Our new paper on the cover of PNAS, led by Anderson Bueno and Chase Mendenhall, shows that that terrestrial matrices and higher nearby tree cover reduce bird extirpations and boost species richness in forest remnants #ornithology www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 🪶🌍

Wildlife trade drives animal-to-human pathogen transmission over 40 years

New in @science.org ‼️ In the most comprehensive study to date, we show that wildlife trade is driving animal-to-human zoonotic spillover at a planetary scale, with +1 spillover per host every 10 years. Live animal markets and illegal trade pose even greater risks. 🔓 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Well, that's fun.

Link to the paper if you're curious: besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Purdue AeroEco Lab Opportunities

🚨 Hiring a postdoc (2 years)!
We’re looking for someone with skills in data science, remote sensing, or computer science:
🛰️ Build next-gen nighttime light products
🦅 Link light spectra to migration & collision risk

Apply or reach out!

aeroecolab.com/opportunities

"Majority Clade Credibility tree results from the partitioned Bayesian analyses of the concatenated data set (cytochrome b, MB, ODC) calibrated using three fossils. Numbers close to the nodes refer to maximum likelihood bootstrap support/concatenated beast posterior probabilities/species tree posterior probabilities. Values are indicated when at least one the three values was ≥70%, ≥0.95 or ≥0.95, respectively."

All 33 shrike species trace their roots to Africa ~8 million years ago, when C4 grasses exploded across the continent. Oh, and Magpie Shrikes? Just big Lanius. The first complete shrike phylogeny reveals Laniidae is basically one giant genus. doi.org/10.1111/zsc.... #2026MMM #RIP

IMAGE SHOWS GRAPHIC OF CORNELL LAB OF ORNITHOLOGY PHYLOGENY EXPLORER TOOL.

MAJOR NEWS! We just launched an awesome new tool! The illustrated Birds of the World Phylogeny Explorer lets users trace any bird’s lineage, compare species relationships, and explore major evolutionary milestones with a click of a button. SHARE and EXPLORE! birdsoftheworld.org/bow/news/phy...

i'm a simple man. just give me a list. or better yet a link to a Google scholar page :)

Periodically stationary distribution (probability that the fly is active) as a function of the time of day. True stationary distribution is compared to biased approximation, and we see a substantial difference.

Our paper on #HMMs with periodically ⏰ varying transition probabilities is published! 🎉 @carlinafeldmann.bsky.social, Sina Mews, @rmichels.bsky.social @rolandlangrock.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1214/25-AOAS2107

We derive the periodically #stationary distribution and the implied dwell-time distribution

A massive thank you to @ecolsocaus.bsky.social for the "Next Generation Ecologist" Award and for having me give a plenary (😵‍💫). A whirlwind of a week

Hey prospective PhD students 👋

happy to work with students interested in developing a proposal

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP)

The GRFP lives!! (due end of October)
www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

Evaluating macroecological fire impacts on bird populations Fire regimes are context-dependent, as are the ways that animals respond. However, most information on animal responses to fire comes from short-term local field studies, which are hard to extrapolat....

We have a new paper developing methods for looking at bird-fire macroecology. What’s most fascinating to me is that the magnitude *and* direction of fire effects can vary enormously across a species range. Stationarity is dead!! Long live non-stationarity!!

doi.org/10.1002/fee....

One mother for two species via obligate cross-species cloning in ants - Nature In a case of obligate cross-species cloning, female ants of Messor ibericus need to clone males of Messor structor to obtain sperm for producing the worker caste, resulting in males from the same moth...

🚨 🐜 is there a Bluesky starter pack for researchers who don’t study ants but who get lightheaded every time there’s an awesome ant paper? CC @mariusw.bsky.social @jrichardalbert.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Animals don’t just live in their environments—they transform them. And in doing so, they may also shape their own evolutionary trajectories. Our new paper in Trends in Ecology & Evolution introduces a framework for zoogeochemical niche construction. A thread 👇

Moncrieff Lab | Bird Evolution The Moncrieff Lab is a research lab based at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History on the campus of the University of Oklahoma. Research in the lab involves museum specimens, fieldwork, and...

🐦🔬 Recruiting PhD students! 🌎🧬
I’m looking for 1–2 PhD students to join our team starting Fall 2026 at the Sam Noble Museum & University of Oklahoma.

Our research: 🐦 birds • 🌍 biogeography • 🌴 Neotropics • 🧬 population genomics • 🌱 speciation

👉 Learn more: www.moncriefflab.org

Please share!

A recent Statistical Report in "Ecology"👇

Avian influenza spillover into poultry: environmental influences and biosecurity protections With the continued spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), understanding the complex dynamics of virus transfer at the wild – agriculture …

New pub alert! Very excited to share work providing actionable insights into how we can better implement biosecurity and plan surveillance for avian influenza in the US. This virus doesn’t look to be going away so best to adjust accordingly.

😍 congrats, well deserved!

All hail Anonymous Potato 🫡

Genetic Characterization of the Cell Types in Developing Feathers, and the Evolution of Feather Complexity We used single cell sequencing to investigate the cell types of developing chicken feathers. From these data, we are able to describe the transcriptional profile of feather cell types, look at their ....

My feather cell type paper is finally out! doi.org/10.1111/ede.... We’ve packed a ton of stuff into this paper but I’ll go through some highlights in this thread!

🙏

😊🥹 aw shucks you're too kind!!!

Migration shapes senescence in a long-lived bird | PNAS Each year, billions of animals migrate across the globe on diverse spatial and temporal scales. Migration behavior thus plays a fundamental role in...

🦩🦩🦩 First paper from my last postdoc at @tourduvalat.bsky.social, co-first authored with Hugo Cayuela, is now published in @pnas.org. Thanks to a wonderful dataset on the Greater Flamingo in southern France, we investigated the relationship between migratory behaviour and ageing. 🦩🦩🦩

best kind of post

Jim Estes, biologist who revealed how sea otters shape entire ecosystems, died on May 20, aged 79 When Jim Estes first arrived in the Aleutian Islands in 1970, he expected a routine wildlife survey. What he found was the outline of a scientific revelation. In places where sea otters thrived, the…

Jim was an incredible ecologist. I own several of his books, and cite his research reguarly. www.butlernature.com/2025/08/20/j...

🙏☺️

nice scientific writing alert -- check out the first line from this new Science paper by @gilbert-lab.bsky.social & Brent Pease

"in many parts of the world, the night is no longer dark"

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Title and author list for the synthesis paper titled "Understanding and Predicting Population Response to Anthropogenic Disturbance: Current Approaches and Novel Opportunities" published in Ecology Letters.

The latest paper from the DISCAR synthesis group is out at Ecology Letters! We discuss the key approaches to predicting human impacts on wildlife populations, highlighting avenues for incorporating indirect effects, such as energetic modelling. doi.org/10.1111/ele....

PSA: all y'all should hire Joel for your scientific illustrating needs. He's an up-and-coming artist and is great to work with!!

First postdoc paper just dropped! Using 50 years of Breeding Bird Survey data, we found that the unexpected functional shifts of bird communities in North America do not track species-level expectations, and these unexpected shifts can be explained by just 5% of “hyper-dominant” species.