📅Next Tuesday, our online seminar speaker will be Lisa Buche @lili-buche.bsky.social (ETH Zürich), presenting:
⭐Moving beyond linear interactions in community ecology⭐
Zoom link: iite.info/seminar/
Global times: www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/f...
Free and open to all - we hope to see you there!
Interesting reading for ecologists considering adding higher-order interactions into their models.
Stay tuned for our next preprint on this! 👀
From Arjun Krishnan @compbiologist.bsky.social
Expertise before augmentation: a practical guide to using generative AI during research training: zenodo.org/records/1845...
Build expertise first: why PhD training must sequence AI use after foundational skill development: zenodo.org/records/1864...
In 1836, Darwin visited this crater in Ascension Island and wrote:
“These saucer-shaped layers crop out on the margin, forming perfect rings of many different colours, giving to the summit a most fantastic appearance... hence the hill has been called the Devil’s Riding School.”
The issue is that attention doesn't scale. I already have to ignore good papers because there are simply too many.
If it hasn't been filtered through human critical thought... it’s just more noise added to the already oversaturated publication world 🫠
This is just the first of many outputs from our amazing interdisciplinary team:
1 🌱 ecologist + 1 🍎 physicist-turned-theoretical ecologist from @ebdonana.bsky.social, joining forces with 3 🧮 mathematicians + 1 🦉 philosopher from @unisevilla.us.es
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
For too long, theoretical ecology has been heavily biased toward competition. We hope our work sparks new discussions on building robust theoretical models that treat cooperation as an equally important driver of biodiversity.
Let us know your thoughts!
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...
3️⃣ Alternative Assembly Pathways: Because cooperation expands the feasibility domain, it creates a "bloom" of alternative assembly graphs, so communities gain multiple different structural pathways to reach a state where all species coexist
2️⃣ Intertwined Biodiversity: Cooperation allows for species that couldn't persist on their own. Species with negative intrinsic growth rates in harsh environments can survive and thrive simply due to the presence of cooperative species 🤝
1️⃣ Enlarged Coexistence Opportunities: Cooperation enlarges the range of conditions allowing species to coexist compared to competition. The effect is non-linear: as community size grows, cooperation increases the range of possible intrinsic growth of species
Using the structural stability framework, our paper serves as a proof of concept to show how positive interactions (aka facilitation, mutualism, or your word of choice) expand on coexistence mechanisms. We identified 3 distinct ways cooperation maximizes biodiversity:
Finally! Here is our perspective on why cooperation maximizes diversity and how it promotes additional coexistence mechanisms that do not occur under competition
journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...
This is a hard topic with strong opinions... Thanks @asn-amnat.bsky.social for publishing it! 🧵👇
after much deliberation and giving AI the benefit of the doubt, Wikipedia editors have had enough of AI slop. New policy bans LLM generated content, periodt www.404media.co/wikipedia-ba...
Hoy hablaré en el programa “A vivir que son dos días” en la cadena SER sobre la terraformación de la Isla de Ascensión. cadenaser.com/cadena-ser/a...
This isn't good news.
The ArXiv has been the best — and single — holdout of truly nonprofit academic publishing, even if it's “only” a pre-print server.
This moves us away from a more dignified academic publishing system, not closer.
www.science.org/content/arti...
✨ Our grants are back! ✨
Young researcher in Complex Systems?
Apply for yrCSS grants to support:
💡 conferences / schools / workshops
🤝 research visits & collaborations
🌍 extra support for low-income countries
🗓️ Deadline: 20 March 2026
👉 yrcss.cssociety.org/grants/
New blog post:
"Higher orders need higher standards"
skewed.de/lab/posts/hi...
I discuss our current work disentangling misconceptions around "higher-order" networks: arxiv.org/abs/2602.16937
Explainer thread for the paper here: bsky.app/profile/tiag...
The NYT style guide
📣 Join us for the TENET satellite at @netsciconf.bsky.social in Boston!
Following the enthusiasm for last year’s editions, we're bringing together researchers working on Temporal Networks!
✏️2 pages abstracts
📆 Submit by Feb 20, 2026
🔗 more info here: tinyurl.com/4zevnyft
Jeremy Fox has a new book out, 'The Ecology of Ecologists'. What's that about, and should you read it? (Quick answers: how ecology's chaos of approaches is a feature, not a bug; and YES.) scientistseessquirre... 🌍🧪
Congrats Dr Maull!
A lot of “network analysis” about the Epstein Files.
Nearly all of them missing the point: when a system operates under strong incentives for discretion, what gets documented is NOT a neutral sample of reality.
Results are conditional on what is observed!
open.substack.com/pub/manlius/...
☀️ 2026 Summer School in the Pyrenees - Unifying Mathematical Models of Biodiversity
Applications are now open!
This school offers a state-of-the-art overview for interdisciplinary theoreticians.
🗓️ July 5-11
🎯 PhD students to senior researchers
ℹ️ intp.science/en/summer26....
📭 contact@intp.science
🌐🧪
Apply now to become a member of the Advisory Board!
Excited to share a new PhD thesis from my student and soon Dr @vmaull.bsky.social on synthetic ecosystems, preventing tipping points, and a new concept: emergent bioengineering. Very proud of this achievement, and thankful to @sfiscience.bsky.social, where many of these ideas came to life.
📣We will be back soon with a new series of online theory seminars!
As ever, free and open for all via Zoom. Follow us on here, or join our email list (iite.info/seminar-emai...) for details.
In the meantime, all our past talks are on Youtube: www.youtube.com/@theoretical...
See you there!
🌱🧩 La semana pasada tuvo lugar en Sevilla la 4ª Reunión de la Sociedad Española de Sistemas Complejos, organizado por nuestras investigadoras @violetacalleja.bsky.social y @domgarvir.bsky.social y la @unisevilla.us.es.
La investigadora @paniw.bsky.social fue una de las conferenciantes invitadas.
The call for participants for Complexity72h is finally open! Apply by February 28 for the best collab ever!
Why???
✨ Amazing projects
👩🏫 Fantastic tutors
📍 A great location
👉 Apply now: www.complexitynextgen.org/complexity72...
Do you REALLY need anything else to be convinced?
We didn’t think so.
Pablo Valgañon during his talk
Pablo Valgañon presenting our results
@pvalganon.bsky.social from @paleoipe.bsky.social group at the @ipe-csic.bsky.social presenting our work on causal networks in pleoecology at the CS3 meeting @cs3conference.bsky.social taking place in Sevilla.
