If all goes according to plan, in a few hours, a crew of astronauts will begin a journey that will take them on a loop around the moon. Here's a video that NASA put together to help people visualize the journey through space, first orbiting the earth before looping around the moon and flying home 🔭

This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.

We're at the Vector-Borne Diseases conference today here in Liverpool. Let us know if you are too! #VBD26

Postdoc in Macroevolution - Deadline April 12th - Join a team of Stuttgart botanists & myself to test drivers of Angiosperm diversification! Fully open process Submit cover letter, CV, 3 referees & publication list in a single PDF to [email protected] + 3 key papers (if possible) as PDF

Lots of great talks so far at the UK VBD conference in Liverpool, but most interesting new fact for me so far came from UK APHA's Ben Jones: There are parasitic wasps for Ixodes ticks that were trialled for biocontrol in the late 1990s! Wikimedia commons pic of Ixodiphagus hookeri.

The Honeygar Farm peatland has been devastated by drainage, farming, and excess nutrients. Proud to work with them - via Casey Bryce and her team - on using its restoration as an opportunity to learn and teach. @cabot-institute.bsky.social @bristoluni.bsky.social www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The long-delayed Deer Strategy for England has some good provisions around streamlined licensing & support for venison markets. But it’s unclear if govt will set culling targets, & zero mention of reintroducing lynx and wolves. Ministers need to buck up their ideas… www.gov.uk/government/p...

I am hiring a research assistant (vampire bats), a Panama fieldwork coordinator (vampire bats), and also considering postdoc apps (social behavior, any species): socialbat.org/2026/02/19/h...

New paper out! We developed a new approach to West Nile virus forecasting that is the first nationwide attempt to beat a benchmark standard (by 22%!). The key advancement was aggregating county data to regions which boosted signals that were obscured by small case counts. doi.org/10.1029/2025...

This is a devastating blow to Canadian dipterology, entomology, ecology, and beyond. Please share. #diptera @dipterists.bsky.social @teamdiptera.bsky.social @canentomologist.bsky.social @entsocamerica.bsky.social @entsocontario.bsky.social @entsocbc.bsky.social @royentsoc.bsky.social

A super handy database to help support academic society journals and other ethical publishing. academic.oup.com/jeb/article/...

we look forward seeing you on March 10 for Dr. Siqueira's webinar on "Dengue Alliance: How to Deliver Effective and Accessible Dengue Treatments". Register: www.zoomgov.com/webinar/regi.... @utmbhealth.bsky.social @dndi.org @sbvirologia.bsky.social @astmh.bsky.social

New gaussian process slides going well

From Chris Borkent: Fellow Dipterists/systematists/ecologists: Agri./Agri-Food Canada plans to eliminate the Diptera Unit at the Canadian National Collection of Insects. Dr. Art Borkent has prepared an open letter to support keeping the unit open. To sign, please read & follow the instructions here.

With the shuttering of the Walter Reed Biosystematics Unit last year by the US Army we are loosing a lot of expertise and future expertise in insect taxonomy and ecology.

ohvbd 1.0.0 has now been released on CRAN! This package should help those looking for VBD data by interfacing with vbdhub.org for searching, and the VectorByte trait and population dynamics databases for data download (alongside much more). vbdhub.org/blog/ohvbd-c... #rstats #vectorbyte #vbd

Disturbingly detailed analysis of my first rewatch incoming

My miniature tree identification pins are finally back in stock and the 2nd edition is better than ever! Please share them around so people can see 💚 canopyrobin.etsy.com/listing/4386...

Considering the challenge in suggesting we eat more plants, proposing insect products seems ridiculous. But it's received $1B to try to scale & now ~80B insects are farmed. It can actually emit as much as some beef & has major risks. My first in the Drawdown Explorer: drawdown.org/explorer/dep...

With WaPo locked into a death spiral, CBS effectively an arm of state news, and public media facing massive budget cuts, it's more important than ever to follow and support independent media.

Hello Insectphile Friends! I’m giving a casual presentation to a “ladies lunch” group next week about insects. I can talk for days about insects, both scientifically & emotionally, but that’s just me. Tell me & help me, what should I include about why YOU love insects? Hugs & Bugs! 💚🪲 🌿

dplyr 1.2.0 is out now and we are SO excited! - `filter_out()` for dropping rows - `recode_values()`, `replace_values()`, and `replace_when()` that join `case_when()` as a complete family of recoding/replacing tools These are huge quality of life wins for #rstats! tidyverse.org/blog/2026/02...

Most people are worried about climate change - but most don't hear or talk about regularly. That's why I started my free newsletter Talking Climate. Every week I share good news, not so good news, and what people can do. If you aren't a reader yet, see below. I have 6 different ways to subscribe!

Texas A&M says PLATO may be gender or race ideology I mean, they are so close to getting the criticisms of the western canon 😹 dailynous.com/2026/01/06/t...

Stoked to be part of this awesome group and study "Priority climate and health modelling needs" just out in @thelancetplanet.bsky.social. Thanks to @wellcometrust.bsky.social for hosting the meeting where these ideas were spawned.

An #rstats question for package developers: If my package maintains a cache to minimise data downloads, is it sensible/preferred to put an automatic cache cleaner (delete anything older than x days) in .onLoad, or to just mostly leave cache maintenance to the user (with appropriate helpers)?

Two years ago we got together in a beautiful mountain to learn and develop #rstats packages for ecology After {labeleR} (ecologyr.github.io/labeleR/) and {BlueCarbon} (ecologyr.github.io/BlueCarbon/), {mappestRisk} is now officially out! See thread by lead author @dario-ssm.bsky.social 👇

Do you do moth trapping in the UK? We'd love your help! 💡 At @ukceh.bsky.social we're training & testing AI to detect multiple moths in a single image. Send us top-down photos of multiple moths on egg trays to support this work. More info & form: forms.gle/e3HzBPEd7RVV... #mothsmatter #TeamMoth

@franwin.co.uk drove a massive rework of rTPC this year, making package maintenance much easier. rTPC now supports 49 different model formulations, vignettes are updated, & you can parallelise model fitting using new purrr & mirai, which is DOPE. #rstats 🧪 padpadpadpad.github.io/rTPC/article...

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA 10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

Sometimes you get a nice shot in dreadful light. Unfortunately the water was reflecting the sun right back at me as this great blue heron picked up a baby American alligator. #birds

You still have 5 days to apply for this awesome postdoc opportunity in the Environmental Data Science Innovation & Impact Lab at the University of Colorado-Boulder! This could be your backyard!

Two years post-doc position on viral phylodynamics available at CERP. cerp-epi.com/fr/careers/

Introducing my new #rstats package {kitchensink} Not sure what the right model to fit is? Should you allow random intercepts, slopes, both? What do Bayesian methods say? Just call {kitchensink::throw} to fit every possible model and see how your results differ!

Thanks to everybody who chimed in! I arrived at the conclusion that (1) there's a lot of interesting stuff about interactions and (2) the figure I was looking for does not exist. So, I made it myself! Here's a simple illustration of how to control for confounding in interactions:>

New paper out! A common computational approach to predict organismal fitness and distributions in the field could vastly overpredict the potential range of thermal suitability for malaria transmission relative to performance characterized at constant temperatures: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"Mean daily temperatures predict the thermal limits of malaria transmission better than hourly rate summation" new paper now out in NatComm, led by @martashocket.bsky.social doi.org/10.1038/s414...

I received a heartbreaking email today: A paper in a special issue I’m editing is being retracted because one of its authors is afraid of losing their job and their legal status in the U.S. if they publish a scientific study on evolution. Yes, on evolution, nature's engine of diversity.

Don't miss this week's MIDAS Webinar Series featuring Dr. Jacob Barhak. Date: Friday, March 28 - 1:00 - 2:00p EDT. Topic: Lessons Learned from Modeling COVID-19: Steps to Take at the Start of the Next Pandemic Register in Advance: pitt.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

If you hate statistics like I do, then you'll love my free lectures. Putting science before statistics, 20 lectures from basics of inference & causal modeling to multilevel models & dynamic state space models. It's all free, made with love and sympathy. 🧪 #stats www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

This is a great resource! I just watched the first video and it inspired so many ideas for the quantitative ecology course I’m designing for the fall semester.

At this point, it is obvious that it is not safe for scholars to travel the US. There are no easy solutions for conferences scheduled in the US this year but it should be cleary to everyone involved that they cannot just go ahead as planned.

1/35 New paper out! @jamesTstroud and I dive into why long-term studies are crucial for understanding evolution. They reveal processes impossible to detect in short timescales and capture rare events that transform our understanding of evolutionary dynamics. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

“The Trump administration has canceled funding for an ongoing 30-year, nationwide study tracking patients with prediabetes and diabetes, researchers said, at a time when top officials have emphasized their determination to curb the incidence of such chronic conditions.”

This was a fun review to work on with James deMayo. We highlight genome-enabled studies from the last ~20 years that provide lab and field perspectives on (often rapid) thermal adaptation. Thanks to JEB for fantastic editorial support!

Hi there, my student is making a survey about the use of R packages in Ecology, could you please spend two mins on filling it 🥹 Very appreciated! And if you could spread it further (RT), that would be just awesome. ❤️ docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

An album of over 200 pressed seaweeds collected by an anonymous Victorian collector. A transcribed poem is pasted as title page, it begins: "Oh call us not weeds, we are flowers of the sea." I saw this at UW-Madison Special Collections 🌊📚 CA 19285 #seaweed #herbarium #naturalhistory

** Upcoming quantitative conference: ** 📈 Environmental and Ecological Statistics Conference 📈 1-3 July, Lancaster, UK. Contributed abstract submission closes 1st April.

Interested in ecological/environmental #stats? Join us at the EnvEcoStats conference at Lancaster Uni 1-3 July 2025 envecostats.wordpress.com 14 days left to submit an abstract - come on ecologists! @bes-quantitative.bsky.social @besmacro.bsky.social @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social #RStats

And some fun pictures from the field in Surat, India.