A friend of mine once joked that doing ecological informatics meant working with data that was big enough that you couldn’t open it in an Excel spreadsheet.

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.

We had a great time at ESA this year and enjoyed getting to interact with lots of both old and new friends and colleagues.

Slides and script from Morgan Ernest’s Ignite talk on Why constraint based approaches to ecology from Elita Baldridge and Ethan White’s thought provoking ESA 2013 session on Constraints in Ecology. Slides are also archived on figshare. Slide 1-3: As this coral reef food web so aptly demonstrates, nature is complex.

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. Slides are also archived on figshare. 1.

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.

If you have been to a conference recently where speakers are invited, the odds are that you (or someone with you) noticed that the speaker list didn’t really reflect the demographics of the field. https://twitter.com/DanGraur/status/354770945115828224 There have been various conversations about a number of recent conferences.

We here at Weecology have just recently discovered John Bruno’s blog SeaMonster, and have been getting a great deal of enjoyment out of it. While perusing some of the posts, we ran across one that made Ethan and I both laugh and cringe at the same time: Are unreasonably harsh reviewers retarding the pace of […]

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.

Over at Dynamic Ecology this morning Jeremy Fox has a post giving advice on how to decide where to submit a paper.

Communicating research more broadly is not only important for outreach to the public, but with the rapidly expanding literature, we think it’ll also be important for communicating to other scientists.