12/12 What's clear: we handicap ourselves by studying organisms in environments dramatically simpler than where they evolved. What other fundamental discoveries await scientists willing to bring ecology into the lab?

I am so proud of you Eva 🤩🎉🎊👏 This thesis award from #UPJV is so well deserved 👍 You make forest microclimates shine at multiple levels 🌳🌳🌲🌲 #proud #supervisor @evagril.bsky.social @upjv-univ.bsky.social

NSF is open again! A few comments: *Please be patient. During a shutdown NSF employees cannot open computers or respond to emails. *Merit review will continue. However panels won’t resume until after Dec 8th. *POs remain excited and committed to advancing science and the scientific workforce.

Great example of how ecology is done, including how open questions about effects of climate change are fairly examined (tl;dr: many birds doing ok, but not all)

Wren Wagenbach's photo of Mount Rainier took 3rd place in the scenery category of our photo contest. Wren was a member of our crew surveying birds in the national parks of the Pacific Northwest as part of the NPS's Inventory and Monitoring Program. 🪶

interactions between habitat preference and behavioral competitive dynamics seem to shape elevational ranges in Catharus thrushes

For Nightingale-Thrushes, an interaction between competition and habitat shape their elevational ranges. The interaction between them is asymmetric (the norm in birds) - with the lower elevation species, dominant over its higher elevation counterpart. So WHY NOT go higher up, if you can?

..with that info, we can test each hypothesis.. The upshot here is that thermal physiology has no bearing on where species CAN physically live (2x BMR suggested as the physiological 'ceiling' for species) - our species live comfortably within this. So if not physiology, then what?

So i wanted to get mechanistic, and measure each of these variables on species and test them in unison, which meant: 1. Establishing abundance patterns across elevation by lots of point counts 2. Characterising the thermal environment birds experience across elevation..

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/...

excellent new paper by Sam well summarized in this nice thread --- a TON of hard work went into testing these major hypotheses for range limits

Very happy to finally see this out in @pnas.org. Great work (masterfully) led by my dear friend @gabrielmoulatlet.bsky.social on a classic question on range sizes, climatic niches and dominance for plants at the global scale! Thanks for the collab, Gabriel!

in "General laws of biodiversity: Climatic niches predict plant range size and ecological dominance globally", we provide key insights into species’ vulnerability to environmental change and the processes that structure biodiversity at global scales. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Read Ben's great synopsis + background to our new paper out in Ecology!

How are Pacific NW mountain birds responding to climate change? I got up at 4:00 am for a month to find out. but first the backstory, or "how I spent seven years telling everyone this project wasn't possible" new paper here: esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

A reminder that Las Vegas and Atlanta are the two largest non-mining settlements in the history of civilization not to be built by a navigable body of water. They frankly should not have existed if not for human hubris

One of the funner moments from my South Africa trip occurred when these two little borbs decided to chase each other on the edge a lagoon. (They're Black Crakes, btw.)

Looking for a PhD opportunity? I'm hoping to recruit someone to my group at Durham University to work on a project combining fieldwork and labwork to study speciation in rubyspot damselflies: iapetus.ac.uk/studentships... Get in touch if you want to chat!

Excited about this paper led by Katja Poveda & Heather Grab! We use SEM to show natural habitat at large scales improves biocontrol. But, locally, it can decrease yields, perhaps due to edge effects or areas of lower agronomic quality. Check it out! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Last night, I watched one of the best nature videos I have ever seen, from Cornell Lab of Ornithology. I have been in love with hornbills since I lived in Indonesia and Malaysia and saw them every time I went out in the jungle. You really owe it to yourself to watch this.

1403 Woodpigeons visible in a single frame of this video at 21 seconds @derbyshirebirds.bsky.social #UKBirding, my estimate at the time was 12k birds through in three large waves in about 20 minutes, but I might have been well under...

07-Nov: On this day in 1913, Alfred Russel Wallace died. Wallace famously came up with a near-identical explanation for how evolution occurs independently of Charles Darwin. You can read about their friendship here: friendsofdarwin.com/articles/dar... #histsci

tropical baby birds do the darnedest things check out these fuzzy weird little nestlings that hide their heads and sit there motionless. potentially trying to convince predators they are a nasty fungus rather than a tasty helpless baby bird v cool new paper: www.scielo.br/j/zool/a/MtT...

amazing project!!

Interested in a PhD studying the evolutionary ecology of animal behavior in Barcelona? Final days to apply for this open PhD position in our lab! 👇 For more information about the position: creaf.factorialhr.com/job_posting/...

The lion makes a convincing point 🦁 My latest for @therevelator.org

New and improved! (as of today, now with page numbers and an issue number ;) "Evidence for ancient selective sweeps followed by differentiation among three species of Sphyrapicus sapsuckers" Led by Dr. Libby Natola: doi.org/10.1093/jeb/...

These endangered lemurs don't have babies often. (You won't believe how females keep males from mating with them!) When they do give birth, they raise kids communally. But in today's climate, their patterns are changing. By me, for @biographic.bsky.social: www.biographic.com/investigatin...

I’m stuck in bed between chemo treatments for metastatic coloncancer, wearing a take-home chemo pump attached to my chest. I wanted to share my advice that you can benefit from ‘Letting Your Colleagues In’ don’t need to struggle alone @insidehighered.com www.insidehighered.com/opinion/care...

Another amazing paper from Tara Christensen - with a surprising result that nectar generalists (butterflies) are declining more than specialists. esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

five days left to submit an abstract for #speciesonthemove in Taiwan in April! SOTM is my favorite conference—a small, ECR-friendly meeting that gathers international scientists working on every aspect of climate change + range and phenological shifts. www.speciesonthemove.com

A thing I keep noticing in science papers/talks lately is that graphics are being used to show data, not story. Silently wishing more visual resources were spent showing *how* systems and processes actually operate, rather than merely offering graphs and charts that confirm they occur.

Last year Brazil saw its biggest drop in emissions in 15 years, new data show. Analysts credit the decline to a crackdown on the illegal clearing of forest.

I wrote about the irony of the AI bubble, a phenomenon driven by storytelling and imagination in an industry that has contempt for both

I've been pretty quiet here lately, trying to cut down on doomscrolling for the sake of my mental health... BUT I have a new story out at @therevelator.org, on how climate change is contributing to bird population declines in multiple biomes around the world. #birds 🪶🌏

What can goshawks teach us about how camouflage, behavior, and habitat protect seasonally color-molting prey? Recent findings suggest that brown prey may be less vulnerable to predation under climate change compared to white morphs. Read now ahead of print! www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

COME WORK WITH ME!!! Very exciting open faculty position at MIT, with ecosystem and biodiversity modeling as a focus! cee.mit.edu/people/share...

NYC and adjacent friends: I'm thrilled and terrified to be giving a public lecture in Manhattan at 6pm on Wednesday, 19 November. If you feel like coming into the city* for the evening, I'd love to see you there! *Yes, NYC = "the city" for Jersey girls. www.simonsfoundation.org/event/trade-...

Applications are currently being accepted for UBC's ✨️ Biodiversity Postdoctoral Fellowship ✨️ (two positions!!), due Jan. 15 Please share far and wide 🚀 (See thread)

just look at that flycatcher

Is there a podcast like Catalyst, Volts, or Odd Lots (read: smart, detail-oriented, outside the scope of pop sci) about wildlife/biodiversity/conservation issues? 🧪🌎

New paper out today in Ecology Letters! In this synthesis we dive into the equilibrium assumption in ecology - why it's everywhere in ecological theory, the evidence for it in nature, when meeting the assumption is important, how to achieve it in empirical research, and more! tinyurl.com/yh6kyysm

Check out the recent publication in Annual Reviews of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics where the authors explore genomic species delimitation in depth. You'll see a number of #sciart figures I created to help explain some of the concepts! www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Downright befuddled (Northern Saw-whet Owl)

The headline, while accurate, doesn't begin to capture the beauty of this story, my news to me good news for Oct 26. #earthOptimism #BeyondTheObituaries reasonstobecheerful.world/urban-farms-...

Bumping this up one last time. I'm looking to hire graduate student(s) to work on an NSF-funded project to study elevational range shifts among dragonflies here in Colorado. @cudenverclas.bsky.social 🧪🌍🐙 Applications will be considered until Nov 1. See post below for more details

1 week left to apply to our Postdoc job with our lab using AI to analyze camera trap images at the NC Museum of Natural sciences and NCSU and in collaboration with Wildlife Insights https:/​/​jobs.ncsu.edu/​postings/​223025

I’m excited to share that we were one of 15 recipients of the Bezos Earth Fund AI Grand Challenge grants. These funds will be used to expand Audubon Latin America & Caribbean’s Conserva Aves program. www.bezosearthfund.org/news-and-ins...