Ethan White and Morgan Ernest's blog for discussing issues and ideas related to ecology and academia.

Ethan White

We have a postdoc position available for someone interested in the general areas of macroecology, quantitative ecology, and ecoinformatics. Here’s the short ad with links to the full job description:  If you’re interested in the position and are planning to be at ESA please leave a comment or drop me an email (ethan.white@usu.edu) and we can try to set up a time to talk while we’re in Pittsburgh.

Postdoctoral position in macroecology, quantitative ecology, and ecoinformatics

Morgan Ernest

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.

PhD Student Opening: Small Mammal Community Dynamics

I am incredibly excited to announce that I am the recipient of one of the Moore Foundation’s Investigators in Data-Driven Discovery awards. To quote Chris Mentzel, the Program Director of the Data-Driven Discovery Initiative:  I feel truly honored to have been selected. All the finalists that I met at the Moore Foundation in July were amazing as were all of the semi-finalists that I knew. I did not envy the folks making the final decisions.

Wow! I’m a Moore Investigator in Data-Driven Discovery!

It’s that time of year again where we let people know which Weecologists are doing what and where at the annual Ecological Society of America meeting! We have an action packed schedule this year.

Weecology at #ESA2013

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.

Navigating ESA

Transient Theorist is planning on doing something with his Spring Break that most of us don’t do often enough – take a week to think. In the rush to do all of the things that

 have

to be done, we often lose track of doing the things that are really important to our core mission – advancing scientific knowledge as quickly as possible.

Spring Break = Think Week for academic scientists

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.

We’re hiring a computer vision developer!

As part of the Carnival that Prof-like Substance is organizing on Pre-tenure advice, I thought I’d throw in a piece of advice that anyone who asks me this question gets from me. Here it is:  Create a calendar and block out time for you. Sounds simple, and honestly a little stupid, but it’s the best advice I can give. Why? When you start your job, or a semester, your calendar is empty.

Pre-tenure Advice: Blocking out time for your research

This is a guest post by Elita Baldridge (@elitabaldridge), a graduate student in Ethan White’s lab in the Ecology Center at Utah State University.

As a budding macroecologist, I have thought a lot about what skills I need to acquire during my Ph.D. This is my model of the four basic attributes for a macroecologist, although I think it is more generally applicable to many ecologists as well:

 Data

Four basic skill areas for a macroecologist [Guest post]

Advertisements for three exciting postdoctoral positions came out in the last week. Interface between ecology, evolution and mathematics   The first is with Hélène Morlon’s group in Paris. Hélène and I were postdocs in Jessica Green’s lab at the same time. She is both very smart and extremely nice, oh, and did I mention, her lab is in PARIS. Here’s the ad. If it’s a good fit then you couldn’t go wrong with this postdoc.

Postdocs Galore [Jobs]

If you follow Ethan (@ethanwhite) or I (@skmorgane) on twitter, you are probably aware that we are on sabbatical right now out at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (go, tarheels!) along with our pre-school aged daughter. Anyway a tweet of mine recently elicited a post request:

The “2+n Body” Problem: Sabbatical planning with kids

Jeremy Fox over at the Oikos Blog has written an excellent piece explaining why fundamental, basic science, research is worth investing in, even when time and resources are limited. His central points include: Fundamental research is where a lot of our methodological advances come from. Fundamental research provides generally-applicable insights. Current applied research often relies on past fundamental research.

On the value of fundamental scientific research

A couple of months ago Micah J. Marty and I had a twitter conversation and subsequent email exchange about how citations worked with preprints. I asked Micah if I could share our email discussion since I thought it would be useful to others and he kindly said yes. What follows are Michah’s questions followed by my responses. At the level of the journal nothing happens.

Thoughts on preprints and citations

When last we left our intrepid scientists, they were starting to ponder the changes that might result from the new pre-proposal process. In general, we really like the new system because it helps reviewers focus on the value of big picture thinking and potentially reduces the overall workload of both grant writing and grant reviewing.

The NSF Preproposal Process: Pt 2. A promising start

American Naturalist (one of the top journals in ecology and evolution) has just announced that they are rolling out a forum system to allow for online discussions about their published papers.

American Naturalist Adds Online Forum

There are a couple of upcoming meetings (or sessions of meetings) related to metabolic scaling and it’s relationship with/to ecology that I thought might be of some interest. The first is  a symposium at the 2010 Society for Experimental Biology conference in Prague on the relationship between the scaling of metabolic rate with body size in organisms and the ecology of those organisms.

Upcoming meetings on metabolic scaling and ecology

Summary   Likelihood, likelihood, likelihood (and maybe some other complicated approaches), but definitely not r^2 values from fitting regressions to binned data. A bit more nitty gritty detail   In addition to causing issues with parameter estimation, binning based methods are also inappropriate when trying to determine which distribution provides the best fit to empirical data.

Frequency distributions for ecologists IV: comparing model performance

Morgan &amp; Ethan

We’ve recently been following a couple of blogs by graduate students studying ecology and have been enjoying them enough that we thought we’d point folks in their direction. Transient Theorist is a first year PhD student interested in quantitative and interdisciplinary approaches to ecology. How could we not love his blog. Particularly good recent posts include Ups and Downs and Intimidating questions.

Journal Article 2.0

As I announced on Twitter about a week ago, I am now making all of my grant proposals open access. To start with I’m doing this for all of my sole-PI proposals, because I don’t have to convince my collaborators to participate in this rather aggressively open style of science. At the moment this includes three funded proposals: my NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship proposal, an associated Research Starter Grant proposal, and my NSF CAREER award.

On making my grant proposals open access

Before we start, this post refers to posts already written on this topic. To make sure no one gets lost, please follow the sequence of operations below:

 Step 1:

Do you know about the new pre-proposal process at NSF?

The NSF Pre-Proposal Process: Pt 1. Judging Preproposals

Shawn Taylor

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.

USAJobs Guide for Biologists and Ecologists

A guest post from last week on the Portal Blog about studying Kangaroo rat placentas!

Pregnancy in Kangaroo rats

I have never been a big fan of comprehensive exams. In my opinion being able to perform on a test (of whatever form) has very little to do with what it takes to be successful as a scientist and most of the exam systems that I am familiar with have serious structural problems above and beyond this basic objection.

Drug Monkey on comprehensive exams

This is a guest post by Elita Baldridge (@elitabaldridge). She is a recently finished PhD in our group who has been navigating the development of a chronic illness during graduate school and beyond.

This is the second in a series of posts about my experiences completing a PhD with a chronic illness (Part 1, see also these two earlier, posts). As I mentioned in the first post, having a chronic illness means that there can a lot of

External challenges of chronic illness (in graduate school)

As some of you may know, I’ve been working with Michael Angilletta for the past year on organizing a Gordon Research Conference. I announced the mentoring program that is affiliated with the conference last week, but here is the official info on the conference itself. Please forgive a little repetition from the mentoring program post.

Unifying Ecology Across Scales: The role of nutrients, metabolism, and physiology [Announcement]

After writing about the importance of good RSS feeds for a particular subset of the academic community it occurred to me that part of the reason that we have such hit and miss implementations of feeds by journals is that most academics don’t even know what a feed is let alone actually use a feed reader. If this is you then we still want you to be able to get regular updates from JE, so last night I setup a new feed using Feedburner.

Email subscription now available for Jabberwocky Ecology

Andrew Gelman over at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science posted a hilariously awful story about the interpretation of a non-significant result he saw at a recent talk (I particularly love the Grrrrrrr at the end).  This and related misinterpretations crop up all the time in ecology.

Definitely not the meaning of “non-significant”

Understanding and managing forests is crucial to understanding and potentially mitigating the effects of climate change, invasive species, and shifting land use on natural systems and human society. However, collecting data on individual trees in the field is expensive and time consuming, which limits the scales at which this crucial data is collected.

Data science competition: Converting remote sensing into trees

As you may have seen earlier either on Jabberwocky, EEB and Flow, or over at Oikos’ new blog, the most recent piece about how some branch of ecology is ruining ecology has caused some discussion in the blogosphere.

A Plea for Pluralism

Are you interested in stoichiometry? Energy flow through individuals, communities or ecosystems? Implications of organismal physiology? Do you like macroecology? Field experiments? Lab experiments? Theory? Are you particularly interested in integrating various combinations of the above?

Metabolic Basis of Ecology Meeting [Announcement]

Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Mentoring Program Gordon Research Conference:  Unifying Ecology across Scales ADDED BELOW: Who can apply is added under financial support (why it’s where will make more sense when you read it) Time and Place: July 19-25, 2014 at the University of New England in Biddeford, Maine Conference Description: Ecological patterns and processes […]

Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Mentoring Program


 Gordon Research Conference:  Unifying Ecology across Scales


 ADDED BELOW:

Who can apply is added under financial support (why it’s where will make more sense when you read it)** ** Time and Place: July 19-25, 2014 at the University of New England in Biddeford, Maine Conference Description: Ecological patterns and processes occur at

UPDATED: Unifying Ecology across Scales: Mentoring Program [announcement]

Doing science in academia involves a lot of rejection and negative feedback. Between grant agencies single digit funding rates, pressure to publish in a few “top” journals all of which have rejection rates of 90% or higher [1], and the growing gulf between the number of academic jobs and the number of graduate students and postdocs [2], spending even a small amount of time in academia pretty much guarantees that you’ll see a lot of rejection.

How I remember the positive in science and academia: My Why File

We had a great time at ESA this year and enjoyed getting to interact with lots of both old and new friends and colleagues. Since we’re pretty into open science here at Weecology, it’s probably not surprising that we have a lot of slides (and even scripts) from our many and varied talks and posters posted online, and we thought it might be helpful to aggregate them all in one place. Enjoy.

Open talks and posters from Weecology at #ESA2013

Today, I was watching a great episode of the History Channel show “The Universe”, which was exploring the concept of the nature of the universe. (On the off chance you are some type of physicist or astronomer who has stumbled on to this blog, you might want to skip to the next paragraph.

Evolution in the Multiverse

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.

The story behind the paper: Xiao et al. 2016

Introduction   I have been very encouraged of late to see more and more ecologists embracing the potential of the web for communication and interaction. I’ve recently blogrolled some graduate student blogs and in the last few weeks I’ve come across American Naturalist’s trial run of a forum system, Ecological Monographs’ blog, and a blog soliciting feedback on a new initiative to digitize existing biological collections.

Getting your own domain name: a recommendation, justification, and brief tutorial

Over the weekend I saw this great tweet: Personal publishing policy for the PhD: always submit to http://t.co/dE2HMGlP and only publish (as 1st author) in arXiv-friendly journals. — P Desjardins-Proulx (@phdpqc) July 14, 2012 by Philippe Desjardins-Proulx and was pleased to see yet another actively open young scientist.

Over the weekend I saw this great tweet:  by Philippe Desjardins-Proulx and was pleased to see yet another actively open young scientist. Then I saw his follow up tweet:  At first I was confused.

ESA journals do not allow papers with preprints

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.

Am I teaching well given the available research on teaching

The peer review system has recently been under increasing pressure as the number of papers submitted has been skyrocketing.

PubCreds: Paying for journal submissions with reviews… or maybe we should just use money

This is a guest post by Elita Baldridge (@elitabaldridge). She is a graduate student in our group who has been navigating the development of a chronic illness during graduate school. She is sharing her story to help spread awareness of the challenges faced by graduate students with chronic illnesses.

I am a graduate student. I have fibromyalgia.

PH.D STUDENT POSITION IN COMMUNITY ECOLOGY

The Ernest Lab at the University of Florida has an opening for a Ph.D student interested in research in the area of community ecology, forecasting, and/or temporal dynamics to start fall 2020.

Ph.D Student Opening in Weecology

There is an excellent post on open science, prestige economies, and the social web over at Marciovm’s posterous*. For those of you who aren’t insanely nerdy** GitHub is… well… let’s just call it a very impressive collaborative tool for developing and sharing software***. But don’t worry, you don’t need to spend your days tied to a computer or have any interest in writing your own software to enjoy gems like:  Thanks to Carl Boettiger

A GitHub of Science? [Things you should read]

We’ve had a bit of discussion here at JE about potential solutions to the tragedy of the reviewer commons, so I found a recent letter in

 Nature

(warning – it’s behind a pay wall) suggesting that there may not actually be a problem interesting.

No peer review crisis after all?

A few months ago Mick Watson wrote an awesome post about How to recruit a good bioinformatician. We’re in the process of hiring a scientific software engineer so I thought I’d use Mick’s post to illustrate why you should come work with us doing scientific software development and data-intensive research, and hopefully provide a concrete demonstration of the sort of things Mick suggests for appealing to talented computational folks.

We’re recruiting a good Scientific Software Engineer

Those of you who attend conferences will be familiar with the standard – walk up to someone you know, who is talking to someone you don’t, get introduced to new person – conference interaction.

Lazy reviewers and whiny AEs

I’m looking for one or more graduate students to join my group next fall. In addition to the official add (below) I’d like to add a few extra thoughts. As Morgan Ernest noted in her recent ad, we have a relatively unique setup at Weecology in that we interact actively with members of the Ernest Lab. We share space, have joint lab meetings, and generally maintain a very close intellectual relationship.

White Lab PhD openings at the University of Florida

It’s job season. It’s that time of year again when our young scientists pour over a wide variety of job ads and ask themselves that critically important question: do I apply? In some ways, this is the most critical step in the entire job application process. Yes, your job packet is important. There’s the goldilocks problem of conveying your awesome in the cover letter but worrying about sounding conceited.

The best way to not get a job: don’t apply

Counting plants and rats in the desert is fun to collect but also hard won data. Another Portal Project blog post is up!

Walking the beat

So here it is, the first of the positions we’ll be advertizing as part of our move to the University of Florida. The official ad is below, but a few comments first. The position is for a student to work with me, but for those who aren’t really familiar with our groups, it’s important to note that my group works closely with Ethan White’s lab (we provide desk space that mixes the labs together, we have a single group lab meeting,

Ernest Lab Ph.D opening at University of Florida

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

Post-docs at the University of Wyoming

Imperial College London is offering a new masters degree program in quantitative biology. It sounds like a great opportunity to get some good quantitative training via an intensive 1 year MS program. The best part of their pitch follows below. If you’d like to see the whole ad check out the flier that Dan Reuman sent me.

New Masters Program in Quantitative Biology at Imperial College London

“It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds”  Samuel Adams

Rooted in revolution

Zack Brym

Engaging in Art and Science Collaborations

 This is a guest post by Zack Brym (@ZackBrym). He is a graduate student in our group interested in the form and function of orchard trees. He has also developed an interest in scientific communication.

Getting the Most Out of Science through Art

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.

We’re looking for a new PhD student to join weecology! The new student will work on our Everglades project, developing actionable forecasting models for this actively managed ecosystem, with a focus on understanding the influence of scale on ecological forecasting.

PhD Student Position In Ecological Forecasting Of Everglades Wading Birds

Therapy for interdisciplinary biologists

UPDATE: If you’re looking for the information for 2014, checkout the DEBrief post for links. It’s that time of year again when we’re all busy working on preproposals for the National Science Foundation, and just like last year it’s more difficult than you would think to track down the official guidelines using Google.

NSF Preproposal Guidelines 2013

The weecology group is coming in force to the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America which is being held in New Orleans next week. We’ve been up to a quite diversified list of things over the past year ranging from temporal dynamics of communities to forecasting and remote sensing. We also have people involved in a number of outreach or training events this year.

Weecology at #ESA2018 [updated]

This is a guest post by Elita Baldridge (@elitabaldridge)

I am currently the remotely working member of Weecology, finishing up my PhD in the lower elevation and better air of Kansas, while the rest of my colleagues are still in Utah, due to developing a chronic illness and finally getting diagnosed with fibromyalgia.  The relocation is actually working out really well.  I’m in better shape because I’m not having to

How technology can help scientists with chronic illnesses (or Technology FTW!)

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EcoData Retriever now supports R and environmental data, and has more datasets

UPDATE: If you’re looking for publicly available grants go check out our new Open Grants website at https://www.ogrants.org/. It has way more grants and is searchable so that you can quickly find the grants most useful to you.

Recently a bunch of folks in the biological sciences have started sharing their grant proposals openly.

A list of publicly available grant proposals in the biological sciences

There is an excellent post over at EEB &amp; Flow on the empirical divide,inspired by an editorial by David Lindenmayer and Gene Likens in the most recent ESA Bulletin, titled “Losing the Culture of Ecology”. It was great to see some thoughtful and data driven consideration of the idea that we should choose to emphasize one broad area of ecology over another.

Bridging, not building, divides in ecology [Things you should read]

A group of 5th and 6th graders where asked to define either “science” or “writing” and when the answers were combined this definition of creativity was the result. In scientific education, and as we conduct scientific research, we often lose track of the fact that creativity is critical to the scientific process. This is a great reminder of its importance.

Creativity = Science + Writing

Summary   Don’t bin you’re data and fit a regression. Don’t use the CDF and fit a regression. Use maximum likelihood or other statistically grounded approaches that can typically be looked up on Wikipedia. A bit more detail   OK, so you’ve visualized your data and after playing around a bit you have an idea of what the basic functional form of the model is. Now you want to estimate the parameters.

Frequency distributions for ecologists III: Fitting model parameters

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 &amp;

A new database for mammalian community ecology and macroecology

Nathan over at Flowing Data just posted an interesting piece on the emergence of a new class of scientists whose work focuses on the manipulation, analysis and presentation of data.

Data scientists

Within the small community of ecologist bloggers much has been of the lack of blogging (and other odd pursuits like twittering) among ecologists (this is, afterall, EEB &amp; Flow’s raison d’etre), and I recently read over at academHacK that “in the future [academics] can be online or be irrelevant”. So, this semester I did what I could to get some future ecologists blogging.

Starting young: getting ecologists to blog

UPDATE: Both Ecology Letters and the British Ecological Society journals now allow preprints. Thanks to both groups for listening to the community and supporting the rapid and open exchange of scientific ideas. Dear Ecology Letters and the British Ecological Society ,  I am writing to ask that you support the scientific good by allowing the submission of papers that have been posted as preprints.

An open letter to Ecology Letters and the British Ecological Society about preprints

We are very exited to announce a major new release of the Data Retriever, our software for making it quick and easy to get clean, ready to analyze, versions of publicly available data. The Data Retriever, automates the downloading, cleaning, and installing of ecological and environmental data into your choice of databases and flat file formats.

Data Retriever 2.0: We handle the data so you can focus on the analysis

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New release of the EcoData Retriever

We are excited to announce the first release of a new Julia package that let’s you run our Data Retriever software with a native Julia interface. For those of you not familiar with Julia it is a new programming language that is similar to R and Python, has a central focus on data analysis, and is designed from the ground up to be fast. It is an emerging scientific programming and data analysis language.

A Julia Package for the Data Retriever

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.

Return to (and of?) the ecology blogosphere

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.

PHD STUDENT IN ECOLOGICAL FORECASTING OF SMALL MAMMALS

The Weecology lab group run by Morgan Ernest and Ethan White at the University of Florida is seeking a post-doctoral researcher to study changes in ecological communities through time.

Postdoctoral research position in the Temporal Dynamics of Communities

PH.D STUDENT OPENING IN COMMUNITY ECOLOGY IN THE ERNEST LAB

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PhD Student Opening, Community Ecology, Ernest Lab

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.

Trait Databases: What is the End Goal?

The newly created Early Career Ecologist Section of the Ecological Society of America is to organizing a mentoring program for the upcoming ESA meeting in Baltimore. ESA can be a big and intimidating meeting for students and postdocs. Let’s face it, many of us are socially awkward and meeting new people can be hard – especially if the people you want to meet are more senior.

[Announcement] ESA Centennial Mentoring Program Organized by Early Career Ecologist Section

Martorell, C. &amp; R.P. Freckleton. 2014. Testing the roles of competition, facilitation and stochasticity on community structure in a species-rich assemblage. Journal of Ecology doi:10.1111/1365-2745.12173  At a given location in nature, why are some species present and others absent? Why do some species thrive and have lots of individuals and others are barely eeking out an existence? What determines how many species can live together there?

Why I like this: Martorell and Freckleton (2014)

Slides and script from Ethan White’s Ignite talk on Big Data in Ecology from Sandra Chung and Jacquelyn Gill’s excellent ESA 2013 session on Sharing Makes Science Better.

Ignite Talk: Big Data in Ecology

I’m a big fan of preprints, the posting of papers in public archives prior to peer review. Preprints speed up the scientific dialogue by letting everyone see research as it happens, not 6 months to 2 years later following the sometimes extensive peer review process. They also allow more extensive pre-publication peer review because input can be solicited from the entire community of scientists, not just two or three individuals.

[Preprint] Nine simple ways to make it easier to (re)use your data

The latest installment from the Portal Project Blog on the watch for Banner-tailed Kangaroo Rats

The Spectabulous Spectabs of Portal

A while ago there was a bit of discussion around the academic blogosphere recently regarding the importance of developing a digital presence and what the best form of that presence might be. Recently as I’ve been looking around at academics’ websites as part of faculty, postdoc and graduate student searchers going on in my department/lab I’ve been reminded of the importance of having a digital presence.

Thoughts on developing a digital presence

I’m going to be participating in a Royal Society Discussion Meeting and they’ve asked us to advertise this to interested parties so I figured I’d just post about it here. The meeting is on

 Biological Diversity in a Changing World

and (other than your humble narrator) has a pretty impressive list of speakers. Here are the key bits of information (straight from the meeting’s web page).

Biological Diversity in a Changing World – Royal Society Discussion Meeting

(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.

Things we(ecology) like(s) 2

If you’re interested in big ecological datasets, natural history, and predictive cross-scale ecology (like we are) then you should check out the upcoming Gordon Research Conference (GRC) on Unifying Ecology Across Scales (July 28 – Aug 2) and the associated Gordon Research Seminar (GRS;

Gordon Research Conference &amp; Student/Postdoc Conference on Unifying Ecology Across Scales

After posting yesterday that we were ramping up the blog again, my RSS feed let me know that arguably the most impactful ecology blog of all time, Dynamic Ecology, was doing the same thing! We also heard from Terry McGlynn who has recently moved and renamed his really important blog, now a newsletter named Science For Everyone. And we heard from multiple other folks that they are in the process of spinning up new blogs/newsletters.

It really is the return of the ecology blogosphere!

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.

Regime shift still cometh?

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.

Ode to six-legged wonder

Ever wondered how fast the desert can turn green when the rains get going? There’s a Portal blog post on that (with pics)!

How fast can a desert turn green?

We have a modest sized group of current folks at ESA this week presenting on all the cool things they’ve been doing. We’re also around and always happy to try to find time to grab a coffee or just a few minutes to chat science. Our schedule for the week is: Monday   Get a double dose of rapid change in ecological communities from the Portal Project with Morgan Ernest and Erica Christensen. 02:50 PM – 03:10 PM in C120-121.

Weecology at ESA

Last week Zack Brym and I formally announced a semester long Data Carpentry course that we’ve have been building over the last year. One of the things I’m most excited about in this effort is our attempt to support collaborative lesson development for university/college coursework.

The potential for collaborative open lesson development for college coursework

[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.

GEB adds unlimited data references section to papers

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.

Sharing the Long-term Portal Project Data: 37 years of Rodent, Plant, Ant, and Weather Data

This is a guest post by Elita Baldridge.

I am working on organizing an Inclusive Ecology Section within the Ecological Society of America. This section will provide resources and support for all ecologists, regardless of race, sex, physical or mental ability or difference, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, ethnicity, socio-economic status, culture or subculture, national origin,  parental status, politics,

Starting an Inclusive Ecology section in the Ecological Society of America

My research group is hiring a Scientific Software Engineer to help develop software that facilitates science, contribute to research in data-intensive ecology, and improve scientific research and computing through training and modeling competitions. We are actively involved in data-intensive computational research, open source software development, and open approaches to science.

Scientific software engineer in data-intensive ecology group

Sam Scheiner published a piece recently on ecology’s lack of engagement with theory. Frankly, the title pretty much tells you his conclusion “The ecological literature: an idea free distribution”, but if you want to know more, either read the original piece (it’s short) or EEB &amp; Flow’s nice write up on it.  The empirical-theoretical divide is a topic I’ve been pondering for a while.

Jabberwocky Ecology

The Portal Weather Station

A Vegetation History

Portal: Then and Now

2017 Summer Plant Census

Ode to six-legged wonder

The Spectabulous Spectabs of Portal

Portal Phenocam

How fast can a desert turn green?

Pregnancy in Kangaroo rats

Weecology at ESA