{.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-1393 loading=“lazy” decoding=“async” attachment-id=“1393” permalink=“https://jabberwocky.weecology.org/2014/02/13/ecodata-retriever-quickly-download-and-cleanup-ecological-data-so-you-can-get-back-to-doing-science/retriever_logo_wtext/” orig-file=“https://i0.wp.com/jabberwocky.weecology.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/retriever_logo_wtext.png?fit=515%2C234&ssl=1” orig-size=“515,234” comments-opened=“1”
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.
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,
{.alignnone .wp-image-1480 .size-medium loading=“lazy” decoding=“async” attachment-id=“1480” permalink=“https://jabberwocky.weecology.org/2014/09/16/weecology-is-moving-to-the-university-of-florida/uf/” orig-file=“https://i0.wp.com/jabberwocky.weecology.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/uf.jpg?fit=1056%2C1370&ssl=1” orig-size=“1056,1370” comments-opened=“1” image-meta=“{"aperture":"2.4","credit":"","camera":"iPhone
As announced by Noam Ross on Twitter (and confirmed by the Editor in Chief of Ecology Letters), Ecology Letters will now allow the submission of manuscripts that have been posted as preprints. Details will be published in an editorial in Ecology Letters. I want to say a heartfelt thanks to Marcel Holyoak and the entire Ecology Letters editorial board for listening to the ecological community and modifying their policies.
We macroecologists are scattered across the globe, often with little in person access to other macroecologists. Often we’re lucky if there’s another person at our institution that has even heard the word macroecology. Sadly, we don’t have a lot of venues for bringing large groups of macroecologists together. Many of the ones that do occur tend to be local in attendance or focused on one area of macroecology. But plans are afoot, my friends!
There is a lot of discussion on the internet about highly skewed speaker lists at symposia and conferences. For the past year, I’ve been co-organizing a small conference (~110 people) with Michael Angilletta where we’ve been practicing some of the approaches I developed and blogged about earlier for organizing a seminar series. However, in ecology we know that what works at small scales may not apply to larger scales.
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.
Preprints are rapidly becoming popular in biology as a way to speed up the process of science, get feedback on manuscripts prior to publication, and establish precedence (Desjardins-Proulx et al. 2013). Since biologists are still learning about preprints I regularly get asked which of the available preprint servers to use. Here’s the long-form version of my response. The good news is that you can’t go wrong right now.
As I’ve argued here, and in PLOS Biology, preprints are important. They accelerate the scientific dialog, improve the quality of published research, and provide both a fair mechanism for establishing precedence and an opportunity for early-career researchers to quickly demonstrate the importance of their research.
