A drone’s-eye view of the South Gobi, Mongolia, at sunset. Home to our long-term study of snow leopards & the social-ecological system of ungulates, carnivores & livestock herders. You might wonder if anything was living down there. But there are 20 snow leopards & 2000 ibex. Life finds a way! 🌏

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair I do over-share this quote, but it's just so apt for so many things wrong with the world (pretty timeless too).

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

Hey everyone, is there a literature (can be grey) discussing the ethics of using #generativeAI in #conservation and-or #ecology? I have to persuade some folks to consider the “darker” side of it and some authoritative/academic sources would really help. Thanks for any links. 🌍#conservationscience

Enjoyed reading about this partnership between the Kuikuro and Brazilian/US archaeologists. ✅Trust built over decades ✅Shared research objectives ✅Indigenous data sovereignty ✅Credit sharing ✅Respect & humility (“I didn’t “discover” anything”) #participatoryscience www.science.org/content/arti...

Now live! www.ethicalconservation.org/toolkit/ -Offers a fresh perspective on “human-wildlife conflict” -Suggests shifting the narrative from demonisation of wildlife towards an empathetic & nuanced approach to conflict, in partnership w/ local communities #ethicalconservation #conservationscience🌍

I find it’s helpful to always start from the premise: “All models are wrong, but some are useful” (Box, 1979)

23mins running uphill to celebrate October 23rd, International Snow Leopard Day. #23for23 Because conservation often feels like an uphill battle. But I guess you never know when the crest will suddenly appear and you’re on the downhill… #SnowLeopardDay #MoveForSnowLeopards

We (Snow Leopard Trust) will have a consultancy available soon to do climate-smart protected area planning in Kyrgyzstan. Will involve #cameratrap data & Zonation. Suitable for PhD/post-doc level or a lab group. Get in touch if interested! Will post link once it’s live! 🧪🌍#conservationscience

Important reflections on the power dynamics in large-scale syntheses of ecological data. Many of them perpetuate colonial structures. An example that comes to mind is Google & Wildlife Insights, who used camera trap data to publish the SpeciesNet algorithm, with no credit given to field researchers

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

Over on the Other Place I would occasionally put this thread together, most recently during lockdown, four years ago in fact, and I realised I'd not done it here. So, bear with, and feel free to mute as this is an epic (genuinely, I’m not sure we won’t reach hitherto non-invoked thread limits tbh).

*Seeing double* Nope, these images are not the same, or even from the same image sequence! They were taken 23 days apart, with raging snow storms & high winds between them. #Snowleopards are creatures of habit, regularly coming back to the same tiny patches of ground to see who's been around.

Next Thursday (11th), join us to discover how 300+ local community members & camera traps generate vital ecosystem data, transforming biodiversity monitoring in the Sanjiangyuan. 📸🌿 Learn about innovative incentive models for #conservation in #China. 👉 bit.ly/SLNBioMonitoring

Confused writing is usually a symptom of confused thinking. As we struggle to clarify writing, we clarify our thoughts. AI writing aids rob us of that struggle, leaving clean-looking text and thoughts still confused for lack of inspection. Writing is not just a product; it is a diagnostic tool.

Only a pre-print for now, but after 4 years of hard work I couldn't resist sharing this! The Global Canopy Atlas: analysis-ready maps of 3D structure for the world's woody ecosystems 📜: doi.org/10.1101/2025... Huge team effort led by the brilliant Fabian Fischer!

History appears to be repeating itself, with a new "mega-rice" project underway in South Papua, a repeat of the social and ecological disaster that was Mega Rice I in Kalimantan in the late 1990s. The UN says that > 50,000 Indigenous people will be directly affected e360.yale.edu/features/ind...

Consider the first headline -- "Brazil secures Amazon allies for $125 billion global forest fund" -- against the backdrop of everything else Brazil is doing. The hypocrisy from the host of the COP30 climate conference is staggering.

Incredible graph, and pretty much sums it up. Teeing off as the world burns.

Here’s me kind of hoping it doesn’t shut down Libgen though, a vital lifeline for many who don’t have fancy pantsy university journal access (= vast number of researchers in Global South, plus almost everyone in the NGO world)

From last week spotting the turtle doves in the Knepp rewilding project, to having the same species at our garden pond here in Ronda, Spain!

Can we all agree macroecology is also lawful evil 😈 Spot on for Conservation ecology

Interesting 🤔 Seems like a good way forward to ensure rigour and accuracy in work. I suspect there is a grey area, though, in deciding when genAI is acting as an assistant (which is allowed under their rules) and when it has stepped over the line into creator (not allowed).

AI challenge to find lost Amazonian civilizations draws critics | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti... There are echoes here of how macroecologists mine satellite & other global data to make maps of conservation priorities, also often without consultation or validation on the ground.

Are drones fancy gadgets, or can they effectively guide management strategies and align with the overarching goals of protected areas? Rossi & Wiesmann 2025 argue the latter 👌 besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

My first @uk.theconversation.com article with @jackantbam.bsky.social and @lambin-ecology.bsky.social and @kennyafc.bsky.social "Surprisingly effective way to save the capercaillie: keep its predators well-fed" theconversation.com/a-surprising...

A no-brainer if ever I saw one.

A new paper in The Lancet, one of the world’s foremost peer reviewed medical journals, estimates that USAID prevented 91 million deaths across 133 countries over 20 years. The paper estimates that Elon Musk’s DOGE funding cuts to USAID will lead to 14 million deaths by 2030 (4.5 million children).

Related issues in #cameratrap AI exist, still unresolved. E.g. Google’s SpeciesNet, ostensibly trained on public data (techcrunch.com/2025/03/03/g...) but actually trained on partly embargoed data, w/ little recognition for the 100’s of people in the Global South who collected & curated the data 😧

A really clear and practical guide to implementing SMART and improving its effectiveness over time (written by the SMART Partnership and @faunaflora.bsky.social): docs.google.com/presentation...

Nepal has launched its first-ever species-specific action plan for dholes (Cuon alpinus), allocating 262.9 million rupees ($1.9 million) over five years to address key threats such as habitat loss, prey depletion, disease and competition with larger predators.

No mention of the disease risks. Or the welfare concerns of releasing birds into places that don’t suit them. This is pretend conservation, dressed up as the real thing and given a free ride by a serious environmental journalist. Hugely damaging. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Our friendly neighbourhood fox passes just under our bedroom window almost every night. Taken with a @naturespy.bsky.social Ursus solar-powered ☀️ #cameratrap, which has been successfully powering itself across Dutch forests and Mongolia deserts recently. Goodbye battery changes! 👋

we're living through one of the greatest technological revolutions in the history of mankind and it's not AI

Sometimes R just beats you up for no reason.

Springer-Nature launched a series of "Discover" journals that closely mimic MDPI titles -- sharing *identical* journal names, and likely similar business model. What is going on, and why researcher will - as always - fall for it? A 🧵 the-strain-on-scientific-publishing.github.io/website/post...

Breaking news: it appears Emperor penguin populations in Antarctica are declining faster than predicted. Latest satellite data shows a massive 22% drop in penguin numbers over the last 15 years in key regions. This is more than double the rate of loss that experts had expected... 🧵 1/8

Attending the 9th Global Snow Leopard & Ecosystem Protection Program (GSLEP) meeting in Issyk Kul, Kyrgyzstan this week. Ministers, representatives & partners from across all range countries met to discuss conservation progress & priorities, with the Tien Shan mountains as our backdrop! ⛰️🐆

This should be front page news everywhere

There are 2 previous historical cases of countries destroying their science and universities, crippling them for decades: Lysenkoism in the USSR and Nazi Germany. The Trump administration will be the 3rd. It's not just budgets but research, institutions, expertise, and training the next generation.

View from the recent office! 🤩 Yes it’s a tired trope, but what a privilege to call this “work”!* I had no connection in the field, but hope to share some news from the Gobi, Mongolia… watch this space. *rest assured most of my time is spent firmly behind a desk/laptop!

It's 2025 and over here I am still having to *manually* type references into Papers and Mendeley that they manage to garble... 🙈

Hard to see this as anything other than blatant corruption. And 1000s of local ppl in Vietnam are about to lose their land to make the Trump family more money.

Take a look at @science.org's article describing our work in @globalchangebio.bsky.social showing that beak morphology of hummingbirds has changed in association with feeders! science.org/content/arti...

Wondering if anyone with Springer Nature access might be so kind as to download this pdf and share? link.springer.com/article/10.1... 🙏 #icanhazpdf

Illegal gold miners are now operating very close to the 2nd tallest tree in the Amazon Rainforest. Six giant trees are found inside the Iratapuru River Sustainable Development Reserve in Brazil’s Amapá state. Despite the area’s protected status, gold miners are illegally operating just 1km away.

Excited to share the first post of a project in Madagascar that I am part of. Follow the link for the whole post and video. www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeSx...

Hunting birds is rampant throughout Cambodia. w/ Vutha Srey, we joined hunters catching birds at night and dug into the reasons behind the trade for @dialogueearth.bsky.social With support from @anticorruption.bsky.social Cambodia dialogue.earth/en/nature/bi... #birds 🌏

For people who go outside and collect field data, this should be about as surprising as finding out the sky is blue… IUCN and GBIF-derived range maps are not very accurate for most species in most places. You shouldn’t use them for anything less than national scales (maybe regional, in some cases).