I posted about this on my Facebook page, but I'm heartbroken about the God Squad's recent decision to allow oil and gas companies to harm Rice's Whales. You can learn more about these whales here: www.ourgulfwhale.org
I wrote about why every lab should have AI use guidelines, and how to do it.
open.substack.com/pub/blekhman...
Gold is great for forcing rich institutions/funders to pay tho, which doesn’t happen under hybrid models. I imagine this has led to a smidgen more equality North-South 😎.
But the biggest winners in all of this are the mega publishers. Gold OA does nothing to reduce their stranglehold on science.
Gold OA has allowed those in the Global South & in conservation NGOs w/out journal subscriptions to jump the paywall, finally.
Whilst also, partially (could do a lot better) protecting the ability for those same people to publish through waivers.
So there’s also that.
#conservationscience 🧪🌍
NSF LTER program “archived”.
LTER=“Long Term Ecological Research”.
This program has been incredibly successful, incredibly frugal for what they accomplish, and…of course…targeted by evil know-nothings.
My heart is breaking.
Mongolia 2027! (I gather you’ve run trips there)
They might work OK in the Global North, but beyond that, no chance. The training data are just not there yet, and for the long-tail of rare species in the tropics, it’ll take a long time to remedy this. Human experts can often provide likely IDs, by combining data with priors & info on habitat etc.
And as an extension of this: BirdNet and other global AI classifiers are not useful, generally, for biodiversity research. Despite the #AIhype 😏
For example, I saw a recent paper in PNAS using BirdNet concluding that bird diversity was higher in pasture and agriculture than in old-growth forest 🙃
Surprising piece of information: on average, European eel reach sexual maturity at large age than any whale species. And certainly much older than any other exploited fish species.
That's why short-term measures are not useful. Eels need a moratorium mimicking the whaling ban
(see below)
A lone hiker is in the mid distance, traversing heather & gorse, with a beech forest behind. In the distance a snow capped ridge of mountains
A series of bear dung boluses filled with beech seed husks sits in a crack in a rock surrounded by soft dry moss
A wonderful ent of a beech tree, its centre completely rotted out and three tripod legs left holding it up. All the “legs” and branches a shooting out a twisting at different angles
A cluster of glistening inkcap mushrooms growing inside a tree hole, surrounded by mulch filled with beech seeds and hazelnuts
Celebrated #WorldRewildingDay looking for brown bear signs in a wild corner of northern Spain.
Success! Evidence of a bear enjoying last autumn’s beech mast.
We also found clues of other interactions with the beech tree: some glistening inkcaps, and a dormice’s cache of hazelnuts inside a treehole
It’s actually from the Editor-In Chief of the journal! 👀
I've had this from a journal:
"Print your figure in a a letter size paper, place it *on the floor*, stand next to the page. Any text or number that you can´t read from that distance needs to be enlarged"
Who is reading papers like this?!
Also, I haven't had access to a printer since about 2007...
At the sharp edge of defending nature across the planet, rangers suffer. That’s for sure. They are also largely overlooked and undervalued. Hence, the importance of this call for urgent mental health support for rangers👇
Now that we can’t claim we didn’t know, what are we all going to do about it?
My kind of paper: tech (collars/tags), cool movement data, a hypothesis rooted in field observations, and a surprising finding!
In 2023, I sought to explain to a parliamentary committee what a structural collapse of the global food system would look like, and why this this is plausible - even likely. I think the likelihood has just ratcheted up a notch. I beg you to read and understand. Thanks
www.monbiot.com/2023/03/09/t...
Incredibly shortsighted decision by our govt to cut development funding, including taking an axe to nature recovery projects.
It diminishes us a country, both at home & abroad.
And so we slip inexorably ever closer to the little Britain dream of Farage and his billionaire mates.
You can now add (for $20) an AI agent to your RStudio session…
Any support for non-profits @posit.co? This could help to speed up analyses in wildlife conservation.
Broadly agree, Zack, & really important to hold Starmer to account for his own words! But not sure I agree with the last sentence, at least on current evidence. It doesn’t seem to be the case that Starmer’s doing anything T wants, more that he’s playing the long game.
Although we have known this for many years—e.g. @neobirdconserve financed early work by Vitek Jirinek—this should have been the top news headline last week. These declines in 'pristine' tropical forests are well-documented, poorly understood and continue apace. www.science.org/content/arti...
I didn’t notice anywhere that it said it was AI, but also didn’t notice the name of an author either, which is a bit of a red flag
The oldest known wild Sunda clouded leopard is a 6.51-year-old female! Similar to the oldest known mainland leopard cat too.
Pretty neat what long-term camera trap studies can tell us.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Hi Laura, this write-up is AI generated I think? Just flagging this for others.
Yep I agree, SCR certainly not easy, but the statistical foundations are solid, and it’s easier than the ‘unmarked’ route (REM/REST etc.)! There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be being applied across lynx populations in Europe in a standardised way.
Interesting study, too, thanks for sharing!
Some argue protected areas in fire-prone landscapes can undermine forest carbon (fuel build-up → higher fire risk). This paper shows Spanish protected areas consistently outperform comparable unprotected lands, strongest in National Parks.
iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...
Lynx (including Eurasian) are actually one of the “easier” ones, since you can identify individuals (unlike for, say, deer). Done with good survey design (and that doesn’t mean throwing a few cameras up and hoping for the best 🤓) and analysis, you can get an accurate & precise population estimate.
I don’t know what this is, but I am here for the team names
Essential reading for conservation scientists & ecologists (in fact anyone doing science across borders!) 🌍🧪onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ele.70227
Remote-control science is an internet-enabled form of "parachute" science
FWIW, I see a lot of this in AI and macroecology research
"Podemos vivir sin lobos (...) como estuvimos a punto de vivir sin linces, como posiblemente podamos vivir en pocos años sin urogallos, salmones y anguilas (...). Pero somos muchas las personas que no queremos vivir sin ellos"
Léete estoy de @ernestodmartin.bsky.social
elpais.com/clima-y-medi...
📣 NEW! I’ve just released the BIGGEST and perhaps most creative project I’ve ever worked on!
“Searching for Birds” searchingforbirds.visualcinnamon.com 🐤
A project, an article, an exploration that dives into the data that connects humans with birds, by looking at how we search for birds.
Oh that’s good 👏
