
Back when I had optimistic views of my time, I vowed to do more blogging this year. Sadly, life had other plans. But I return with an update to an earlier post on the Portal rodent community. To recap, in April 2023, my student Pat Dumandan and I were afraid. Afraid that Chaetodipus penicillatus (the Desert pocket mouse) was about to undergo a population explosion.
