New dataset of canopy tree maps for 100 million trees in the National Ecological Observatory Network with information on location, species identify, and size.

Welcome back to our next installment of: what the heck is happening with the Portal rodents? For those just tuning in, I might recommend reading our first two installments: Regime Shift Cometh? and Regime Shift Still Cometh? June in the Arizona desert can be a brutal time for conducting the Portal rodent trip.

Back when I had optimistic views of my time, I vowed to do more blogging this year. Sadly, life had other plans. But I return with an update to an earlier post on the Portal rodent community. To recap, in April 2023, my student Pat Dumandan and I were afraid.

If you’re interested in big ecological datasets, natural history, ecological forecasting, 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; July 27-28; a student/postdoc only conference that occurs before the larger conference).

This year is the 25th anniversary of The Carpentries, a non-profit teaching “foundational coding and data science skills to researchers”. As part of this anniversary community members were invited to describe “How has The Carpentries made an impact on you?”. I wrote about this for The Carpentries Blog and am cross posting it here. In short, in my case, The Carpentries has changed every aspect of my professional life.

Every 10 years, the desert rodent community at the Portal Project reorganizes. We know this thanks to a paper led by former graduate student Erica Christensen where we documented the long-term dynamics of change in the Portal rodent community.

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 started Jabberwocky Ecology back in 2008 when blogs were becoming the dominant medium for informal (online) academic discussions.

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.

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.