If you’re interested in big ecological datasets, natural history, and predictive cross-scale ecology (like we are) then you should check out the upcoming Gordon Research Conference (GRC) on Unifying Ecology Across Scales (July 28 – Aug 2) and the associated Gordon Research Seminar (GRS;

What impact did The Carpentries have on me? As a learner, it taught me most of my essential day-to-day computational tools. As an Instructor, it changed how I teach, allowing me to reach more students including those that need help the most. As an organiser, it taught me skills that are essential to collaborating and to managing teams. As a creator, it taught me how to hand off the work to the next leg in the never-ending relay race.

We’ve been studying how rodent communities change through time in the Arizona desert for 40 years. About once a decade we see a rapid change. Is the next one about to happen? It might be!

After posting yesterday that we were ramping up the blog again, my RSS feed let me know that arguably the most impactful ecology blog of all time, Dynamic Ecology, was doing the same thing! We also heard from Terry McGlynn who has recently moved and renamed his really important blog, now a newsletter named Science For Everyone. And we heard from multiple other folks that they are in the process of spinning up new blogs/newsletters.

We started Jabberwocky Ecology back in 2008 when blogs were becoming the dominant medium for informal (online) academic discussions. About the same time a handful of other ecology blogs got going and for a while the academic “blogosphere” was the hub for the sorts of things we now often talk about on other social media platforms.

We’re excited to announce the initial release of crown maps for 100 million trees in the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) with information on location, species identify, size, and alive/dead status. Using NEON’s remote sensing data we’ve been developing computer vision models to locate tree crowns for all individuals visible from above and classify those crowns to species (Weinstein et al. 2019, 2020, 2023; Marconi et al. 2022).

The Weecology lab group run by Ethan White and Morgan Ernest at the University of Florida is seeking a Project Manager to conduct and manage a long-term field study of breeding wading bird colonies in the Florida Everglades.

The Ernest Lab at the University of Florida has an opening for a PhD student interested in ecological forecasting of desert rodents to start Fall 2024. This position is funded on an NSF grant to study ecological forecasting under novel conditions using data from the Portal Project, our long-term field site located in southeastern Arizona.

Last week an exciting new addition to the R ecosystem was announced: webR. webR lets you run R from inside your browser, without installing R ¹ . This is a really exciting development for educational materials, because it makes it possible to provide interactive materials where students can modify, create, and run code right inside a web page with zero setup.

A funny thing happened on the way to the pandemic… In the summer of 2019 a colleague of mine, Dr. Peter Frederick – an expert in the wading birds of the Everglades – emailed me. Peter and I served on some university committees together, so I assumed we were just getting together to chat about changes in graduate student admissions or something else administrative.