A guest post from last week on the Portal Blog about studying Kangaroo rat placentas!

We have a modest sized group of current folks at ESA this week presenting on all the cool things they’ve been doing. We’re also around and always happy to try to find time to grab a coffee or just a few minutes to chat science. Our schedule for the week is: Monday Get a double dose of rapid change in ecological communities from the Portal Project with Morgan Ernest and Erica Christensen. 02:50 PM – 03:10 PM in C120-121.

The Portal Project turns 40 this year! In celebration, we will be regularly posting about the history of the site, new things going on, natural history of the desert, and other fun things over at the Portal Blog.

Should you cite preprints in your papers and should journals allow this? This is a topic that gets debated periodically. The most recent round of Twitter debate started last week when Martin Hunt pointed out that the journal Nucleic Acids Research wouldn’t allow him to cite them. A couple of days later I suggested that journals that don’t allow citing preprints are putting their authors’ at risk by forcing them not to cite relevant work.

The Weecology lab group run by Ethan White and Morgan Ernest at the University of Florida is seeking a Data Analyst to work collaboratively with faculty, graduate students, and postdocs to understand and model ecological systems. We’re looking for someone who enjoys tidying, managing, manipulating, visualizing, and analyzing data to help support scientific discovery.

The Weecology lab group run by Morgan Ernest and Ethan White at the University of Florida is seeking a post-doctoral researcher to study changes in ecological communities through time.

We are very exited to announce a major new release of the Data Retriever, our software for making it quick and easy to get clean, ready to analyze, versions of publicly available data. The Data Retriever, automates the downloading, cleaning, and installing of ecological and environmental data into your choice of databases and flat file formats.

Last week Zack Brym and I formally announced a semester long Data Carpentry course that we’ve have been building over the last year. One of the things I’m most excited about in this effort is our attempt to support collaborative lesson development for university/college coursework.

This is post is co-authored by Zack Brym and Ethan White Over the last year and a half we have been actively developing a semester-long Data Carpentry course designed to be easily customized and integrated into existing graduate and undergraduate curricula. Data Carpentry for Biologists contains course materials for teaching scientists how to work more effectively with data.

Counting plants and rats in the desert is fun to collect but also hard won data. Another Portal Project blog post is up!

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