Wars of choice murder countless people today—and drown the homes of countless people tomorrow.
—Each 5-year delay in peaking carbon emissions will cause an extra 8 inches of sea-level rise by 2300.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A female hairy woodpecker perches on the side of a spruce tree trunk. She is black and white with a long sturdy beak for digging into the trees looking for bugs. The background is orange from the late evening sun.
We are fortunate to have both Downy and Hairy Woodpeckers around all year, but they are particularly active in the winter.
This female Hairy Woodpecker arrived with a few loud PIPS, to forage for snacks on or in the trees!
#Birds #photography #wildlife 🪶
I’m so excited for this! Who’s going?
My talk will be about time, as ecology’s final frontier: dynamics, timescales, resolution and extent, historical contingencies, and the denominator of all ecological processes.
US domestic corn use from 1980 to 2022. See if you can spot when the Renewable Fuels Standard was established in 2005. Source: USDA NASS.
US transportation energy sources, 2022. Gasoline more than half. Biofuels 6%. Source: EIA.
Today the US uses about 30-40% of our corn supply and 40-50% of our soybean oil supply to produce biofuels that account for…
…about 6% of our total transportation fuel.
Lots of land & food/feed, small amount of energy.
Solar is 100x more efficient per acre at producing energy.
End of 🧵 for now.
🚩Dig into plant functional ecology! 🌱⛏️Join the 8th Go Belowground! PhD course (13–19 Sep 2026, Czech Republic) Lectures, hands-on field, lab training ▶️ 1url.cz/2ziQz
#clonality #budbank #belowground #mophology #roots #traits #GoBelowground #ExFuMo #functional #course
Changes in simulated natural grassland area and soil moisture under different SSP scenarios based on the outputs of the UKESM1 model. (A1) Spatial distribution of average natural grassland area percentages during the historical period (1950–2014), (A2) spatial distribution of average change in natural grassland areas under the SSP1-2.6 projection (2070–2100) compared to the historical period, (A3) spatial distribution of average change in natural grassland areas under the SSP5-8.5 projection (2070–2100) compared to the historical period, (B1) spatial distribution of average moisture in the upper portion of soil column during the historical period (1950–2014), (B2) spatial distribution of average change in soil moisture under the SSP1-2.6 projection (2070–2100) compared to the historical period, (B3) spatial distribution of average change in soil moisture under the SSP5-8.5 projection (2070–2100) compared to the historical period, and (C) percent of total global natural grassland areas with soil moisture in the upper soil column in excess of 10, 20, 30, and 40 kg/m2 during the historical period (1950–2014) and under the SSP1-2.6 and SSP5-8.5 projections (2015–2100) - all show decreasing trends. It should be noted that results are subject to model-specific uncertainties.
These findings have implications for future warming, mediated by hydroclimate-biogeochemical feedbacks. It is too soon to constrain those with certainty, but at least model simulations suggest this could be a negative feedback, with drier soils causing lower methane emissions or even uptake.
New paper with our long-term collaborators from CUG Wuhan (led by Xinyue Dang), showing a threshold response in soil moisture that induces an abrupt shift in soil microbial community and methane emissions. @ogu-bristol.bsky.social @bristoluni.bsky.social @cabot-institute.bsky.social
Dense, dark forests in Europe are a modern phenomenon - Europe’s landscapes for 23 Myr were mostly tree- & flower-rich mosaics shaped by large herbivores, not dense #forests, see our new synthesis www.eurekalert.org/news-release... #forests #woodlands #paleoecology #nature #trees #refiorestation
Purple Rain in Cleveland, Ohio
Photo of two green-grey Cladonia podetia that look like trumpets from Dr. Seuss book.
A couple of Dr. Seuss trumpets.
Cladonia lichens. NWT, Canada.
These lichens are about 2cm high.
#lichen #fungi #fungifriends
US Congress is advancing housing legislation. On @urbaninstitute.bsky.social, I examine land-use elements in both House & Senate bills.
There are some promising opportunities in the legislation—best-practice guidelines & rewards for cities building lots of housing—but also areas for improvement.
Extensive conversion of grasslands & wetlands driven by global food, feed, & bioenergy demand (Kan et al., 2026) doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
Global patterns of commodity-driven deforestation & associated carbon emissions (Singh & Persson, 2026) doi.org/10.1038/s430...
WRI: www.wri.org/insights/glo...
They were going to pass rules to phase out gas stoves, until they received 20,000 public comments against the regulations. Except, oops, it turns out the comments were generated by AI.
In my utopian vision of the future, instead of offloading all the pointless, annoying work tasks (like reports that none one will read and needlessly opaque forms) to robots, we restructure work and society so that the pointless tasks don't happen at all.
This is amazing.
www.getyourfuckingmoneyback.com
Poem The Rainmakers by Francis Harvey
Francis Harvey meditates on hope, futility, and the human impulse to intervene in forces beyond our control.
The act of calling down rain becomes something larger than weather. It’s about standing beneath an empty sky and refusing despair.
#poetry
#poemoftheday
Canopy Height Model
CHM with forest canopy gaps detected
Identifying #forest canopy gaps is important for understanding forest development & biological diversity. New R notebook outlines a workflow to detect canopy gaps from Canopy Height Models derived from ALS #lidar data. Available at:
github.com/OpenForest4D...
#RemoteSensing #Forestry #GoogleColab
one of my things is coming up with titles for self-help books or boardroom presentations and today's offering is "From Performative to Transformative," you're so welcome
Conceptual model of the expected role of dryland mechanisms along a climatic gradient from cool and moist towards hot and dry conditions, and their relevance for climate-smart forestry.
Ecophysiology for climate-smart forest management
#TansleyReview by Gessler et al. @wslresearch.bsky.social @arthurobuntspecht.bsky.social @annekempel.bsky.social @josegruenzweig.bsky.social
nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
#plantscience
🧵 In its Endangerment Finding rescission, US EPA chose to ignore the effects of the rule on public health and the environment by refusing to even quantify them or report them in the rule.
So I dug into the docket to quantify those costs myself, using EPA's own models.
Suprematism, by Nikolai Suetin, 1920-21, 📸 by @tiltoncreative
now I am stressed about grading them 🤣
Don't miss this one 👇 and the Global Wood Density Database v2, doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
European governments and institutions surged military aid to Ukraine by 67% and financial and humanitarian support by 59% in 2025 while Trump abandoned the battered country and its people, throwing his support to Russia. www.axios.com/2026/02/19/u...
March monthly outlook just dropped by the Climate Prediction Center.
What are the sources of cropland GHG emissions? Mostly rice cultivation & peatland drainage (~70% combined). A new study led by Cornell & @projectdrawdown.bsky.social details sources of these GHGs doi.org/10.1038/s415...
See nice write up @worldresources.bsky.social www.wri.org/insights/cli...
“At NSF, the net reduction of 205 STEM Ph.D.s between 1 January and 30 November constituted 40% of its total pre-Trump Ph.D. workforce of 517, by far the largest percentage at any agency. STEM Ph.D.s also make up a larger percentage of the total workforce at NSF than at any other agency…”.
Greater Roadrunner portrait
This absolute unit just hopped on our back wall. 🪶
Come work with us! 🧪🌐🧑💻🌿🐸❄️
I am hireing a #postdoc in Climate Change Ecology to work on Ecological Synthesis and support the upcoming #IPCC report as a Chapter Scientist (CH14: terrestrial, freshwater and cryopspheric biodiversity, ecosystems, and services. #IPCC #AR7
@ipcc.bsky.social
Close up photo of a small section of a crustose lichen that’s grey in places and orange in others. It looks sort of like a barren landscape with mountains and valleys.
I love how the surface of some crustose lichens can look like an aerial view of an exotic landscape. This picture covers about 5cm, left to right.
Porpidia #lichen. #Newfoundland, Canada. #fungi #fungifriends
