Lake Powell on the Colorado River is set to receive 13% of its normal spring runoff, the lowest amount from upstream snowmelt on record. #climatechange #water coloradosun.com/2026/05/09/l...

Palmer drought index. Worst ever. Worse than the dust bowl. Fire season is coming.

“In my lifetime I have witnessed a terrible decline. In yours, you could and should witness a wonderful recovery.” What an immense privilege it has been to be alive at the same time as this incredible human being—David Attenborough. #Happy100thBirthday🥳 www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...

I love that bats are 30% puppy faces, 30% weird little goblins, 30% eldritch horrors, and 10% all three at once. (📷: Merlin Tuttle, arranged by Bryan Bongey)

🐺🐻‍❄️🦌🫎🦃🦅🐒🦝🦫🦬🐘🦉🐿️🦨🦡🐾🦎📷🧬 Hiring: Biodiversity Lab Manager @NaturalSciences Anticipated opening this summer Help run our on-exhibit Lab in Raleigh MS required Sign up for an alert when it goes live #cameratraps #AI #computervision docs.google.com/forms/d/1nrS...

Permanent job in Sacramento! Sr environmental scientist in a good unit. Manage acoustic data, implement automated approaches for aggregating and summarizing wildlife data, carry out advanced quantitative analyses that integrate multiple data sources. calcareers.ca.gov/CalHrPublic/...

This is cool.

I am hiring a new postdoc to work on an ecosystem modeling project with colleagues in hydrology, computer science, and the social sciences, including @mojisadegh.bsky.social If you want to do impactful work to understand the forest-water relationship, apply: www.hurteaulab.org/blog/ecosyst...

What I like best about the Artemis II photos is that it was taken by actual humans. An actual person had to frame it and manually adjust settings. It's their own artistic rendition of what they thought looked best at the time, something no probe, rover or unmanned spacecraft can take. it's art

Article about R&D office closures that interviews my old work colleague, Ali Urza. She left last year for a non-federal position during the DOGE turmoil. www.kunc.org/regional-new...

Holy smokes! An incredible start to the 'Wildfire Season' in the US this year - owing to an abnormally hot and snowless winter in some parts of the country.

Drought a huge concern this summer. Palmer drought severity index (PDSI) by state for March 2026 had 6 states with their worst drought on record, with 22 others experiencing a top-10 worst drought. Only Michigan had an above-average lack of drought. From: www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monit...

The LTER program specifically supports experiments and monitoring to study processes that play out over much longer time-frames than a typical three-to-five-year NSF grant. It's basic infrastructure for how we understand biodiversity... and how biodiversity responds to long-term environmental change

I hadn't seen this before. This is pretty remarkable. Earth and Moon in one NASA photo. ht @astrokatie.com

Long-term studies are vital to understanding how species and ecosystems are responding to climate change and other environmental stressors, but difficult to sustain under typical short-term grant cycles. LTER has been funding these since 1980. This is breaking something that can’t be replaced.

This planet — with all its troubles — is worth caring for. That should be our single purpose, as a species: To be stewards of this magnificent world, ensuring it thrives long into the future.

What will happen to the 82 USFS experimental forests around the country? Many sites have decades-long experiments that are tracking how forests are changed by timber harvesting practices and climate change. As I say here, “you can't just pick up an experimental forest site and move it to SLC.”

Good article on the USFS Research Office closures. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/03/c...

More context on this #Artemis II image: * This is the night side, lit by moonlight. You can see city lights in Spain & Portugal, & a sliver of day at lower right * The Sun is entirely behind Earth, which makes it a kind of solar eclipse, but w/ Earth doing the eclipsing instead of the Moon: ☀️🌍🚀🌕

Let's learn about some medical research that just left Earth on Artemis II, bound for the silver sphere in the sky. It's AVATAR, but it doesn't involve blue aliens. It stands for "A Virtual Astronaut Tissue Analog Response" & it looks like this USB drive-sized device.

It's been a day. The initial call was followed by hour long multiregional breakouts, followed by regional breakouts. The info dam broke and a deluge of information was released. #fsreorg #bettertogether #ourworkmatters #FSReorg #bettertogether #ourworkmatters

Postdoc position with Enakshi Ghosh working with myself, @hufbauer.bsky.social and Ian Pearse! Based at Virginia Tech and visiting us here in Colorado! Despite the photo, it is not on geese...but in fact, focused on insect immunity! jobs.apply.vt.edu/jobs/postdoc...

Taking this opportunity to plug USFS lands as well 👀

Official sad news. White-nose syndrome infected bats have been found in our mountain hibernation sites. It's unclear what the mortality rate will look like by the time bats emerge in spring. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

The frilled lizard is an iconic Australian reptile because of their utter fearlessness. Their scientific name, Chlamydosaurus kingii, translates to 'King cloaked lizard' & you can see why. They're one of a few modern lizards that can accurately be called bipedal, running upright on hind legs.

New post on Weather West: As historic March heatwave finally fades, a brief cooler/wetter interlude will occur across the U.S. West in early April before warmth & dryness likely return. Also: a deeper dive into now record-low Western snowpack.

We're hiring an Assistant Professor of Ecology! Come and join me and a great group of colleagues at University of Windsor in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Our job ad: efhc.fa.ca2.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid... Message me if you have questions. @ibiouwindsor.bsky.social @uwindsor.bsky.social

1/5 NEW paper alert! 🧪🔥 A lot of you know that snowpack is currently at a record or near-record low in many watersheds in the western US. A logical question is thus: how will the low snowpack affect wildfire in the coming months? Read the thread for key findings ...

Wherever you fall along the “AI is evil” to “AI is useful” spectrum, having clear guidance from academic societies and journals seems essential as we figure this stuff out

Climate change is already happening in Colorado. Here are 10 signs we can see right now.

Statistical Rethinking 2026 is done: 20 new lectures emphasizing logical and critical statistical workflow, from basics of probability theory to causal inference to reliable computation to sensitivity. It's all free, made just for you. Lecture list and links: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

“But in addition to being a catastrophe, what unfolded here is also an antecedent to a renaissance. A story not only of what has been lost, but of what eventually will find a way to flourish and endure” Loss and hope - a common mix when it comes to fire in the west

Well written Gavin. I think this AI moment re-highlights the underlying publish or perish problem. How do we reward quality over quantity, incentivize new science and learning, when average thinking is increasingly easy to imitate?

~180 years ago, Floreana Island in the Galapagos lost its unique tortoise, a victim to humans/invasive species. In 2000, scientists found hybrid tortoises descended from Floreana giant tortoises on an island 70 miles away. A managed breeding program maximized the offspring’s Floreana ancestry and...

❄️ Another bleak snow drought update as the West faces a March heat wave: "Snow drought worsened from February into early March due to record warmth, despite near-normal precipitation across much of the West." www.drought.gov/drought-stat...

Emcee Jeff Mount set the tone, saying “We don’t say ‘thank you’ to people often enough.’” Peter Moyle REALLY is the most consequential fish biologist in California history, & was honored & thanked by many of the State’s environmental best & brightest last Saturday. www.ppic.org/blog/celebra...

I'll have more to say about this by Tuesday, but...yeah. No Miracle March in the cards for Western snowpack this year--quite the opposite, in fact. I'll take a closer look and have a livestream and blog post soon to discuss.

#addBirder 🪶

Excited to share our new paper in @natcomms.nature.com We synthesize causal discovery & inference approaches across traditions (regression adjustment, quasi-expts, SEMs, Granger causality, convergent cross-mapping, and more) into a unified workflow for ecologists. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Me. I'm a mad scientist. (Paul Noth cartoons)

The impasse among the states is pushing Glen Canyon Dam closer to the brink. "Aridification is rendering the dam obsolete, at least as a water storage savings account," @landdesk.bsky.social writes: www.landdesk.org/p/the-colora...

Field job in the beautiful mountains of NE Oregon doing passive acoustic monitoring and woodpecker demography just went live. Please share! jobs.rwfm.tamu.edu/view-job/?id...

I feel so seen

The U.S. Forest Service documented this vegetation plot near Spirit Lake in 1979—a careful species-level inventory of an old-growth forest. After May 18, 1980, they returned to the same coordinates and put up another marker. Same spot. Different planet.

Did you know that because roly polies are terrestrial crustaceans and not actual bugs they breathe through adapted gills even though they live out of water.

New paper from our lab, led by Leah McTigue We reviewed 40+ years of research on drought affects on wildlife: 66% of single-species responses were negative, only 2% positive. As droughts intensify under climate change, wildlife are in trouble. 🌍🌐🧪 📄 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Where will novel fire regimes threaten birds? Our paper in @natcomms.nature.com shows that most bird diversity hotspots facing future high-sev fire occur in places that historically burned at low severity - a critical mismatch. These are the spots to focus restoration. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Vertebrates are worthy of study too despite their long neglect in favor of spineless science

New paper from our lab, led by Leah McTigue We reviewed 40+ years of research on drought affects on wildlife: 66% of single-species responses were negative, only 2% positive. As droughts intensify under climate change, wildlife are in trouble. 🌍🌐🧪 📄 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...