The long-delayed Deer Strategy for England has some good provisions around streamlined licensing & support for venison markets.
But it’s unclear if govt will set culling targets, & zero mention of reintroducing lynx and wolves.
Ministers need to buck up their ideas…
www.gov.uk/government/p...
I am hiring a research assistant (vampire bats), a Panama fieldwork coordinator (vampire bats), and also considering postdoc apps (social behavior, any species): socialbat.org/2026/02/19/h...
New paper out! We developed a new approach to West Nile virus forecasting that is the first nationwide attempt to beat a benchmark standard (by 22%!).
The key advancement was aggregating county data to regions which boosted signals that were obscured by small case counts.
doi.org/10.1029/2025...
This is a devastating blow to Canadian dipterology, entomology, ecology, and beyond. Please share.
#diptera
@dipterists.bsky.social @teamdiptera.bsky.social @canentomologist.bsky.social @entsocamerica.bsky.social @entsocontario.bsky.social @entsocbc.bsky.social @royentsoc.bsky.social
A super handy database to help support academic society journals and other ethical publishing. academic.oup.com/jeb/article/...
we look forward seeing you on March 10 for Dr. Siqueira's webinar on "Dengue Alliance: How to Deliver Effective and
Accessible Dengue Treatments". Register: www.zoomgov.com/webinar/regi.... @utmbhealth.bsky.social @dndi.org @sbvirologia.bsky.social @astmh.bsky.social
butterfly meme ME ANYTHING IS THIS A GAUSSIAN PROCESS
New gaussian process slides going well
Fellow Dipterists / systematists / ecologists, if you have not yet heard, Agriculture & Agri-Food Canada is planning to eliminate the Diptera Unit at the Canadian National Collection of Insects, supposedly for financial reasons. The open letter below has been prepared by Dr. Art Borkent. If you agree with the letter, and would like to add your name in support, please follow the directions below. Message is as follows: ********************* The following is an “Open Letter” that will be presented to the Canadian press by a Member of Parliament, Ms. Elizabeth May. If you can support this petition, please send your name, full affiliation and address (including country) to Art Borkent’s email: artborkent@telus.net Your name will be added to a supporting list that will likely never be seen publicly but needs to be noted by our member of parliament. Please consider helping to stop the removal of the Diptera Unit in Ottawa, Canada. Please remember that we are writing this for the press – someone gave advice that it should be written at about the level of an intelligent 14 year old. If any of you are members of another society of specialized Dipterists or otherwise, please feel free to send this on to your other colleagues. I am hoping to have this submitted to Elizabeth May with all the signatures by Friday, Feb. 13. Time is of the essence. best wishes, Art Borkent and David Grimaldi
(Message too long for alt-text): the text of the first page of an open letter to support keeping the Diptera Unit open at the Canadian National Collection of Insects and Nematodes.
(Message too long for alt-text): the text of the second page of an open letter to support keeping the Diptera Unit open at the Canadian National Collection of Insects and Nematodes.
A sampling of output from the Diptera Unit at the CNC
From Chris Borkent: Fellow Dipterists/systematists/ecologists: Agri./Agri-Food Canada plans to eliminate the Diptera Unit at the Canadian National Collection of Insects. Dr. Art Borkent has prepared an open letter to support keeping the unit open. To sign, please read & follow the instructions here.
With the shuttering of the Walter Reed Biosystematics Unit last year by the US Army we are loosing a lot of expertise and future expertise in insect taxonomy and ecology.
ohvbd 1.0.0 has now been released on CRAN!
This package should help those looking for VBD data by interfacing with vbdhub.org for searching, and the VectorByte trait and population dynamics databases for data download (alongside much more).
vbdhub.org/blog/ohvbd-c...
#rstats #vectorbyte #vbd
Disturbingly detailed analysis of my first rewatch incoming
A rectangular enamel pin with two hinges on the left hand side. It looks like a book and has a picture of a tree on the front. The book is titled: Trees, a miniature guidebook. An open version of the pin shows assorted leaf shapes on the pages of the book. The leaves are labelled by species as oak, horse chestnut, sycamore, hawthorn, ash, alder, hazel, holly, lime, beech, and birch
My miniature tree identification pins are finally back in stock and the 2nd edition is better than ever! Please share them around so people can see 💚 canopyrobin.etsy.com/listing/4386...
Considering the challenge in suggesting we eat more plants, proposing insect products seems ridiculous.
But it's received $1B to try to scale & now ~80B insects are farmed.
It can actually emit as much as some beef & has major risks.
My first in the Drawdown Explorer:
drawdown.org/explorer/dep...
With WaPo locked into a death spiral, CBS effectively an arm of state news, and public media facing massive budget cuts, it's more important than ever to follow and support independent media.
Meme of two identical pie charts stacked. The pie chart are divided into equal quarters with a legend on the right. The top pie chart says: Nobody Will Remember: Your salary How "busy" you were How many hours you worked How many Gucci bags you owned The bottom pie chart says: People Will Remember: How much you knew about bugs The time you spent learning about bugs If you knew facts about bugs that made them smile If they learned to love bugs because of you
Hello Insectphile Friends!
I’m giving a casual presentation to a “ladies lunch” group next week about insects. I can talk for days about insects, both scientifically & emotionally, but that’s just me.
Tell me & help me, what should I include about why YOU love insects?
Hugs & Bugs!
💚🪲
🌿
dplyr 1.2.0 is out now and we are SO excited!
- `filter_out()` for dropping rows
- `recode_values()`, `replace_values()`, and `replace_when()` that join `case_when()` as a complete family of recoding/replacing tools
These are huge quality of life wins for #rstats!
tidyverse.org/blog/2026/02...
A global map showing that most people don't talk about or hear about climate change regularly (except in Scandinavia - I believe this is the Greta Effect!). Source: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
A global map showing that most people are worried about climate change. Source: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
Most people are worried about climate change - but most don't hear or talk about regularly.
That's why I started my free newsletter Talking Climate. Every week I share good news, not so good news, and what people can do.
If you aren't a reader yet, see below. I have 6 different ways to subscribe!
Texas A&M says PLATO may be gender or race ideology
I mean, they are so close to getting the criticisms of the western canon 😹
dailynous.com/2026/01/06/t...
Stoked to be part of this awesome group and study "Priority climate and health modelling needs" just out in @thelancetplanet.bsky.social.
Thanks to @wellcometrust.bsky.social for hosting the meeting where these ideas were spawned.
An #rstats question for package developers: If my package maintains a cache to minimise data downloads, is it sensible/preferred to put an automatic cache cleaner (delete anything older than x days) in .onLoad, or to just mostly leave cache maintenance to the user (with appropriate helpers)?
Two years ago we got together in a beautiful mountain to learn and develop #rstats packages for ecology
After {labeleR} (ecologyr.github.io/labeleR/) and {BlueCarbon} (ecologyr.github.io/BlueCarbon/), {mappestRisk} is now officially out! See thread by lead author @dario-ssm.bsky.social 👇
A top-down image of 12 various moths on a green egg carton.
Do you do moth trapping in the UK? We'd love your help! 💡
At @ukceh.bsky.social we're training & testing AI to detect multiple moths in a single image.
Send us top-down photos of multiple moths on egg trays to support this work.
More info & form: forms.gle/e3HzBPEd7RVV...
#mothsmatter #TeamMoth
@franwin.co.uk drove a massive rework of rTPC this year, making package maintenance much easier. rTPC now supports 49 different model formulations, vignettes are updated, & you can parallelise model fitting using new purrr & mirai, which is DOPE. #rstats 🧪
padpadpadpad.github.io/rTPC/article...
I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA
10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)
Sometimes you get a nice shot in dreadful light. Unfortunately the water was reflecting the sun right back at me as this great blue heron picked up a baby American alligator. #birds
You still have 5 days to apply for this awesome postdoc opportunity in the Environmental Data Science Innovation & Impact Lab at the University of Colorado-Boulder! This could be your backyard!
Two years post-doc position on viral phylodynamics available at CERP.
cerp-epi.com/fr/careers/
Introducing my new #rstats package {kitchensink}
Not sure what the right model to fit is? Should you allow random intercepts, slopes, both? What do Bayesian methods say?
Just call {kitchensink::throw} to fit every possible model and see how your results differ!
Thanks to everybody who chimed in!
I arrived at the conclusion that (1) there's a lot of interesting stuff about interactions and (2) the figure I was looking for does not exist.
So, I made it myself! Here's a simple illustration of how to control for confounding in interactions:>
New paper out! A common computational approach to predict organismal fitness and distributions in the field could vastly overpredict the potential range of thermal suitability for malaria transmission relative to performance characterized at constant temperatures: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
