This is a guest post by Elita Baldridge (@elitabaldridge), a graduate student in Ethan White’s lab in the Ecology Center at Utah State University. As a budding macroecologist, I have thought a lot about what skills I need to acquire during my Ph.D. This is my model of the four basic attributes for a macroecologist, although I think it is more generally applicable to many ecologists as well: Data

We had a great time at ESA this year and enjoyed getting to interact with lots of both old and new friends and colleagues. Since we’re pretty into open science here at Weecology, it’s probably not surprising that we have a lot of slides (and even scripts) from our many and varied talks and posters posted online, and we thought it might be helpful to aggregate them all in one place. Enjoy.

Slides and script from Morgan Ernest’s Ignite talk on Why constraint based approaches to ecology from Elita Baldridge and Ethan White’s thought provoking ESA 2013 session on Constraints in Ecology.

Slides and script from Ethan White’s Ignite talk on Big Data in Ecology from Sandra Chung and Jacquelyn Gill’s excellent ESA 2013 session on Sharing Makes Science Better.

It’s that time of year again where we let people know which Weecologists are doing what and where at the annual Ecological Society of America meeting! We have an action packed schedule this year.

If you have been to a conference recently where speakers are invited, the odds are that you (or someone with you) noticed that the speaker list didn’t really reflect the demographics of the field. https://twitter.com/DanGraur/status/354770945115828224 There have been various conversations about a number of recent conferences.  For an example, check out this hilarious post by Jonathan Eisen.

We here at Weecology have just recently discovered John Bruno’s blog SeaMonster, and have been getting a great deal of enjoyment out of it. While perusing some of the posts, we ran across one that made Ethan and I both laugh and cringe at the same time: Are unreasonably harsh reviewers retarding the pace of coral reef science? It’s the troubled story of a young manuscript just trying to get a break in this cruel world of academic publishing.

I’m a big fan of preprints, the posting of papers in public archives prior to peer review. Preprints speed up the scientific dialogue by letting everyone see research as it happens, not 6 months to 2 years later following the sometimes extensive peer review process. They also allow more extensive pre-publication peer review because input can be solicited from the entire community of scientists, not just two or three individuals.

Over at Dynamic Ecology this morning Jeremy Fox has a post giving advice on how to decide where to submit a paper. It’s the same basic advice that I received when I started grad school almost 15 years ago and as a result I don’t think it considers some rather significant changes that have happened in academic publishing over the last decade and a half. So, I thought it would be constructive for folks to see an alternative viewpoint.

Communicating research more broadly is not only important for outreach to the public, but with the rapidly expanding literature, we think it’ll also be important for communicating to other scientists.

UPDATE: If you’re looking for the information for 2014, checkout the DEBrief post for links. It’s that time of year again when we’re all busy working on preproposals for the National Science Foundation, and just like last year it’s more difficult than you would think to track down the official guidelines using Google.