New #OpenAccess work by @rocb-ento.bsky.social, @katatrepsis.bsky.social & W. Kunin in #RESInsectConsDiv explored the effect of bulb type on moth trap catch & composition in UK gardens doi.org/10.1111/icad.70050 #GardenMothScheme #Biodiversity #ALAN @manusaunders.bsky.social @wileyeco.bsky.social

Interested in moth trapping? Wondering which trap to use? Or if different bulbs collect different species? Using 100k samples from @gardenmothscheme.bsky.social our new paper looks at these questions and more! With with Bill Kunin and @katatrepsis.bsky.social #mothsmatter #teammoth

Interested in moth trapping? Wondering which trap to use? Or if different bulbs collect different species? Using 100k samples from @gardenmothscheme.bsky.social our new paper looks at these questions and more! With with Bill Kunin and @katatrepsis.bsky.social #mothsmatter #teammoth

One of my PhD chapters: 'Designing user-centered technologies to address the illegal wildlife trade' is OUT NOW in the @society4conbio.bsky.social journal Conservation Science and Practice! Please check out the graphical abstract and give it a read: conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

4/ Using evidence gathered from old postcards, maps and the accounts of shepherds and botanists, I want to rebuild a picture of the chalk downland that existed until the 1940s - and in doing so, help efforts to restore it. Please get involved here: ghostsofchalkcountry.org/2025/09/14/h...

Learning that ”the relationship remained significant after adjusting for (unreliable) confounder” is an inference criteria that becomes worse when you have more power has been very formative for how I read the literature.

This is outrageous “Reform [UK] voters don’t think climate is important and the Mail and Sun [newspapers] complain that Starmer has spent a record number of days overseas” on.ft.com/4nOy28P Keir Starmer has no plans to attend COP30 climate summit in Brazil

Heath's moth trap design, from the original publication. Heath, J., 1965. A genuinely portable M.V. Light Trap. Ent. Rec., 77: 236-238. www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/39266893

Your annual reminder of how to tell Field Scabious, Knautia arvensis, and Small Scabious, Scabiosa columbaria, apart with a quick glance. Have a look under the flower heads. Field Scabious has a double row of leaf-like bracts, and Small Scabious has a single row of narrow, bristle-tipped bracts.

So cool - these moths navigate using starlight More great stuff from the Eric Warrant & the Lund vision group. Makes me wonder- could this be disrupted by skyglow? Yet another way artificial light can disrupt moths? www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Piped data.table... a beautiful thing (just me?) #rstats

Natural England is delighted today to declare England’s newest National Nature Reserve: the Bradford Pennine Gateway NNR. 1200 hectares of priority habitats on the doorstep of tens of thousands of people, many with limited access to high quality natural areas. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Interesting paper, worth a read. Another complicating factor in untangling moth declines! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

REVEALED: only 5% of Forestry Commission grants for woodland creation have been spent on the natural regeneration of trees, while the remaining 95% is spent on tree planting. The government needs to change the rules. My FOI request & comment in the Guardian: www.theguardian.com/environment/...

When lepidopterist Michael Braby spotted something odd on a rare butterfly specimen, an old case was re-opened: a heist involving Scotland Yard & a forgery that created a flutter throughout the taxonomic world. cosmosmagazine.com/nature/butterfly-heist-70-years-ago-is-still-causing-flutter/

Locally here in the Sussex High Weald Hyacinthoides non-scripta are mainly blue, occasionally white but these definitely look purple… @naturelark.bsky.social @bsbibotany.bsky.social

I just posted a new notebook: Causal Inference with the 𝚖𝚊𝚛𝚐𝚒𝚗𝚊𝚕𝚎𝚏𝚏𝚎𝚌𝚝𝚜 📦 for #Rstats. It introduces the idea of G-Computation and tries to demystify the differences between ATE, ATT, and ATU. This is a first draft and I would looove any feedback! marginaleffects.com/chapters/gco...

Such a banger. The rain DAG has made its way around socials a few times, but check out the extremely lucid and incisive discussion section.

Labour’s great nature sellout is the worst attack on England’s ecosystems I’ve seen in my lifetime | George Monbiot www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

NEW PAPER from the GLiTRS team! 🎉 We review how best to use different types of evidence to better understand global insect declines 🦗🪳🪲🦋🐛🐜 "Integrating multiple evidence streams to understand insect biodiversity change" published in @science.org 🔗 tinyurl.com/mr35bdaa A summary 🧵 below (1/7)

Using this as an excuse to share a great post by @natehaines.bsky.social on modelling and Dunning-Kruger. haines-lab.com/post/2021-01...

“England’s non-woodland trees have been mapped for the first time, using cutting-edge methods of laser detection and satellite imagery” www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Too edgy for Private Eye? We recently ran the 1st of 3 ads in Private Eye magazine. But after our 1st they told us they wouldn't run any more. Did they give in to pressure from the shooting industry or another vested interest? Private Eye- too establishment for Wild Justice!

The New York Times recently had an article on IVF and embryo selection which I think buries a few important ledes about these products ...

Elevated extinction risk in over one-fifth of native North American pollinators. 1,600 spp of vertebrate & insect pollinators assessed - one in five at risk of extinction. major threats - climate, agriculture, hydrological & fire regimes, & urban development. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

It's published! The largest research work I've ever undertaken: Lords of the flies: dipteran migrants are diverse, abundant & ecologically important Published in Biological Reviews: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... Thanks so much to co-authors @koralwotton.bsky.social & Myles Menz 1/x

Government to extend ban on moorland burning - closing loopholes in existing rules Great news for nature, carbon, & people who’ll be spared from acrid smoke & flooding Bad news for dukes & billionaires who own grouse moors 🎻 Here's my quote running on PA newswire: 1/ www.gov.uk/government/n...

Need to explain (or understand) linear mixed effects regressions, random intercepts, and random slopes? Look no further than "A Visual Introduction to Hierarchical Models" by Michael Freeman, 2017. It's a banger!

🚨New paper on tropical moth pollination 🧵1/8 - What happens in tropical ecosystems when the day ends?🌔🦋 Our new review that @robtrop.bsky.social and I wrote highlights moths’ vital role in pollination and outlines research gaps, challenges and biases. Sharing valued! Link: doi.org/10.1017/S026...

The government’s Land Use consultation is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to intervene in this critical issue. Here’s my response to it. Please feel free to borrow / copy & paste as much as you want. It’s crucial that we engage. www.monbiot.com/2025/03/23/f... 1/3 🧵

Read this @sabs.bsky.social interview with my friend @co2ley.bsky.social, who was fired at NOAA as the Director of the Ocean Acidification Program (OAP) and later reinstated but placed on administrative leave. Disclaimer: Some of my work on marine CO₂ removal (mCDR) is funded by OAP.

Check out this incredible stack exchange answer by the author of R package MatchIt on why/when matching is preferable to regression for causal inference: stats.stackexchange.com/questions/54...

Brilliant news on a Friday afternoon: gov will launch new natural history GCSE. It's taken Mary Colwell, @carolinelucas.bsky.social & others years of campaigning. (I'm praying it'll be introduced quickly enough for my children!) www.theguardian.com/environment/...

A gobsmacking story. Water companies let toxic waste disposers, for cash, dump their loads into sewage farms. The sewage sludge is then spread, untested, on farmland, potentially poisoning vast areas, entire ecosystems and the people (you and me) eating the food. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I’ve long used FiveThirtyEight’s interactive “Hack Your Way To Scientific Glory” to illustrate the idea of p-hacking when I teach statistics. But ABC/Disney killed the site earlier this month :( So I made my own with #rstats and Observable and #QuartoPub ! stats.andrewheiss.com/hack-your-way/

The new FIT Count season is nearly here 🎉🎆👏 From 1st April onwards, when weather is good, enjoy spending 10 minutes counting the insects that visit flowers - wherever you can find flowers, and as often as you wish, to help monitor #pollinators. Full details on our website ukpoms.org.uk/fit-counts

Always worth this sharing this from @noahgreifer.bsky.social

Just came across this interesting 1968 paper from Herman Daly which recasts economics as a sub-discipline of ecology. A must-read if interested in ecological economics or degrowth!

Check out this incredible stack exchange answer by the author of R package MatchIt on why/when matching is preferable to regression for causal inference: stats.stackexchange.com/questions/54...

🔎 🌍 🧪 How reliable are biodiversity trend assessments? A new paper in @ecography.bsky.social led by the amazing @wilkesma.bsky.social, reveals hidden sources of uncertainty in monitoring data and modeling choices that can dramatically alter conservation conclusions… (1/5) 🔗 bit.ly/4ibhAgq

Wild birds in crisis - me chatting to the wonderful Prof Ben Garrod on BBC R4 Inside Science today - bird populations are falling but we have ambitious govt targets to halt & reverse decline - now we need action 🐦🐦🐦 www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/... @rspb.bsky.social

BREAKING: DEFRA asks England’s biggest landowners to come up with plans to restore nature. The new National Estate for Nature is a bold move by Labour, summoning landowners who own a tenth of the country to report on their stewardship. With comment from me: www.theguardian.com/environment/...

A week ago came across one of most extraordinary subaqua views have ever seen in UK, where the Old Carr Stream emerges (through a human construction, into a deep man made V shaped channel) from Beachamwell. Preternaturally clear water - clearest have ever seen. #MySwim #Chalkstreams #Norfolk 1/9

Rapid butterfly declines across the United States during the 21st century www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

It's time! 🥳 The 2025 summer #GardenMothScheme starts this week. Put your trap out once a week (ideally Fridays) & contribute to national research. Recording form: tinyurl.com/GMS25Record Instructions: tinyurl.com/GMS25Info Local organisers: gardenmothscheme.org.uk/info #TeamMoth #MothsMatter

It's paper week ;) Here is an interesting puzzle: The emissions of artificial light at night increase at a rate of ~2% per year (seen by the VIIRS-DNB radiometer onboard the Suomi-NPP satellite), but... authors.elsevier.com/a/1kZjX564Sf...

MOTH X HUMAN 🌟 coming this summer! Bradford (6–8 June) and London (4–6 July) UKCEH science is part of an exciting collaboration with @elliewilsonuk.bsky.social merging cutting-edge musical technology with ecological research 🦋🎵 Learn more: www.ceh.ac.uk/news-and-med...

In so far - 3 Small Mottled Willow (exigua) [not recaptures], 2 U. ferrugalis, 1 Dark Sword-grass (ipsilon) & 1 Angle Shades (meticulosa). It's blowing a gale here and so I've gone for the safety net method! It seems to be working well as the moths are being blown along the lawn and on to the sheet