Had a great interaction with Sahana Ghosh from Nature India about our black pea research. Here's her excellent story on our paper: www.nature.com/articles/d44... @nature.com @ornithoale.bsky.social @stanforddoerr.bsky.social

the worst part of every manuscript for an ornithologist, yes, worse than tough reviewers worse even than outright rejection when they typeset the paper and all the species names are lower case

Happy to share our research was featured in Stanford reports. @stanforddoerr.bsky.social @ornithoale.bsky.social news.stanford.edu/stories/2025...

Happy to share our research on traditional farming landscapes in northwest Himalaya is out in Science Advances! Thanks to my advisor Tulja & all the wonderful collaborators- Ale @ornithoale.bsky.social, Katie @kasolari.bsky.social, Akshata, Kullu, Rinchen, Lamaji. 1/7 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Check out our newest study published in Science Advances last Friday ❤️

See you at #ESA2025 next week!Find me at the ESA SEEDS events, Wed, 10:30 AM Panel on Careers at a Research Station with OBFS friends; and Thu, 5 PM Poster LB 13-177 on Wildfire resilience initiatives at Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve ('Ootchamin 'Ooyakma)!

The Xue lab at UC Irvine is looking for a staff scientist to support our work investigating how microbes interact and evolve in the gut microbiome! Open to a wide range of previous experience levels, see ad for more. recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF09601

Of course the main purpose of a yard is to attract bugs, and the best way to attract bugs is with native plants, so that’s mostly what we do. Here’s a sampling—descriptions in alt text. 🐝🦋🐛🐜🪰🪲🐞 (Remaining grass lets us play games and lets doggies chase balls, but is slowly going to clover)

Have you ever cited or come across a mention of the 'human shield hypothesis' and wondered: what is the evidence for this hypothesis, and what is the quality of that evidence? Wonder no more! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

It was a pleasure to work with my amazing interdisciplinary team of coauthors: @ornithoale.bsky.social, Maya Xu, @flamingmuffinz.bsky.social, Mei Li Palmeri, Meggie Callahan, Nicole Ardoin, and Gretchen Daily

This underscores the importance of urban community gardens - not only do they provide habitat for biodiversity and opportunities to access nature, but also many other benefits: social connections, education, and food sovereignty. Let’s work to protect and advocate for urban community gardens!

Regardless, these results are exciting - they suggest that community gardens have the potential to provide access to nature across an income gradient! People in both high and low income neighborhoods in San Francisco can have positive interactions with birds in gardens.

Why might this be? It could be because birds are highly mobile organisms, the nature of San Francisco (compact, lots of greenspace, heterogenous), regional effects (luxury effect is stronger in tropical and arid environments), or community gardens themselves.

For example, we expected lower income neighborhoods to have less canopy cover and therefore less avian species richness, but instead found all three of these variables were unrelated!

Instead, we found that avian species richness and abundance were predicted by local and landscape-scale environmental factors, very few of which were correlated with income.

Surprisingly, given past studies on the luxury effect that show higher biodiversity in higher income neighborhoods, we found no relationships between any of these metrics and garden income!

For each garden, we compared three bird metrics with garden income: species richness, abundance, and a species access metric, a metric for our 10 focal species that was higher where there were more individuals from species people noticed and cared about.

We dug into why attitudes differed. While less-popular species had mostly aesthetic disservices, popular species had both ecological and aesthetic services. This suggests that providing education about species’ ecological roles could be an important conservation tool!

However, we also wanted to understand how much gardeners noticed each species. When we weighted sentiment scores by recognition, the scores of less-charismatic species like the Black Phoebe dropped.

Using these results, we were able to assign each species a “sentiment score” and rank them in terms of positive sentiment. Most species had more positive than negative words associated with them, while corvids were the exception.

For each species, we performed a sentiment analysis, classifying words into positive, negative and neutral. While species like the Anna’s Hummingbird had primarily positive associations, others like the American Crow, were more controversial.

We also examined gardener attitudes towards 10 common garden species, chosen to capture a range of traits, through a word association task.

Through our surveys, we learned that gardeners felt positively about birds overall, showing high agreement with a number of positive statements about birds in the garden!

We worked in 20 community gardens across an income gradient in San Francisco, CA, surveying gardeners, performing avian point counts, and survey vegetation.

We studied a specific type of access to nature, human/bird interactions, through an interdisciplinary lens. We wanted to understand how people felt about birds overall as well as specific species, and where people came into contact with those species as well as diverse bird communities.

This means we miss some crucial components: understanding how specific components of nature (like wildlife!) contribute to access, and understanding whether people actually benefit from and enjoy coming into contact with that nature.

Access to nature provides myriad benefits to people, but those benefits are not equitably distributed. In addition, most studies of access to nature focus on physical access to greenspace.

Delayed long post in the interest of sci-comm! Our new paper on human/bird interactions in community gardens just came out! Super proud of this work. Article: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Press release: naturalcapitalproject.stanford.edu/news/five-in... Thread below!

Super excited about this paper, it was such a pleasure to collaborate on it with @ornithoale.bsky.social! Longer post coming soon but check it out at www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Katie, come visit me in Berkeley and we’ll go birdwatching and get you new lifers! I think it’s a win that we have you as a bird data collector now 🤩🤓🥳… soon after we’ll coauthor 🤩

New paper alert 🚨 Published today in Landscape and Urban Planning and led by Dr. Kelley Langhans

Our pub is out on natural capital accounting in Colombia! Among many contributions, I made Fig 3. The ecosystems we studied are worth >$100M & that value would increase by 12% if a new aqueduct is built. media: lnkd.in/gqkCg4zK paper: rdcu.be/eiCgf @lisa-mandle.bsky.social @ornithoale.bsky.social

New paper alert 🚨

Sinú Basin ecosystems can provide sediment retention benefits for water utilities and energy production in Colombia, equivalent to 1.7 percent of the local gross domestic product @ornithoale.bsky.social @jagoldstein.bsky.social @lisa-mandle.bsky.social Read more at 👇 www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Excited to host Dr. Laura Melissa Guzman for this Friday’s seminar! Tune in to learn more about using occupancy models to understand trends in bee biodiversity 🐝🌷📊💻

🏆Know anyone who has made an outstanding impact in ecology? Nominate them for our BES Awards 2025!   Categories cover the breadth of experiences and career stages, so let us know which ecologists inspire you!    Make your nominations by 7 April 👉

McKalee Steen, DSE team member and PhD candidate in @natureatcal.bsky.social uses #DataScience to analyze Indigenous land reclamation across the US, & the social and ecological impacts of those acquisitions. We're honored to have McKalee on our team! cdss.berkeley.edu/news/mapping... #LandBack

The Mother Tree Project communications team is opening a summer Work-Learn position for a current UBC student! Get hands-on experience with communications, digital content creation, managing daily inquiries from global audiences and so much more! Submit an application to join our amazing team!

Check out our new study led by Alex Boren, an undergrad at UC Berkeley!

We're hiring a new Assistant Teaching Professor for Penn State's online geospatial education programs: psu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/PSU_Ac...

It's clear that society must pursue transformative policies to both fight climate change and halt the loss of biodiversity. Our research looks to identify 'win-win' strategies that help decision makers address both these crises jointly.

The neighbors in Berkeley

Published online early today! Find out how our research team has been using collective governance and citation politics to more effectively share power and recognize Latin American contributions to ornithology. doi.org/10.1093/orni... PM me if you want a copy without the paywall.

Herpetology friends. This is a trivia question. In the Colombian Pacific, there’s a music 🎶 festival called “San Pacho” and people dress like the fauna in and around Chocó. What species is this frog? 🐸

The shapefiles are gone! 🎉 The {spData} package has officially dropped all datasets in the shapefile format, moving toward modern and efficient geospatial data standards. 🚀🌍 Upgrade your workflows with {spData}: https://buff.ly/4htZ5D3 #rspatial #rstats #GIS #Geocompx

Hey, scientists: . 🌟 . * . 🌙 🛸 * 🛰️ . ✨ * YOU ARE NOT ALONE . * . 🌏 🪐 * 🌞 👽 . * . ✨ . Pass it on.

Here’s the view from the highest chairlift in North America, located in Breckenridge, Colorado. #snowboarding #mountains #ski #winter

Harsher dry seasons due to climate change is linked to declining bird survival in the Amazon "...challenging the notion that pristine rainforests can fully protect their #biodiversity under increasingly severe climate conditions." www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I gave an interview to the BBC at midnight while the #LAfires were raging outside and I couldn't sleep. Turned into one of the most thorough and well-researched articles on wildlife and wildfire I've had the pleasure of contributing to.

The folks obsessively posting about egg prices for the past few years have gone strangely quiet just as egg prices hit an all-time high.