A screenshot of the title and abstract page of an article in Soil Organisms journal, entitled 'Advocating for the lobe and protection of soil animals through photography: the work of Frank Ashwood and Andy Murray'.

A photograph of a round, hard-bodied mite walking among a cluster of lollipop-shaped slime mold fruiting bodies.

Want to start doing soil animal macrophotography? Or fancy a rare glimpse into mine and @mesofauna.bsky.social's minds?

An article has just dropped in @soilorganismsj.bsky.social, showcasing mine and Andy's love for documenting soil biodiversity! 🧪🪱

Open Access: soil-organisms.org/SO/article/v...

I really want to know what underpinned that statement about excluding funding research into 'natural sounds or processes'. What triggered that?!

Soilsposting on my holidays www.instagram.com/p/DWj6qN0Eo2G #nzsoils #soilclassification #drivebynerdery #cantstopwontstop

Report to the prime minister: prioritisation in new zealand's science, innovation and technology system

new zealand's 47-page govt report on science, out today, uses the terms "basic science", "discovery science", and "fundamental science" zero times

"curiosity-driven research" appears only in regard to cutting it

a foolish report released on April Fool's Day

www.mbie.govt.nz/assets/repor...

View out my front windscreen looking into the truck deck as I drive up the loading ramp of the Kaiārahi, a slightly venerable RORO ferry. It's a lil cloudy but otherwise nice. I'm on holidays yay!

Boats are so cool. Underrated infrastructure. I'm in a building that goes places!

Since the Fisk map is circulating again, I want to highlight a very good and probably underappreciated* paper by Aslan and Autin on how soils develop in this setting, through the interaction of pedogenic processes, sedimentation, and hydrology. doi.org/10.1130/0016...
*like so many good soils papers

Does anyone know of the TerHum app for #soilscience humipedon classification (doi.org/10.3390/soil...) is region-locked on Google Play? I can't access it from NZ.

ah that won't help! Curse that beautiful website :P

Geordi meme Top panel: geom_point() with x pointing to a dot, and geom_segment() with x pointing to the end of a line and xend pointing to the other end Bottom panel: geom_pointrange with x pointing to a dot, xmin pointing to the end of a line and xmax pointing to the other end

trying to get my dataviz class to stop using geom_point() + geom_segment() and instead use geom_pointrange() #rstats

Probably trained on SO data mostly. Plus, the man page for that function has *_pointrange listed last, so it shows up as 'and one more' here - ggplot2.tidyverse.org/reference/ge... - and most of the example code focuses on geom_errorbar. Makes me want to double-check the examples in my own packages

Trying to replicate the results of an older paper using the supplied supplementary data, and I'm being rudely reminded that while I do a lot of Complicated Stuff in #rstats, I rarely use it for its original intended purpose. Having to re-read, like, ?t.test is embarrassing 🤦‍♀️

Oh wait, he does have an account here! @humus-rocks.bsky.social Anyway its a shit time to be a US federal employee in the environment space so his efforts are doubly appreciated.

#rstats package 'mpspline2' got its first CRAN update in a good long while today 🎉 This is thanks largely to the efforts of Andrew Brown at the USDA-NRCS, who has added the super useful ability to spline multiple variables in one call. cran.r-project.org/web/packages...

Atkinson Hyperlegible Font - Braille Institute Read easier with Atkinson Hyperlegible Font, crafted for low-vision readers. Download for free and enjoy clear letters and numbers on your computer!

periodic reminder of the existence of Atkinson Hyperlegible, a free font available from the Braille Institute designed to improve readability for people with low vision

I use it in talks because it's pretty and also because, as an audience member, I am perpetually squinting at people's slides

tmap vs. ggplot2 for mapping – Geospatial Stuff For me at least the choice between ggplot2 and tmap is an ongoing question. Here are my latest thoughts on the subject (with code).

tmap or ggplot2 for maps? 🗺️

David O’Sullivan breaks down the trade-offs in a blog post.

URL: dosull.github.io/posts/2024-1...

#RStats #RSpatial #Maps #tmap #ggplot2

Physical Sample Curation - ESIP

Physical samples are vital elements of study in many disciplines, including earth and environmental sciences, biological sciences, archaeology, and beyond.

Meet the ESIP Physical Sample Curation Cluster 👋

The group meets monthly and is led by Andrea Thomer & Natalie Raia (University of Arizona).

A screen cap of the Trimble map viewer refusing to accept a shape file upload while claiming to support the format. Nope! It's KML only. This is actually the least of this interface's problems...

I'm really liking the Trimble catalyst hardware so far, but the software can absolutely get in the bin. The whole interface and workflow pattern appears to have been designed as a form of mass revenge by someone who was treated cruelly by a GIS tech in the past.

Standard rock names are often either too general or too specific but the vocabulary still needs to be broadly compatible with geological descriptions, and mixed materials are challenging.

Yes, its tricky to come up with a good schema for parent materials that highlights the important details. I think recording mode of deposition, parent rocks (weathering sources), and mineralogy (weathering products) separately helps. The 'parent rocks' list is the hardest to formulate well...

What's this particular loess made of?

The USDA system separates the two concepts relatively well, so you may not have encountered this.

because the residual-soil terms carry information about material's mineralogical composition but the transported-soil terms don't. So when I see a term like loess, I get a lot of info about grain size distribution and I can make inferences about permeability and structure etc from that but also:

A thing that I've noticed in some soil description systems (e.g. WRB) is that a 'parent materials' list is supplied but that it lists rock names for residual soils and then switches to particle size and mode of deposition for anything transported. Putting these two concepts in one list is wrong imo,

Now I get to air my pet peeve about how terms for particle size and mode of deposition aren't lithologies!

Soil Horizons Issue 32, October 2023. This issue of Soil Horizons presents recent research on soil carbon, impacts of climate change on erosion, irrigation, measuring drainage losses, farm-scale mapping, predicting...

This year's issue of Soil Horizons is out! Lots of updates about what's been happening in the soiley parts of the new BSI @bioeconomyscience.bsky.social www.landcareresearch.co.nz/publications...

Nice bit of NZ soil content from @jamiemorton.bsky.social at @newsroom.co.nz, newsroom.co.nz/2025/10/22/s...

Oh super, Microsoft started blocking access to the Internet Archive at work and now I have to have a Conversation with IT.

The Majority AI View - Anil Dash A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

Okay, for the folks who asked: here's the majority AI view, writing up the reasonable, thoughtful view on AI that the vast majority of people in tech hold, that gets overshadowed by the bluster and hype of the tycoons trying to shill their nonsense. anildash.com/2025/10/17/t... Please share!

All roads lead to The Arena.

Microbes are collectively one of the biggest forces shaping Earth, and yet undergraduate #geology students typically receive little training in microbiology. My new open access textbook seeks to help. “Microbiology for Earth Scientists” is freely available here newprairiepress.org/ebooks/53/

Moving mountains: grazing agents drive terracette formation on steep hillslopes Terracettes, striking, step-like landforms that stripe steep, vegetated hillslopes, have puzzled scientists for more than a century. Competing hypotheses invoke either slow mass-wasting or the relentl...

New favorite preprint, both for the topic and the figures arxiv.org/abs/2504.17496 #geomorphology #terracettes #landscapemodeling