Just sent this to my oldest, who's in 4th year of a software engineering degree. It's going to be an "interesting" ride for this cohort 😅

If you enjoy the coalesce operator %||%, did you know that you can enforce it through

- Jarl jarl.etiennebacher.com/rules/coalesce
- {lintr} lintr.r-lib.org/reference/co...

(For older R versions you could use the same operator from {rlang})

#RStats

Historical botanical illustration of Swertia Swertopsis, a Pteridophyta plant, showing several detailed views of the plant's parts. Central main image depicts the entire plant with two tall stems, each bearing lance-shaped leaves and clusters of small, pointed flowers. Surrounding illustrations include close-ups of flower structure, seed pods, roots, and pollen details, labeled with numbers for identification. The style is precise line art typical of Meiji-era scientific plates, emphasizing botanical morphology for study and classification. The image includes fine details like leaf venation, reproductive organs, and surface textures. Text in Japanese and English identifies the species and plate number.

🌴 Shinsen Nihon shokubutsu zusetsu.
Tokyo: Keigyosha, Meiji 32-36 [1899-1903]

[Source]

6 days!

#Botany2026

pkgskills makes this work muuuuuch better! api2r.github.io/pkgskills/in... #RStats #GenAI

A slide built using the quarto publishing system showing speech bubbles like on an iPhone, white bubbles showing up on the left and blue bubbles showing up on the right. The title of the slide says "Romeo & Julie -- Act II, Scene II" and each speech bubble has a line from Romeo or Juliet

This is #quarto 🤯 (just imagine this screenshot is animated haha)

Repo: github.com/EmilHvitfeld...

Way to go, @emilhvitfeldt.bsky.social!!

Check out the new blog post on our latest #BIEN paper in @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social BIEN 4.2: A Reproducible Standard for Global Plant Biodiversity Data 🧪🌐🌾

GitHub - numbats/moodlequiz: R Markdown format for Moodle XML cloze quizzes R Markdown format for Moodle XML cloze quizzes. Contribute to numbats/moodlequiz development by creating an account on GitHub.

And for those still using Moodle, check out `moodlequiz` #rstats package (github.com/numbats/mood...) for a literate programming approach. @mitchelloharawild.com will be speaking on this at ICOTS in Brisbane this year!

A full disc image of Earth, as seen from the Orion Crew Module. The planet is a pale blue, swirling with white clouds and glowing slightly lighter blue in place from reflected light. At lower left, a large brown landmass is Africa, with Spain and Portugal with twinkling lights where the planet curves. At top right, auroras glow in a thin green glow, just barely separated from the planet's surface. Earth is set against the black of space (pic: NASA/R.Wiseman)

More context on this #Artemis II image:

* This is the night side, lit by moonlight. You can see city lights in Spain & Portugal, & a sliver of day at lower right

* The Sun is entirely behind Earth, which makes it a kind of solar eclipse, but w/ Earth doing the eclipsing instead of the Moon:
☀️🌍🚀🌕

!! Wow, NPR article highlighting botanist @naomibot.bsky.social !!

The text at the top reads: “APPS Special Issue Call for Papers: Plant genome skimming: Special uses and future potential”. The image beneath the title shows a phylogenetic tree on the left side, with images illustrating each genus in the tree on the right. Images from top to bottom are Hypogymnia inactiva, Imshaugia aleurites, Cladonia asahinae, Leptogium sp., Graphis plumierae, Opegrapha niveoatra. The text beneath the image reads: “Proposal deadline extended to May 15, 2026”. The Applications in Plant Sciences logo is in the bottom left corner, and a QR code is in the bottom right corner.

DEADLINE EXTENDED!
🌿SPECIAL ISSUE CALL FOR PAPERS🌿

#AppsPlantSci invites proposals for “Plant genome skimming: Special uses and future potential,” led by Quentin Cronk, Nolan Kane & Kyle Keepers.

More info at botany.org/home/publica...

#botany #phylogenetics #genomics #plantscience

Quarto 1.9 – Quarto Quarto 1.9 adds publishing to Posit Connect Cloud, LLM-friendly website output, major Typst improvements, experimental PDF accessibility standards, and list tables for complex table content.

We are pleased to announce Quarto 1.9 ✈️

New features for #RStats, #Python, and #JuliaLang users include Posit Connect Cloud publishing, PDF accessibility (PDF/A & PDF/UA), brand asset sync, enhanced #Typst support, list table syntax, and LLM-friendly output.

Learn more: quarto.org/docs/blog/po...

The System That Decides What Science Gets Published Is Breaking Down The peer review system that validates scientific research is trapped in a self-defeating cycle. A new mathematical model shows why—and what comes next.

@forbes.com picking up the recent work by @carlbergstrom.com & Kevin Gross in @plosbiology.org on the future of peer review.

www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...

Historical watercolor illustration from 1887 depicting an ostrich fern plant with multiple tall, feathery green fronds radiating outward from a central, bulbous base. The detailed drawing includes visible root structures and horizontal rhizomes extending outward, emphasizing the plant's growth habit. The fern's fronds show delicate, finely divided leaflets typical of ostrich ferns, rendered in varying shades of green on a plain beige background, highlighting botanical features for scientific observation.

🦆 Beautiful ferns from original water-color drawings after nature /.
Troy, N.Y.: Nims and Knight, 1887 [©1885].

[Source]

We just published a review 🗞️😁:

‘The ecology of adaptive radiation’ revisited: A 25-year reflection

Dolph Schluter’s book inspired the interest in adaptive radiation, and we wanted to revisit it.

academic.oup.com/evolinnean/a...

1/5 🧵

new github update automatically enables scraping your code for copilot 😍☺️

change it under settings > copilot > features > privacy

Cambridge offers botany course that inspired Darwin after rare archive uncovered University’s botanic garden will use study materials created by John Stevens Henslow, the naturalist’s mentor, 200 years ago

Cambridge offers botany course that inspired Darwin after rare archive uncovered
www.theguardian.com/environment/...
Check out the four-week residential program being offered - application deadline 7 April. www.botanic.cam.ac.uk/learning/cer...

Screenshot of peartree with a tree and a root-to-tip plot

New feature for PearTree - root-to-tip plots. Web version at peartree.live | desktop apps to follow at github.com/artic-network/peartree/releases/latest

📖 Published!

Prompting large language models for quality ecological statistics 🖥️

This perspective addresses the need for effective prompting guidelines to ensure consistent and appropriate advice on statistical analyses when using LLMs🌍

🔎 Read more:

Vibe coding SwiftUI apps is a lot of fun I have a new laptop—a 128GB M5 MacBook Pro, which early impressions show to be very capable for running good local LLMs. I got frustrated with Activity Monitor and decided …

I've been vibe coding SwiftUI menu bar apps for my new Mac, turns out Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4 are both competent at Swift programming, no need to even open Xcode! simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/27/vibe-coding-...

RGBIF green logo (hex sticker style) with a photo pf a grevilia flower

🚀 #rgbif 3.8.5 ➡️New release!

Explore new functions for accessing GBIF occurrence download statistics including:
🔹retrieving summarized download statistics
🔹exporting download summaries & more.

🐛 Bug fixes and minor improvements are now also available.

🔗: gbif.link/rgbif-385

Let’s Botanize® Book Talk & Workshop | New York Botanical Garden A care for plants is a care for the planet, say Ben Goulet-Scott, Ph.D., and Jacob S. Suissa, Ph.D., who are co-founders of Let's Botanize®—an educational non-profit promoting the hobby of botanizing ...

Coming April 14, the @letsbotanize.bsky.social team—Ben Goulet-Scott and Jacob S. Suissa—return to the Garden for a talk about their new book, "Let's Botanize: 101 Ways to Connect with Plants."

Get registered for the talk, as well as their special afternoon workshop!

Xerophyta on a cliff wall.

🌱 Check out this new #AJB Review! 🌱

Shaped by context: Evolutionary trajectories of #desiccation tolerance in land plants

By Rose Marks, R. Shawn Abrahams, & Jenna Ekwealor

doi.org/10.1002/ajb2...

#botany #plantscience #evolution #gametophyte #sporophyte

The text at the top reads: “AJB and APPS Special Issue Call for Papers”. Photos, clockwise from top left: Pleopeltis michauxiana, Sequoiadendron giganteum, unidentified moss species, Azolla cristata. The text beneath the image reads: “New Perspectives from the Genealogy of Flagellate Plants (GoFlag)”. Photos by Jessie Pelosi.

🌿SPECIAL ISSUE CALL FOR PAPERS 🌿 FINAL WEEK!

Submit your proposal to joint special issues of #AJB and #AppsPlantSci highlighting new resources & advances from the #GoFlag project

Deadline April 1

More info: bit.ly/49JPtDe

@ebsessa.bsky.social #bryophytes #ferns #gymnosperms #botany #plantscience

Late Cretaceous origins for major nightshade lineages from total-evidence timetree analysis AbstractBackground and Aims. The timing of the radiation of nightshades (Solanaceae) has been contentious in the literature, with estimates of the crown ag

How old are tomatoes, peppers and golden berries? 🍅🌱

We combined fossils with molecular data to time-calibrate the evolutionary history of #Solanaceae

Curious about total-evidence dating? Take a look!

academic.oup.com/aob/advance-...

BIEN: A biodiversity informatics ecosystem advancing open and reproducible workflows for plant observation, plot and trait data The rapid expansion of biodiversity data presents new opportunities to understand and forecast biosphere dynamics. However, disparate and dispersed data, taxonomic and geographic inconsistencies, ...

Our new #BIEN biodiversity data workflow paper is out! BIEN is an ecosystem of modular, open-source BIEN tools for collecting, harmonizing, and validating biodiversity data -- and an integrated global database (BIEN db) of plant occurrences, traits & geographic ranges. doi.org/10.1111/2041... 🧪🌐🌾🌵

Does anyone remember ICQ messenger did you have an ICQ account?

Data Organization in Spreadsheets Karl W. Broman & Kara H. Woo Pages 2-10 | Received 01 Jun 2017, Accepted author version posted online: 29 Sep 2017, Published online: 24 Apr 2018 1. Introduction 2. Be Consistent 3. Choose Good Names for Things 4. Write Dates as YYYY-MM-DD 5. No Empty Cells 6. Put Just One Thing in a Cell 7. Make it a Rectangle 8. Create a Data Dictionary 9. No Calculations in the Raw Data Files 10. Do Not Use Font Color or Highlighting as Data 11. Make Backups 12. Use Data Validation to Avoid Errors 13. Save the Data in Plain Text Files ABSTRACT Spreadsheets are widely used software tools for data entry, storage, analysis, and visualization. Focusing on the data entry and storage aspects, this article offers practical recommendations for organizing spreadsheet data to reduce errors and ease later analyses. The basic principles are: be consistent, write dates like YYYY-MM-DD, do not leave any cells empty, put just one thing in a cell, organize the data as a single rectangle (with subjects as rows and variables as columns, and with a single header row), create a data dictionary, do not include calculations in the raw data files, do not use font color or highlighting as data, choose good names for things, make backups, use data validation to avoid data entry errors, and save the data in plain text files.

Every day is a good day for sharing one of the most useful papers about research data ever written. PLEASE get your people to understand and follow this advice.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Webinar: Dax Kellie on reproducible R code YouTube video by SORTEE

If you missed my talk today about how to make your R code more reproducible and why it's good for science, the recording is already online!

Apologies for the internet issues, I hope you can forgive me, they do go away after a few minutes 😅
#rstats 🧪🌏 @sortee.bsky.social

youtu.be/2_Aum45rYlU

高知県で新種植物「トサノカンザシギボウシ」　新潟大学などDNA解析 - 日本経済新聞 新潟大学の志賀隆准教授や高知県立牧野植物園の藤井聖子氏らは高知県で新種の植物を見つけた。植物のDNAを解析するなどして調べて「トサノカンザシギボウシ」と名付けた。東アジアなどに分布する「ギボウシ」の一種で、葉が細長いなど他の地域の集団と異なる特徴を持っていた。研究成果をまとめた論文は1月、学術誌「フロンティアズ・イン・プラント・サイエンス」に掲

高知県で新種植物「トサノカンザシギボウシ」　新潟大学などDNA解析 - 日本経済新聞 www.nikkei.com/article/DGXZ...