Cover of The Vanishing Wild : Australian Wildlife and the Fight Against Extinction by Justine Hausheer.

The back cover. Jack Ashby's quote reads: "With her engaging and impassioned accounts, Justine Hausheer takes readers with her as she visits conservationists in the field and lab working tirelessly to save a series of incredible animals from extinction, while the world waits for politicians to take the environment seriously." The whole cover reads: "'I'M LISTENING FOR A GHOST. BRIGHT GREEN AND YELLOW WITH A TAIL STRIPED LIKE A BUMBLE-BEE.IT CROUCHES IN WAIT AS THE SUN SINKS BELOW THE ESCARPMENT.' Australia is a country celebrated for its wildlife, yet native species are in crisis. In the last 200 years, Australia has lost more biodiversity than any other developed nation, In this book, award-winning science writer Justine E. Hausheer encounters pygmy possums that live high in the Snowy Mountains, hears the booming calls of bitterns from their adopted home in the Riverina's rice fields, crouches after dark in the spinifex grasslands listening for the elusive night parrot and meets adorable fat-tailed dunnarts who might hold the answers to reviving the Tasmanian tiger. The Vanishing Wild immerses us in the harsh reality of the extinction crisis - and shows us the future of conservation and what can be done to save Australia's native species. Justine Hausheer takes readers with her as she visits conservationists in the field and lab working tirelessly to save a series of incredible animals from extinction, while the world waits for politicians to take the environment seriously. Jack Ashby , author of Platypus Matters 'Beautifully gives voice both to the animals on the precipice as well as those dedicated to bringing them back,' Sean Dooley, BirdLife Australia NEWSOUTH 9 1781761117039 WILDLIFE/ POPULAR SCIENCE/ NATURAL HISTORY" A UNSW COMPANY

Here's a great book about Australian #conservation. I was delighted to provide a quote for the cover. @justinehausheer.bsky.social takes readers into the lab and field to meet conservationists working to stop Australia's #extinction crisis, and the political inertia they're battling against.

A hand holding a phone displaying the Where to Watch Birds in Scotland app. Aberlady Bay (one of the sites featured in the app) can be seen in the background. It has a grassy/saltmarsh edge and the bay beyond is filled with water at high tide with a wooden bridge crossing it.

Where to Watch Birds in Scotland launched on this day in 2019

With 1.75 million site views since then, our free app helps beginner & experienced birders alike discover the best places to see birds across Scotland.

If you haven't downloaded it yet, you can do so here www.the-soc.org.uk/about-us/app

Emperor Penguin now Endangered!🐧

Our new IUCN Red List assessment reveals the shocking impact of climate change.🌍

Drastic declines and erratic changes in sea ice in Antarctica are projected to cause the Emperor Penguin population to halve by the 2080s.📉

Read more👉 www.birdlife.org/emperorpenguin

Nice to finally finish off a nearly five-year-old side project and dip my toes into something non-birdy for once!

New paper out today in @austentsoc.bsky.social Austral Entomology! Analysing nearly 300,000 @inaturalist.bsky.social observations by 22,000 #citizenscience users reveals many new insights into where Australian butterflies occur.

Open Access here: doi.org/10.1111/aen....

Two great postdoc opportunities with @eesaupe.bsky.social in Oxford on macroecology/extinction/conservation through a paleobiological lens

What does biodiversity look like in your own backyard? That's the question we explored when our team headed to visit the ever-iconic Martha Stewart to help document the wildlife living alongside her gardens.

Catch the full segment on CBS Sunday Morning: tr.ee/hTkHNx0zxJ

Close-up of delicate pink and white fuzzy flower held in hand. Text reads "FOR 60 YEARS, PEOPLE THOUGHT THIS PLANT WAS EXTINCT"

Field of silvery-pink feathery flowers growing among grasses. Text explains Ptilotus senarius hadn't been seen since the 1960s until someone shared it on iNaturalist.

Ground view of flowering plant growing in rocky soil. Text reads "On iNaturalist, community members helped confirm this species had survived, unnoticed, for decades."

Flowering plants in Australian bushland with eucalyptus trees. Text reads "SOMETHING THAT LOOKS ORDINARY MIGHT SURPRISE YOU — AND EVERYONE."

Ptilotus senarius hadn’t been seen since the 1960s. People thought it was extinct — until nature-enthusiast and horticulturist Aaron Bean came across it and shared an observation to iNaturalist. There, community members helped confirm what once seemed impossible: this species had survived.

Citizen scientist re-discovers Australian plant thought extinct for nearly 60 years A plant which was last collected 58 years ago has been rediscovered thanks to photographs presented on the citizen science platform iNaturalist. Ptilotus senarius is a small shrub found in the north of Australian state Queensland. The species was only named in 2014 after analysis of herbarium specimens from 1925...

A horticulturalist putting bands on birds in a remote part of QLD saw an interesting plant.

He uploaded photos to a #CitizenScience app, where a Queensland Herbarium botanist saw them and recognised a plant thought to be extinct:

connectsci.au/news/news-pa...

@ausjbotany.bsky.social #AusJBotany

A Typology of Australian Terrestrial Bird Communities Aim Holistic measurement of the response of fauna communities to interventions requires suitable community condition metrics. However, the development of such metrics is hindered by the absence of b...

Thrilled to be part of this new study that aims to derive a meaningful classification of distinct and recognisable Australian terrestrial bird communities. Lead by @martinemaron.bsky.social and Hannah Fraser with many other colleagues check it out here.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

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...

The @theseabirdgroup.bsky.social 1992 conference was sponsored by shortbread and whiskey!

We need more of this.

Guidelines: - Best Practice for Using iNaturalist in the UK: Best Practice for Using iNaturalist in the UK A practical, optional guide to help your observations integrate smoothly with the UK biological recording system This guidance is entirely optional. You...

forum.inaturalist.org/t/guidelines...

Great to attend #BES2025 in Edinburgh this week, and to have the opportunity to share some of my PhD work with conference attendees!

We churned through over 100 million radar samples to quantify the structure of migration through the airspaces across the United States: Just out in Ecology esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

Far eastern curlew illustration by @terngirl

Richard Fuller, winner of the #AOC2025 Serventy Medal, talks about migratory birds in Australia. From shorebirds that use the East Asian – Australasian Flyway to surreptitious night-time migrant, the story of bird migration is far richer than most of us realise. www.fullerlab.org

So excited to shared this project lead with @fredericddb.bsky.social and many enthusiastic ecologists. We played as predators and prey and with quite simple rules and were able to reproduce phenomenon observed in nature. doi.org/10.1111/2041...
@methodsinecoevol.bsky.social

GitHub - hadley/genzplyr: dplyr but make it bussin fr fr no cap dplyr but make it bussin fr fr no cap. Contribute to hadley/genzplyr development by creating an account on GitHub.

Do you teach #rstats? Do your students complain about how lame and old-fashioned dplyr is? Don't worry: I have the solution for you: github.com/hadley/genzp....

genzplyr is dplyr, but bussin fr fr no cap.

Featuring a Desertas petrel that stunned scientists by chasing a tropical storm (see their incredible chase mapped here!), tiny nightingales that cross the Sahara twice a year, and Bewick's swans that have changed their stopovers and diet

The next International Statistical Ecology Conference (ISEC) will take place on January 8-15, 2027, in Mérida, México.

Calls for workshop and roundtable proposals now open, deadline Nov 15, 2025 (anywhere on earth).

Visit statisticalecology.org for more information. 🧪

Please share widely 📈🦋🐾

Variable: e.g. Carrion Crow -ve, Raven +ve, Rook/Hoodie CIs overlap 1.

For the very common stuff, you start to run into detectability effects - particularly in the BirdTrack analysis - where species are likely to be the first-recorded regardless of preference, given how common and obvious they are.

Large citizen science datasets are powerful tools for biodiversity science, but they may have biases. Nice new paper from @louisbackstrom.bsky.social et al. showing that for eBird and Birdtrack lists there is a tendency for rare species to be over-represented
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

A lot of common species are in that sweet spot. Skylark perhaps closest: 1.001 from the eBird analysis and 0.999 from the BirdTrack analysis. From a quick check through Table S1, other examples inc. Goldeneye, Blue Tit, Goldfinch, Little Egret, Kestrel, Fulmar, Bullfinch, Blackcap.

Swainson's Thrush perched in a tree at Cuithir, Barra. Photo taken by Louis Backstrom.

View over the small patch of woodland where we saw the Swainson's Thrush at Cuithir, Barra.

Brilliant trip to Barra and Colonsay (19th-23rd Sep) with @birdingscot.bsky.social, @louisbackstrom.bsky.social, and James Weeks. Some great birds over the course of the trip, with Stuart Beeby's Swainson's Thrush at Cuithir the undeniable highlight, and a lifer for all of us! 1/4
#BirdingScotland

In spite of these preferences leading to the overrepresentation of certain species in the eBird & BirdTrack datasets, we found that this bias had limited impacts on actual applications of the data (occupancy models). Even so, we urge consideration of observer bias in analyses of #citizenscience.

Rare #birds were significantly more likely to drive survey initiation, with other species-specific factors like novelty and charisma also potentially contributing, especially among more common species.

These observer preferences were most prevalent on short-duration surveys (less than 5 min). ⤵️

Using #citizenscience data from eBird @cornellbirds.bsky.social and BirdTrack @birdtrack.bsky.social @btobirds.bsky.social, we explore what drives birders to initiate semi-structured surveys on these two large-scale citizen science platforms.

The biggest factor: species rarity! ⤵️

Detections of Rare Species Lead Citizen Scientists to Initiate Data Recording Aim Citizen science data are increasingly used to monitor biodiversity but come with several challenges that can impair accurate ecological conclusions. We explore how observers' preferences for cer...

Very pleased to share my first PhD paper, out now in @consbiog.bsky.social:

Backstrom, L. J., Drake, R. L., Worthington, H., & Johnston, A. (2025). Detections of Rare Species Lead Citizen Scientists to Initiate Data Recording. Diversity and Distributions, 31(10), e70103. doi.org/10.1111/ddi.... ⤵️