New paper from the lab: how do we make probabilistic species interaction networks more useful and robust? @francisbanville.bsky.social has some thoughts, and went through the literature to map mathematical definitions to ecological concepts. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... 🧪

🎉 We have reason to celebrate! Our own Dr. @chrisbrimacombe.bsky.social, Postdoctoral Fellow here at the CEM, has received an NSERC grant to further support his research on ecological networks like food webs 🕸️ Read alllllll about it in our latest blog post: www.ecosystemscience.ca/news/celebra...

Which publication a food web was sourced from was a better predictor of its structure than the ecosystem type (eg, aquatic 🐟 vs terrestrial 🪲) 🫠 Researchers’ decisions (and our forgetfulness about their importance) can have long-lasting downstream effects 😬 🧪🌏

this blew my mind: food webs constructed from open-source datasets are driven, in part, by their original publication—in other words, published food webs reflect not just the ecological community but also hidden researcher decisions. doi.org/10.1002/ecy....

New open-access paper out: Food web structures are shaped more by the researchers who build them than by biological or environmental forces we could detect. Read it here: esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

🧪 Very cool results on food webs by lab members: [1] Banville et al.: what does it mean to use probabilities to represent interactions? [2] @gabdans.bsky.social et al.: local reconstruction of regional food webs [1] ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v... [2] royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

“We were, like, Holy shit, there are two different people independently faking data on the same paper.” Excellent reporting from the New Yorker! 🧪 www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

The strain on scientific publishing 📄: We've got issues. Scientists overwhelmed, editors overworked, constant special issue invites, mass article retractions, journal delistings… JUST WHAT IS GOING ON!? See: arxiv.org/abs/2309.15884 A 🧵1/n #AcademicChatter #PublishOrPerish #PhDAdvice #PhDChat