Out today, a companion article for my autoOcc R package: Estimating species occupancy across multiple sampling seasons with autologistic occupancy models via the autoOcc R package. #rstats 🧪 besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Took a little walk just outside @lpzoo.org and came across a family of Cooper’s hawks. There were four flying from tree to tree, got a good picture of two of them!

In the past I've told people that "I've seen it all" when it comes to conducting an urban #cameratrapping study for 15 years. But today, after literally millions of images collected, we now have our first image of a deer peeing in the woods, so I guess there is still more to see out there 🤣🤣🤣🧪

Really excited about our new pub on how health (of people, animals, and ecosystems) can affect, and are affected by, human-wildlife interactions tinyurl.com/OneHealthHWIs In the BioScience One Health collection @aibsbiology.bsky.social 🧪 #humanwildlifeconflict #onehealth #urbanwildlife 🧵1/4

Online now: Disability in ecology and evolution

Apps are open for the 2026 Biota Awards postdoctoral fellowship! My coworkers and I would love to chat about this opportunity with recent PhD grads (or those close to finishing). We've been honored to receive funding from the Walder Foundation in the past! 🧪 www.biotaawards.org/2026-applica...

🦨 Ever wonder how skunks decide where to live in urban landscapes like Chicago? New research from @masonfidino.bsky.social, @lizalehrer.bsky.social, & @sbmagle.bsky.social from @lpzoo.org used nearly a decade of data to find out! 🦊🌍🧪 A 🧵

Do you study wildlife disease? Don't just share your sequences - share your testing data! We've developed a minimum data standard and an R package to help you, and wrote a little how-to-share-data handbook for disease ecology and One Health surveillance projects 🦇🦟🦠🗺️🔢 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

NEW! 🎉 We need wildlife disease surveillance to predict epidemics, but data sharing is rare - we found that only 2-3% of studies share raw data. So, we spent three years developing a data standard and R package to help get wildlife disease data into FAIR repositories. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Have you ever cited or come across a mention of the 'human shield hypothesis' and wondered: what is the evidence for this hypothesis, and what is the quality of that evidence? Wonder no more! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Tiny Diel.Niche R package update, bin.diel.times() outputs the proportion of time diel periods take up over a day (e.g., night, day, twilight) by setting prop.time = TRUE. VERY helpful if you want to quantify use of a given diel period relative to availability! #rstats 🧪 github.com/diel-project...

An update from the team on the uncertain future of our program and the impact of NSF budget cuts. Please share and reach out 🦠

🌆🐾 The International Urban Wildlife Conference kicks off this weekend in Atlanta! We’re bringing together researchers and practitioners to explore the ecology and evolution of cities. Stay tuned for updates, session highlights, and behind-the-scenes glimpses of #IUWC2025! 🌇🦝🧬🌳

Ecologists’ endless quest for automatic inference statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/05/28/e...

🐺🐺🐺 NEW PAPER! 🐺🐺🐺 Recovering wolves in WA tolerate threats except high harvest, high lethal removals, and lack of immigration With @labgardner.bsky.social, Sarah Converse, & Ben Maletzke zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

By far the largest glue up I’ve done. My shop isn’t great for dimensioning boards this size, so I’ve been putting off doing this for a while. Hopefully this does indeed become the top to my dresser!

Check out the @uofubiology.bsky.social press release on our recent paper documenting advances in molt phenology! attheu.utah.edu/research/as-...

Reviewing a revised manuscript and the other reviewer linked to this blog post of mine in one of their comments. It's little things like this that makes me think my statistical musings are actually helpful. 🙂 masonfidino.com/camera_days/

New blog post sharing updates on the latest version of the Diel.Niche R package, which we just released about an hour ago. Interested in quantifying if a species is nocturnal with data? Well it is easier than ever now! 🧪 #rstats #cameratrapping masonfidino.com/Diel.Niche_u...

Arguably the goofiest goose #cameratrapping photo we have collected in over 15 years of biodiversity monitoring throughout #Chicago. Be on the look out for laser eyes here in Humboldt Park! 🧪

Looking for ideas of how to structure a repository when publicly sharing data files from research projects? I've created a sample project on @cos.io to help you think through this. 👇 #databs #edresearch osf.io/59gte/

My graduate school held onto this banner for years (I placed in a research image competition while I was there), and now it has made its way back to my office.

In stark comparison to a recent paper I helped lead with over 200 coauthors, I just submitted my first sole authored paper today. VERY DIFFERENT WRITING PROCESSES.

New publication out this week in @stacksjournal.bsky.social where we looked at the relative roles local and long-distance colonization play on the distribution of striped skunks throughout the Chicago Metropolitan area! 🧪 www.stacksjournal.org/article/kase...

Ah, yes, the joys of cleaning data from large-scale collaborations.

Our analysis of BBS data (through 2023) just came out! doi.org/10.5066/P1F2...

SAY CHEESE 🧪 #cameratrapping

Thanks so much to Lila for this LA Times article about our new publication about social-ecological influences on coyote movement in Los Angeles! 🧪🌎🏙️ Check out the publication here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

I’m down in Argentina right now to teach some workshops on camera trapping, reproducible science, and statistical modeling as well as learn about a lot of research being conducted at @grinbic.bsky.social First day was yesterday, and I’m really looking forward to the rest of the week!

Where do we look to monitor biodiversity? In a new preprint, @karinorman.bsky.social brings some good news: the different site selection algorithms tend to reach a similar efficiency, even though they recommend different locations! 🧪🌎 ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

2nd chapter of my PhD just published in @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social doi.org/10.1111/2041... Another step towards linking animal migration and population dynamics using integrated modelling! The secret lies in a neat equation relating survival and transition probabilities between migratory regions

Want to increase your scientific impact? Maybe try working with absolute rockstars? It works for me. @mhmurray.bsky.social www.cbsnews.com/newyork/vide...

Another video in my series on applied time series and forecasting with the {mvgam} #rstats 📦. This one introduces State Space hierarchical GAMs and GPs for tackling multivariate series youtu.be/2POK_FVwCHk?...

Absolute first today. I was just invited by a journal to review a manuscript from one of my direct co-workers, like we work in the same lab. I declined the review because wow, what a conflict of interest! Has this ever happened to you? 🧪

Please spread the word! UF is hiring a tenure track quantitative ecologist in the Wildlife Ecology and Conservation Department: explore.jobs.ufl.edu/en-us/job/53...

Yesterday a coyote went into a grocery store in Chicago. news.wttw.com/2025/01/13/c...

Quick thread on some new papers on the science of impacts of bird feeding since the publication of our papers here www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... and here britishbirds.co.uk/journal/arti... #Ornithoogy #UKBirding🧵 1/

Revising a manuscript we submitted to @stacksjournal.bsky.social and I have to say that the collaborative review process is nice. Reviewers being able to see each others comments, and comment on them as well, is pretty unique!

I've been looking at different parameterisations of multi-season occupancy models, and it seems that dynamic (with colonisation and emigration) and auto-logistic models aren't all that different. Auto-logistic might be preferred with \alpha being a sort of average log odds. @masonfidino.bsky.social

I started working at the Lincoln Park Zoo 14 years ago in January of 2011. I'm looking forward to what the next year of science will look like with my excellent coworkers at LPZ! They truly make this place a great place to work.

I'd like to encourage folks to publish their code. Not only does it make studies more transparent and reproducible, but it also increases citation rates! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

I thought I had enough opossum art in my life but I was wrong. Dead wrong.

Once again on that date/time grind set while cleaning #cameratrapping data. #rstats

Internships are posted! vtecostudies.org/about-us/emp... Share with your undergrad/postgrad networks! These four positions are meant to be 'starting points' for folks looking for thier first experience in #ecology. Field-based, interdisciplinary, & office-based positions available.

The next season of www.chicagowildlifewatch.org is now live! The exciting news from this season is that we had to add a new species to our list: North American River Otter! Will you be the person to tag this species in the dataset? #Chicago #cameratrapping 🧪

Making new slides for talks is sometimes fun

Are you interested in species interactions and how we model them? Then this thread is for you! Our new paper in Ecology on the role of abundance in species interactions provides new statistical tools for modelling species interactions. shorturl.at/Sqz9m 🧵(1/13)🧵

This is tragic. If you handle a bat w/o protection, wake up at night and realize a bat has been in your room, pretty much anything 'bat and I may have come into physical contact' you should go ahead and assume you have been bitten and get treated for rabies. www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

I get asked to review about 10 papers per month. PLEASE let me know if, for some reason, you are thinking to yourself you would like me to put your name down as an alternative. Most papers are about urban ecology, quantitative ecology, and/or diel behavior in animals (e.g., nocturnality).