yeah that is amazing - and remarkable how perfectly Tom Waits voice matches the classic monochrome photojournalism style.

Researcher degrees of freedom should be more widely appreciated in the biological sciences too. Social sciences & psychology are way ahead of us in that regard.

If we want to conserve evolutionary history, we need to think about this: change the phylogenetic methods, and you change the conservation outcomes. New paper led by honours student Mina Kearns, with @alexskeels.bsky.social & @keaghanjames.bsky.social

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

ah yes

Clearing sales can be dangerous... hope you've got a big trailer

Surely there was a more direct route to Hobart than that

Payment‐based open access is biasing scientific participation from the Global South in ecology Opening access to the products of scientific research is widely considered a key step toward both fairness and better science worldwide. Since the 1990s, different forms of open access (OA) to journa...

This is why @biogeographyjfab.bsky.social and other diamond OA journals are so important. Send us your awesome biogeography papers and do the field a solid!

nsojournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Paul R. Ehrlich, Who Alarmed the World With ‘The Population Bomb,’ Dies at 93

My long-time friend and colleague, the legendary Paul Ehrlich, died on Friday at 93 years old. He had a good innings, but I’ll miss him www.nytimes.com/2026/03/15/b...

This is Iran. These are the people being murdered in our name.

📢 Including fossil tips in your phylogeny can double your continuous trait model fitting accuracy!

Updated preprint out now on @ecoevorxiv.bsky.social.

🔗 doi.org/10.32942/X27...

with @pedrolgodoy.bsky.social @macroecoevoale.bsky.social and @bethanyjallen.bsky.social

I was once marooned on a tiny island with a paranoid lighthouse keeper and a Texan who cooked nothing but burritos with eyeball-burning amounts of chilli.

A man standing up in a crowded room of people sitting. He is dressed in workman's clothes and has his head raised as if speaking up when not necessarily belonging there.

We are a rich enough country to be funding 37% of all basic research proposals, not just considering "the best" 37% and then maybe only funding 12% in the end.

🤎

After a few years of benign neglect I am rebuilding bionames.org, which is a database of 5.4 million taxonomomic names for animals, linked to half a million DOIs and 278K PDFs. Dream is for every species name to be linked to its original publication using a persistent identifier #PID

Forecasting extinction risk for future-proof conservation decisions Conservation prioritisation emphasises currently threatened species, but there are strong arguments for complementary, more proactive approaches based on forecasting future extinction risk for unthrea...

Forecasting extinction risk for future-proof conservation decisions: Trends Ecol & Evolution www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...

Should conservation focus on threatened species? Or should we be proactive and protect species before they become threatened? This paper explores how to get the balance right.

external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%...

The Culture Wars Came for Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales Is Staying the Course.

I take Wikipedia for granted. Reading this Jimmy Wales interview reminded me in our Fantasyland age what a remarkable and important creation it is. True pillar of civilization. Runs on only $200 million a year. Requires our support. So I’m finally donating. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/18/m...

Fuck Black Friday — The Shovel We're raising our prices by 10%

It’s that time of the year again when Australian companies celebrate the fact that it’s almost the Friday after a pilgrim thanksgiving holiday in America by providing discounts to unrelated goods

Well fuck that

We’re raising our prices by 10% and donating the difference (+ an extra 15%) to charity

Surprisingly difficult to get hold of the full list of EPBC amendments...

But here's the list of amendments put out by The Greens

Forecasting extinction risk for future-proof conservation decisions Conservation prioritisation emphasises currently threatened species, but there are strong arguments for complementary, more proactive approaches based on forecasting future extinction risk for unthreatened species. Forecasting methods vary in the timescale of extinction risk estimation and include established methods such as Population Viability Analysis (PVA) and Early Warning Systems, and emerging ‘Over-the-Horizon’ (OTH) methods. We develop a framework that integrates extinction risk assessment across timescales and outlines tradeoffs between shorter- and longer-term extinction prevention goals. This framework facilitates use of extinction risk forecasting in decision-theoretic conservation prioritisation that explicitly considers alternative time horizons for extinction prevention. Considering extinction risk on extended timescales offers a future-proof approach to conservation planning that may prevent more extinctions than focusing exclusively on currently threatened species.

Online now: Forecasting extinction risk for future-proof conservation decisions

Conceptual framework for extinction risk forecasting that outlines key elements and tradeoffs associated with forecasting on different time horizons.

Online now: Forecasting extinction risk for future-proof conservation decisions.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Should conservation focus on threatened species? Or should we be proactive and protect species before they become threatened? This paper explores how to get the balance right.

The Greens have secured an inquiry to find out why job & program cuts are being rolled out across the CSIRO! It will consider the impacts of the funding cuts, the importance of public funding for science & CSIRO’s future funding & resourcing needs.

A graph plotting the CSIRO funding as a percentage of GDP from 1978 to 2025. In 1980 it was around 0.17 %, since then it has sharply fallen to 0.03 %.

The dismantling of Science in #Australia continues...

I remember that hopes were high in 2022 that the new Labor Government would end the decade-long decline. We are now in the second #Albanese term, and things are worse than ever.

ABC News article: www.abc.net.au/news/science...

#PlantScience

Camera captures rare Aussie predator believed extinct across 70km landscape A $5 million project has helped change the region, allowing for the animal's return.

Over five years after cameras were set up within a sprawling Western Australian landscape, an elusive “chuditch” has been filmed for the first time.
au.news.yahoo.com/camera-captu...

A Guided Tour of Phylogenetic Comparative Methods for Studying Trait Evolution Phylogenetic comparative methods are important tools in biology, providing insights into the way traits evolve. There are many technical resources describing how these methods work. Our aim here is to...

Neat paper: A Guided Tour of Phylogenetic Comparative Methods for Studying Trait Evolution
www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Nature suggests you use their "Manuscript Adviser" bot to get advice before submitting

I uploaded the classic Watson & Crick paper about DNA structure, and the Adviser had this to say about one of the greatest paper endings of the century:

Four maps of the Australian Monsoonal Tropics

New paper led by Emmeline Norris based on her Honours project: Land tenure contributions to protected area growth under alternative conservation targets in the Australian monsoon tropics
conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

New Not Drowning, Waving album with Sir George Telek entitled “Malira” out Sept 19th ahead of Melb Recital Centre show on Sat 20th. Front cover features Wargi Apelis from the acclaimed Moab Stringband of Raluana, Rabaul.

I was ok with it until the last two words of the title

Hundreds more CSIRO jobs on the chopping block as experts raise fears over impact on science Exclusive: Concerns Australia is gutting its research capability coincide with Trump’s deep cuts into US science agencies

Other countries will take American scientists, they say.