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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...

🙌 Impressive study applying new methods. Looks like another step towards trait-based approaches for understanding and predicting functional changes to biodiversity and ecosystems. 🌐🧪🌿

Ecological and evolutionary consequences of changing seasonality | Science @jdtonkin.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Publication out on the effect of climate on traits of dominant and rare tree species in the world’s forests in natcomms.nature.com‬rdcu.be/enby2

Closing tomorrow! Last chance to apply for postdoc to explore the role of animals in savanna ecosystem productivity & nutrient cycling! Link to job: tinyurl.com/53dy4584 #savanna #termites #largemammals

Pollinator decline has captured global attention, but another plant-animal mutualism is quietly unraveling. Our new Nature Reviews Biodiversity article synthesizes global evidence on seed disperser decline and what it means for plant biodiversity, ecosystem recovery, and climate adaptation. 🧵

This is a must-read. Csaba Szabó, the author of Unreliable, was approached by a paper mill, and he decided to conduct a sting operation. He documented how paper mills operate. forbetterscience.com/2025/05/19/a...

really cool new paper showing species across the globe are NOT moving upslope any more than you'd expect based on a null model www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

More shots fired in the #causalInference #ecology literature! 🌍

you might think N American species are getting common at their north range limit and rare at their south range limit as temps get warmer but you would be wrong new paper in GEB w/ @eliotmiller.bsky.social & Matt Strimas-Mackey, eBird Status & Trends ftw onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Happy to share my new article on how morphological diversification proceeds during evolutionary radiations: "The diffused evolutionary dynamics of morphological novelty" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 🧵 1/12

Any chubby parrot that moos like this is worth saving. A glimmer of hope for 'mainland' kakapos one day. No females yet, but at least the boys are getting in the moo'd.

The new era of global bird phylogenies begins – this one built over several years by @snacktavish.bsky.social and team massively increases sample size and will be a fantastic resource for macroevolution and macroecology. 🪶 🌐 🧪

Now published!!!! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Postdoc alert! Looking for someone to join our new savanna zoogeochemistry project with @ymalhi.bsky.social and Mark Robertson. Please circulate widely! Contact me if interested. #ecosystemecology #largemammalherbivores #termites my.corehr.com/pls/ulivrecr...

Two fully-funded PhD scholarships @BangorUni in conservation social science. Deadline 5th May. If you have conservation scientists, geographers, economists, sociologists in your network do share. Details in thread below (1/3) www.bangor.ac.uk/conservation...

We are looking for two PhD researchers to work on the resilience of #biodiversity and ecosystem functions across a landscape gradient in the #Netherlands! 4-years, fully funded, great place @w-u-r.bsky.social, apply by 12.5.24. Feel free to get in touch with questions! www.wur.nl/en/vacancy/p...

Great news that the 1st Guam Kingfishers released into the wild for 40 yrs are nesting. This bird may become the poster-child of assisted colonisation (and possible future speciation) as their new home is >3500 miles from Guam – London-to-New-York kind of distance. Background in this older link:

Finally got round to cataloguing bird images from South Africa fieldtrip in January, including Drakensberg mountains, Mpumalanga grasslands and the Flock to Marion cruise. Now I'm missing the ocean. Photos & trip report here: ebird.org/tripreport/3...

Saudi Arabia trip report online: 138 species photographed, including Saunders's Tern. Most of us had scratched this species off our lists following new information on the challenge of identifying wintering birds, so it was great fun tracking down a breeding plumage adult on the Farasans 1/2

Heads-up for fans of trait-based models & trophic interactions! A fresh & fruity paper led superbly by Andressa Cabral & Renske Onstein @naturalis.bsky.social investigates the role of seed-dispersing animals in shaping pantropical plant diversity. nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

After 2 years' development, today we have launched @birdlifeglobal.bsky.social new DataZone! For information on each of the world's 11,000 bird species, 13,000 important sites for their conservation and profiles for 250 countries/territories and 16 global flyways, see datazone.birdlife.org

New paper published in Ecography coming out of the ClimBats COST Action on effects of climate on #bat morphology across space and time. Led by @laura-paltrinieri.bsky.social, @anabenlop.bsky.social and @lsantinieco.bsky.social 🦇🌡️🌧️ nsojournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Another unexpected angle on bird wing evolution: skeletal measurements suggest that wing bone length is shaped not only by aerodynamics of flight but also by thermoregulation (1/4) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... #macroecology #ornithology 🧪🌎🌐🪶

Our study ‘The #global #human impact on #biodiversity’ is out in @nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🌍🌐🐟🌿🪲 Unprecedented synthesis of >2000 studies led by @francoiskeck.bsky.social shows humans are not only shrinking species numbers—but reshaping entire communities across the planet. 🧵1/5

Proud of this paper by Jingyi Yang, along with two other lab members, Chenyue and Hung-wei. Macroecologists take note: it's open access & contains new datasets of elevational range, flight mode, aerial lifestyle and wing area for ALL BIRDS! @homewaylin.bsky.social @alexanderlees.bsky.social 🧪🌐🪶