From how we do science to publishing practices to the sociology of science, there isn’t an aspect of the scientific endeavor that isn’t in flux right now.

The first, throat clearing post to kick off what (we hope) will be a revitalization of the Portal Project Blog

[Update: A little bird pointed out I didn’t have a link to the actual Portal blog. That has been remedied along with a link to the Portal Project website for those who’d like more info on the project] A couple weeks ago, I posted about the new data paper from my long-term field site, the Portal Project.

This is the story behind “Comparing process-based and constraint-based approaches for modeling macroecological patterns” by my former PhD student Xiao Xiao, James O’Dwyer, and myself. Background I was on sabbatical in the fall of 2013 and was doing a lot of reading, and I reread “An integrative framework for stochastic, size-structured community assembly” by James O’Dwyer, Jessica Green, and colleagues.

It is with great glee that I can announce the latest release of the Portal Project Database. For those of you who just want to go play with the data – here’s the link to the Data Paper we just published in Ecology. But I would encourage you to read on, as there is more data-related news below. But first, a story. As some of you know, I manage a long-term ecological study: the Portal Project.

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In a big step forward for allowing proper credit to be provided to all of the awesome folks collecting and publishing data, the journal Global Ecology & Biogeography has just announced that they will start supporting an unlimited set of references to datasets used in a paper. These references will be included immediately following the traditional references section in both the html and pdf versions of the paper.

For the past few years I’ve been involved in a collaboration to put together a broad-coverage life history database for mammals, reptiles, and birds. The project started because my collaborator, Nathan Myhrvold, and I both had projects we were interested in that involved comparing life history traits of reptiles, mammals, and birds, and only mammals had easily accessible life history databases with broad taxonomic coverage.

Recently, over at the blog Ecological Rants the eminent ecologist Charles Krebs wrote a post about the ills of simplification in ecology. The post focuses specifically on how ecology has been ‘led astray’ by simplified models and lab studies. This has recently been picked up on Dynamic Ecology by Jeremy Fox who responded generally to the post but specifically to the affront to microcosms.

*This is a guest post by Elita Baldridge.** This is the third in a series of posts about my experiences completing a PhD with a chronic illness (Part 1, Part 2, and background information). Not only is this about the tools that I used to complete my PhD, but I am optimistic that these tools/coping mechanisms will allow me to be a scientist that gets paid for doing science. The tips &