PH.D STUDENT OPENING IN COMMUNITY ECOLOGY IN THE ERNEST LAB The Ernest Lab at the University of Florida has an opening for a Ph.D student in the area of Community Ecology to start fall 2017.

The next installment from the Portal Blog by my student Joan Meiners (@beecycles) on how we shook things up at the Portal Project so we could study regime shifts.

From how we do science to publishing practices to the sociology of science, there isn’t an aspect of the scientific endeavor that isn’t in flux right now.

The first, throat clearing post to kick off what (we hope) will be a revitalization of the Portal Project Blog

[Update: A little bird pointed out I didn’t have a link to the actual Portal blog. That has been remedied along with a link to the Portal Project website for those who’d like more info on the project] A couple weeks ago, I posted about the new data paper from my long-term field site, the Portal Project.

This is the story behind “Comparing process-based and constraint-based approaches for modeling macroecological patterns” by my former PhD student Xiao Xiao, James O’Dwyer, and myself. Background I was on sabbatical in the fall of 2013 and was doing a lot of reading, and I reread “An integrative framework for stochastic, size-structured community assembly” by James O’Dwyer, Jessica Green, and colleagues.

It is with great glee that I can announce the latest release of the Portal Project Database. For those of you who just want to go play with the data – here’s the link to the Data Paper we just published in Ecology. But I would encourage you to read on, as there is more data-related news below. But first, a story. As some of you know, I manage a long-term ecological study: the Portal Project.

We are very exited to announce the newest release of the EcoData Retriever, our software for automating the downloading, cleaning, and installing of ecological and environmental data. Instead of hours or days trying to get complicated datasets like the Breeding Bird Survey ready for analysis, the Retriever lets you simply click a button or run a single command from R or the command line, and your computer does the rest.

In a big step forward for allowing proper credit to be provided to all of the awesome folks collecting and publishing data, the journal Global Ecology & Biogeography has just announced that they will start supporting an unlimited set of references to datasets used in a paper. These references will be included immediately following the traditional references section in both the html and pdf versions of the paper.

For the past few years I’ve been involved in a collaboration to put together a broad-coverage life history database for mammals, reptiles, and birds. The project started because my collaborator, Nathan Myhrvold, and I both had projects we were interested in that involved comparing life history traits of reptiles, mammals, and birds, and only mammals had easily accessible life history databases with broad taxonomic coverage.

Recently, over at the blog Ecological Rants the eminent ecologist Charles Krebs wrote a post about the ills of simplification in ecology. The post focuses specifically on how ecology has been ‘led astray’ by simplified models and lab studies. This has recently been picked up on Dynamic Ecology by Jeremy Fox who responded generally to the post but specifically to the affront to microcosms.