We started Jabberwocky Ecology back in 2008 when blogs were becoming the dominant medium for informal (online) academic discussions. About the same time a handful of other ecology blogs got going and for a while the academic “blogosphere” was the hub for the sorts of things we now often talk about on other social media platforms.

We’re excited to announce the initial release of crown maps for 100 million trees in the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) with information on location, species identify, size, and alive/dead status. Using NEON’s remote sensing data we’ve been developing computer vision models to locate tree crowns for all individuals visible from above and classify those crowns to species (Weinstein et al. 2019, 2020, 2023; Marconi et al. 2022).

The Weecology lab group run by Ethan White and Morgan Ernest at the University of Florida is seeking a Project Manager to conduct and manage a long-term field study of breeding wading bird colonies in the Florida Everglades.

The Ernest Lab at the University of Florida has an opening for a PhD student interested in ecological forecasting of desert rodents to start Fall 2024. This position is funded on an NSF grant to study ecological forecasting under novel conditions using data from the Portal Project, our long-term field site located in southeastern Arizona.

Last week an exciting new addition to the R ecosystem was announced: webR. webR lets you run R from inside your browser, without installing R ¹ . This is a really exciting development for educational materials, because it makes it possible to provide interactive materials where students can modify, create, and run code right inside a web page with zero setup.

A funny thing happened on the way to the pandemic… In the summer of 2019 a colleague of mine, Dr. Peter Frederick – an expert in the wading birds of the Everglades – emailed me. Peter and I served on some university committees together, so I assumed we were just getting together to chat about changes in graduate student admissions or something else administrative.

Do you have a graduate degree and are looking for a job? The US Government hires thousands of people with your skill set. Here I’ll give a quick overview of the scope of those jobs. If you’re looking for the exhaustive guide for applying on USAjobs its here. Why should I work for the federal government? A career with a federal agency can be just as rewarding, and sometimes extremely similar, as a career in academia.

Authors: Shawn Taylor, Jessica Burnett This guide accompanies this post highlighting careers in the US Government. The US federal jobs site, USAJobs, is notoriously difficult to use. This guide aims to clarify much of the process and is geared towards biologists, ecologists, and other natural resources practitioners interested in working for the federal government. Especially in the agencies listed below.

Adjust expectations, be flexible, support your groups Research will be different from normal for a while and even in the best cases it will also be slower. The shift to working remotely will limit the kinds of work we can do and everyone doing research is experiencing a dramatic disturbance to their lives. This means the people in our labs will need flexibility and support.

Zoom works great: I’ve seen up to ~50 folks attending the talk remotely and slides with video. Everything connection wise worked well except for a single committee member with some minor freezing during the private defense. Have backup options: Give yourself time and backups in case things go wrong. Set up the connection early (15+ minutes) and ask the committee to show up early to check everything is working.