🦜🏔️ How did vibrant Amazonian parrot feathers end up in a desert tomb on the Pacific coast of Peru 1,000 years ago? Our new paper on @natcomms.nature.com reveals they didn't just trade feathers, pre-Inca societies transported live macaws and parrots across the Andes!👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Massive phenomics dataset spanning the #ants tree of life, with 2,000+ whole-body 3D scans! Congratulations to @shubhamgautam.bsky.social , member of our bullab.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
New paper out! 🐦📊
We realease AVONICHE, a global dataset with detailed information on the proportional use of 32 foraging niches, combining dietary categories with the behaviours and substrates used to access resources.
Openly access the paper and data in GEB: doi.org/10.1111/geb....
Phylogenetic and functional analyses across 34 Lepidoptera and 183 plant species show that hexenal isomerases found in Lepidoptera exhibit functional convergence with those found in plants despite having evolved independently from unrelated enzyme families 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Is #AI turning grant evaluation into a lottery? 🎲
The 2025 generative AI improvement coincides with ~20% of proposals scoring >95% in EU #MSCA call.
We’ve reached "excellence saturation."
Time to rethink funding?
👉 doi.org/10.31222/osf...
w/ @birder158.bsky.social
#MetaScience #AcademicSky
Mitochondrial DNA from horses at the Middle Pleistocene archaeological site of Schöningen reveals insight into the evolutionary history of horses, and advances techniques for the analysis of ancient DNA retrieved from highly degraded samples 🧪🐴 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Are our 95% CIs only worth 45% confidence? New preprint authors argue that's too pessimistic and outline extended CIs beyond sampling error. doi.org/10.1101/2025...
#statistics #OpenScience #Reproducibility
cc @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social
@sortee.bsky.social
"Ungeneralizable generalizations? A meta-meta-analysis of the influence of taxonomic bias on the study of behavior." - doi.org/10.32942/X2X...
Tiny hands, tiny birds, big curiosity. 🐦⬛✨
We took local grammar school kids bird ringing—and they loved it.
From gently holding a warbler to learning why birds wear “bracelets,” they got a front-row seat to real science.
🔍📏💍 = ❤️
🔗 martinbulla.github.io//bullab/gall...
#ornithology #scienceoutreach
Coming soon! A mid-summer special BOW Discovery Webinar on AVILIST - the world's first unified global checklist of birds. Does this sound good? Would you like to join us?
Stay tuned for more info. Target is late July. We'll do our best to make this during a globally friendly timeslot.
The deadline for the job application is today.
Jury Theorems for Peer Review Marcus Arvan, Liam Kofi Bright, and Remco Heesen Abstract: Peer review is often taken to be the main form of quality control on academic research. Usually journals carry this out. However, parts of maths and physics appear to have a parallel, crowd-sourced model of peer review, where articles are posted on the arXiv to be publicly discussed. In this article we argue that crowd-sourced peer review is likely to do better than journal-solicited peer review at sorting articles by quality. Our argument rests on two key claims. First, crowd-sourced peer review will lead on average to more reviewers per article than journal-solicited peer review. Second, due to the wisdom of the crowds, more reviewers will tend to make better judgements than fewer reviewers will. We make the second claim precise by looking at the Condorcet jury theorem as well as two related jury theorems developed specifically to apply to peer review.
Paper is finally up and open access (www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...), it's a sequel to an earlier paper where we'd argued that there's not good evidence that pre-publication peer review is a net benefit (www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1093/...). So in this one we suggest an alternative.
When performing multiple imputation of missing data, it is essential to evaluate how the imputed values compare to the observed data.
The attached image was created with the bwplot() function.
More: eepurl.com/gH6myT
#rstats #bigdata #businessanalyst #datavisualization
Land use intensification is a major driver of biodiversity change and ecosystem functioning. Here Bagousse-Pinguet et al. identify thresholds of grassland plant community structure and stability in response to land use intensification www.nature.com/articles/s41...
🚨Some required reading for anyone dabbling in trait-based ecology & ecosystem science.
New archaeological and ancient genomic data from humans in Papua New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago shed light on regional human admixture and genetic isolation over the past 2,500 years www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Scatterplot showing positive correlation between avian wing bone length and temperature across ~1500 bird species, along with diagrams comparing wing bones with low versus high proportional length
Another unexpected angle on bird wing evolution: skeletal measurements suggest that wing bone length is shaped not only by aerodynamics of flight but also by thermoregulation (1/4)
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
#macroecology #ornithology 🧪🌎🌐🪶
Now published!!!! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Pollinator decline has captured global attention, but another plant-animal mutualism is quietly unraveling.
Our new Nature Reviews Biodiversity article synthesizes global evidence on seed disperser decline and what it means for plant biodiversity, ecosystem recovery, and climate adaptation. 🧵
Unsolicited listicle: My list of the most criminally underused/underappreciated phylogenetic comparative methods. Note, I am not involved in ANY of these methods; but I see them as things people are often asking of comparative data but have been surprised at how infrequently they have been cited.
🚨New paper alert!🚨
We show that hummingbird beaks have changed in shape & size since around WWII, driven by the rise of commercialized feeders! 🧵
📄 Paper: dx.doi.org/10.1111/gcb....
#ornithology #evolution #GlobalChangeBiology
