Excited to see this analysis based on AVONET & AVOTREX bird trait data. Do bird radiations tend to avoid regions of trait space already occupied by other lineages? This analysis suggests the answer is yes! The "Birds The Don't Exist" actually do exist, just in related passerine clades.

Congratulations and big respect to Ariane Dellavalle for publishing the first chapter of her thesis. 🎉 A detailed analysis of bird diversity across West African land-use gradients, raising some important questions about how we interpret biodiversity trends. 🪶🌐🧪

🚨3 Lectureships in Biology 🚨 Come join us in Bristol @bristolbiosci.bsky.social! We are looking for new collegues working across a broad spectum of topics in biology, including ecology & environmental change. Get in touch if you have Qs! Apply here by 8 March: www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de...

Why is there such variation in the birds encountered as you go up or down a mountain? New paper in #ScienceAdvances examines how climate and ecological interactions drive bird distributions in mountains throughout the year: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 1/10 ⬇️

Chatbots offer a magnificent bribe - a fast, frictionless route to information that bypasses the discomfort of learning. In this op-ed, we describe this as a Faustian bargain, in which we trade away what it means to be human & universities trade away their value www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/comm...

🚨 For those with access to collections of bird specimens: we are looking for collaborators who can quickly measure bulbuls/greenbuls (Pycnonotidae) for a project on intraspecific trait variation. We need 100s specimens measured from common species in return for co-authorship. Anyone up for it? 🧪🌐🪶

📣 Grad student wanted PhD position in avian evolution, with emphasis on phylogenetics, macroevolution, Neotropical radiations, flight and dispersal. Based at the University of New Orleans (soon to be LSU New Orleans). Start: September 2026. Contact me if interested. claramuntlab.org

If you thought regular bird listing was for nerds, wait til you get a load of phylolisting. @snacktavish.bsky.social

A data collection mission that began in 2012 is finally released as AVONICHE. Designed as a companion to AVONET bird trait database and updated to Avilist taxonomy, it’s an Open Access dataset providing updated diets and a detailed breakdown of foraging behaviours used by all bird species. 🪶🌐

Seed dispersal by 🦜🦇 underpins rainforest recovery. We want to understand more about its timing + traits driving recovery through obs, exp + genomic data. Ready to join the @reassemblynet.bsky.social team working in Ecuadorian Chocó? Pls apply to our 4-yr PhD position @sgn.one: tinyurl.com/2pkryc99

Huge News from the Western Amazon: it's the year 2025 and we are still describing entirely new, strikingly-distinctive large-bodied bird species! Behold Tinamus resonans sp. nov. the Slaty-masked Tinamou mapress.com/zt/article/v... #Ornithology @tetzoo.bsky.social 🪶

Lovely link-up between @josephtobias.bsky.social's #Avonet and the #PredictsProject, with @nhm.org's @patrickawalkden.bsky.social among the authors

Online now: Forecasting extinction risk for future-proof conservation decisions. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Should conservation focus on threatened species? Or should we be proactive and protect species before they become threatened? This paper explores how to get the balance right.

Land-use change undermines the stability of avian functional diversity - new #OA @nature.com paper with @patrickawalkden.bsky.social @josephtobias.bsky.social, combining #PredictsProject with #Avonet doi.org/10.1038/s415...

This was an amazing workshop bringing together a wide range of perspectives. Thanks to the funders and everyone involved. Looking forward to next steps! 🌿🪶🌐

@mschleuning.bsky.social kicks off our workshop linking plant and animal traits to ecosystem-level processes, in Frankfurt today. 🪶🍁🌐

PhD up for grabs in applied ecology focusing on species traits and ecological processes, supervised by @jmbecologist.bsky.social @orlyrazgour.bsky.social, Ben Woodcock, and me. Worth a look!

Wutt!? New ecosystem service just dropped. Birds are fungi dispersers! And, even better, tapaculos are truffle dispersers! My week is complete.

One of the highlights of a short trip to Yunnan last week – the Spot-breasted Parrotbill: an icon for functional morphologists, an insectivore with the 'wrong' beak (stubby like a seed-eater) which nonetheless makes ecophysical sense because it uses bite-force to snip through grass/bamboo stems

Check out our new paper in @royalsociety.org testing mechanisms behind elevational range restriction in tropical montane songbirds! ⛰️🦜🌳 Backstory: when i first visited Central America in the early 2010's i was struck with elevational ranges of birds.. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Absolute scenes in Yunnan when this happened today

Our new @nature.com shows that energy flows mediated by mammals and birds across sub-Saharan Africa have declined by >30% unevenly across functional groups, with major consequences ecosystem functions shorturl.at/AD0Yb

New study from Ty Loft’s PhD thesis. We used an energetic approach to quantify, acr sub-Saharan Africa, how mammal- and bird-mediated ecosystem functions have changed. We found that overall trophic energy flows have decreased by more than one-third, but this change varies across biomes and land uses

A long and busy week ended on a high yesterday. So proud of Dr @jyang19.bsky.social for sailing through her PhD viva, the final step of a long journey in my lab from a Silwood masters degree to a doctorate. 💪 Big thanks to Profs Cris Banks-Leite and Gavin Thomas for examining.

A heads-up for anyone interested in research quality, repeatability & transparency: I'm leading a 2-hour session at 10 am UK-time tomorrow, in conjunction with others. Hopefully this can form the basis of a guidelines paper, so we're hoping you can join online to guide us in the right direction. 🌐🌎

Looking forward to this! I will be helping @josephtobias.bsky.social lead discussions on what preregistration could look like for macroecology - join us on Wednesday 📝🌍

Confused writing is usually a symptom of confused thinking. As we struggle to clarify writing, we clarify our thoughts. AI writing aids rob us of that struggle, leaving clean-looking text and thoughts still confused for lack of inspection. Writing is not just a product; it is a diagnostic tool.

We have a new paper developing methods for looking at bird-fire macroecology. What’s most fascinating to me is that the magnitude *and* direction of fire effects can vary enormously across a species range. Stationarity is dead!! Long live non-stationarity!! doi.org/10.1002/fee....

Colonial superorganisms breaking basic biological rules again. 🐜🧪

🚨New paper led by @adrianaalzate.bsky.social showing that in most plant and animal groups the age of a species predicts its geographical range size, although the relationship is strongly mediated by dispersal ability and occurrence on islands 🧪🌐🪶 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Pick an idiom: "more than meets the eye", "beauty more than skin [feather] deep" etc. In work led by Rosalyn Price-Waldman, we describe a hidden (and ignored!) black or white layer found below the visible surface of bird feathers which helps make bird colours so striking! 🧪 🪶 #colsci

🥳 New paper out in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society! Manakin’s moving melody: the interplay between courtship dance display and vocalization as a predictor of hybridization in manakins (Aves: Pipridae) academic.oup.com/biolinnean/a... #ornithology

Well done, @kerrys189.bsky.social, and a much deserved ‘no corrections’. A really excellent thesis and it was a pleasure being involved. Best of luck with next steps!

We should come to terms with the fact that forest, shrubland, grassland, and wetland ecosystems cannot offset fossil fuel CO₂ emissions. But we should still protect and restore them for biodiversity and other ecosystem benefits.

🫠. A tree came out today with 9,072 bird species, all placements based on actual DNA. It looks like they used eBird 2022 taxonomy; 10,096 were recognized back then. That means these folks just dropped (molecularly well informed) knowledge on 83% of the world's birds. www.cell.com/current-biol...

Beautiful thread by my brilliant colleague, Silu Wang, outlining the special issue she has just released (with Anne Yoder). She highlights some of the wider themes inspiring our article (in same issue) about rethinking the boundaries and targets of biodiversity conservation.

🕊️🙏

🚨 The New Age of global bird phylogenies continues! Hot on the heels of the fantastic updated tree created by @eliotmiller.bsky.social and others, we use a different approach to generate a near-comprehensive timetree of >9000 bird species. 1/3 www.cell.com/current-biol... 🧪🌐🪶

I’m recruiting graduate students to join my lab at the University of New Orleans starting in January or September 2026! If you're at #Evol2025 and curious about my research, come to my talk on Saturday at 11:30 AM in Macroevolution & Diversification II. Contact me if interested. claramuntlab.org

Fantastic paper from an amazing team: Genomics of Neotropical biodiversity indicators: Two butterfly radiations with rampant chromosomal rearrangements and hybridization www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Forests can’t regrow if seeds can’t move. New research shows 60% of tropical regrowth zones have lost the animals that once carried seeds there. No dispersers, no recovery. Rewilding isn’t optional: it’s the missing link in climate and restoration plans. 🌱🐦‍⬛ 🦜 🧪 #SciComm

In our new perspective in PNAS we call for a move away from conservation focused on saving individual species to focusing on ecological processes, which underpin ecosystem resilience and the capacity to adapt to environmental change. Led by @josephtobias.bsky.social 🌍🌐🧪 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

What life history and behavioral traits predict female bird song at a global scale? Our collaborative paper let by Karan Odom and out today in @natcomms.nature.com helps to answer that question @josephtobias.bsky.social @sheardcat.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This lil' beauty is tricky to find, at least this time of year: Bumblebee Hummingbird in Oaxaca this morning.

🚨 Behold a second impressive paper from @kerrys189.bsky.social to celebrate her just-finished PhD. A rising 🌟! This study examines AVONET data to show how even threat abatement leaves large areas of avian functional diversity at risk, and in need of targeted management. 🧪🌐🪶

Conservation of beauty 😍 🐠 Essentially a prioritisation exercise targeting the conservation of sexual selection and warning signals, but it makes sense from the perspective of reef ecotourism

Delighted to have made a small contribution to this gigantic effort driven by Murray Thompson @cefasgovuk.bsky.social leveraging ~1M stomach samples for >200 predator & >2000 prey species to derive fish feeding guilds for the N Atlantic & Arctic 🌐🧪https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/17/2447/2025/

Missed this one. A 'lil eBird data can boost those sample sizes! Raises a few questions about whether eBird checklists reflect species abundance in any meaningful way. I can think of a few sources of bias that make them less suitable for testing AOR. Still an interesting result!

🚨Some required reading for anyone dabbling in trait-based ecology & ecosystem science.

🦏🦣🦌 LARGE paper alert!!! We tracked 60 million years of large herbivore evolution—over 3,000 fossil species—to uncover how ecosystems have changed and reorganized through time. What we found might help us understand the next big tipping point 🧵👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...