A mini review/perspective (with Eugene) on Guilbault et al. 2025 in @animalecology.bsky.social - Quantifying drivers of biodiversity change through increasing data availability and improved analytical frameworks besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

VIDEO: Bird call contest seeks to boost conservation awareness in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong Bird Watching Society holds its first-ever bird call contest with people taking to the stage to mimic the calls of birds including the koel, brown fish owl, and Asian barred owlet

New article out today in Nature - intensified El Niño events under climate change appear to be chipping away at tropical forest arthropod diversity. This is already leading to substantial losses in arthropod function in primary forests across the tropics. rdcu.be/ezAxP

New in @jappliedecology.bsky.social A multi-source remote sensing approach to identify and predict delayed succession in human-dominated tropical landscapes doi.org/10.1111/1365...

New in Scientific Data - Spatial occurrence records and distributions of tropical Asian butterflies www.nature.com/articles/s41... collab w/ many great colleagues, led by Eugene and Emily… optimistic that the data will lead to concrete conservation actions for Asian butterflies

Really happy to announce that the updated version of BioTIME is out!!🚨 This is the largest #database of #biodiversity #timeseries - now with 708 studies and >56 thousand species from across the planet!🦊🐀🐦🐊🐟🐙🦋🐞🌲🍀 & over 400 co-authors sharing their data🤩🤩 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

New in @animalecology.bsky.social - Butterflies respond to habitat disturbance in tropical forests through activity shifts - happy to see this one out, wonderful work led by Shuang and Wenda besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

New online! Causes and consequences of insect decline in tropical forests

As a native Angeleno, these fires are so tragic (though I’m fortunate not to have been impacted directly yet). Been reflecting on Los Angeles Against the Mountains by John McPhee (written 35 years ago) www.newyorker.com/magazine/198...

The insanity of being a fire ecologist in the epicenter of a major fire event, bags packed and ready to evacuate, watching active fire from my window, while taking media requests and explaining to the public, for the 100,000th time how climate change is largely responsible for this

Land-use change reduces bee diversity at local scales, but the impacts of agriculture and urbanisation differ at regional scales. Agriculture has more negative effects overall. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... 🧪 🌏 🌐

Now out in @globalchangebio.bsky.social - Land Use Change Consistently Reduces α- But Not β- and γ-Diversity of Bees - onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Some excitement at the end of the year here in our Hong Kong butterfly work. We (Fung!) managed to capture a tagged Parantica sita that had flown over 3000 km (in more than 120 days) from Japan. A new record for the impressive species hku.hk/press/news_d...

good songs to mop to when the lab floods - Flood (Jars of Clay), You Part the Waters (Cake), Texas Flood (Stevie Ray Vaughan), When the Levee Breaks (Led Zeppelin), Black Water (Doobie Brothers)

now out in Biological Reviews - Wildlife trade investigations benefit from multivariate stable isotope analyses - a comprehensive guide led by Tracey… happy to see this out! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Here’s my annual lab in review for 2024 featuring papers in BMC Biology, Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, Remote Sensing in Eco & Cons tropicalconslab.com/team/2024

strange creature from the New Territories…

good week for wildlife on the HKU campus

new paper - Serological evidence of sarbecovirus exposure along Sunda pangolin trafficking pathways link.springer.com/article/10.1...

woke up searching my phone for photos of the cobra I saw and photographed during my dream… couldn’t find them

winter has arrived in HK! (finally) here’s HKU main bldg (plus a yellow crested cockatoo flying in front of it) on this fine cool day

Spent the day chasing butterflies (on Lantau, in Hong Kong). It was brilliant.