Glad to share our new study at @natcomms.nature.com which resulted from several workshops on the early warning signs of mass extinctions and coordination of macroevolutionary vulnerability and the states of carbon cycle and temperatures. www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧪⚒️ #Geology #Paleobio #EvoBio

Very cool pair of papers demonstrating little link between amount of additive genetic variation and amount of nucleotide variation within species: journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Levels of additive genetic variation vary substantially between species

Adaptive potential determines how populations respond to environmental change. This study compiles evolvability estimates from over 170 multicellular species, revealing substantial variation across th...

journals.plos.org

A 10-million-year biogeographic holding pen primed the Great American Biotic Interchange | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A 10-million-year biogeographic holding pen primed the Great American Biotic Interchange

The movement of taxa between North and South America across the Panamanian land bridge, known as the Great American Biotic Interchange (GABI), established modern-day mammal assemblages in the Americas...

science.org

Our paper (also, my first first-author paper) is now available in MEE early view! In this study, we introduced a state-dependent Ornstein-Uhlenbeck model we implemented in RevBayes to test adaptive hypotheses in macroevolution. (1/3) besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

An efficient Bayesian phylogenetic approach for joint inference of continuous and discrete trait evolution under a state‐dependent Ornstein–Uhlenbeck model

Macroevolutionary adaptation of a continuous trait to different discrete states across species can be modelled using a phylogenetic state-dependent Ornstein–Uhlenbeck (OU) process. Existing infere...

besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Internal decline and the final punch of mass extinctions in the extinction of clades. "Once proportional diversity fell below a critical threshold (mean of approximately 0.13), major abiotic perturbations acted as the ‘last straw’," nature.com/articles/s41... 🧪⚒️ #Geology #Paleobio #EvoBio

Magic traits, search costs, and the persistence of species in secondary contact Jack R. Farley, Darren Irwin bioRxiv 2026.07.23.740407 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Magic traits, search costs, and the persistence of species in secondary contact

When two populations come into secondary contact, assortative mating can act as a barrier to gene flow. However, when assortative mating is incomplete, associations between preference and cue loci can...

biorxiv.org

New paper out! 🖨️ Glad to be part of this study, out in Science Advances: "Emergent patterns of island biodiversity in the Anthropocene" www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Much of what looks natural in island biodiversity is a legacy of human impacts going back millennia. See main findings 👇🧵 (1/8)

Emergent patterns of island biodiversity in the Anthropocene

Human impacts substantially affect our ability to detect and understand natural biodiversity patterns.

science.org

1/ The world's songbirds sing in just 8 basic sounds. And where a bird lives decides which ones it uses. My first PhD paper is out now in @science.org (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aee6239) Here is what we found:

Happy to share this 'capstone' project from my time as a postdoc @umich.edu, where we show that hierarchically nested bursts of body-shape evolution may underlie much of perching-bird diversification over ~50 million years. Free access link here: rdcu.be/fuxB1

Rates of passerine body plan evolution in time and space

Nature Ecology & Evolution - A reconstruction of the evolutionary history of passerine body plans over the past ~50 Myr shows rare bursts of phenotypic innovation near the origin of major...

rdcu.be

New paper from @jakeberv.bsky.social harnesses a massive skeletal measurement dataset for passerines to show nested bursts in phenotypic evolution, many of which appear coincident with intervals of climate instability. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Do social bird species have more stable demographic histories? We do not find this to be the case in our new preprint doi.org/10.32942/X2N... Together with @ryangermain.bsky.social and many others

Now out in Ecology Letters 🥳

Using Modern Coexistence Theory to Understand Community Disassembly

Community disassembly examines how extinctions reshape ecological communities. Here, we introduce the community disassembly graph, which uses invasion growth rates (IGRs) to identify extinction-drive....

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Joe Brennan@biologyjoe87.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Excited to share a new pre-print in collaboration with @sebastianschreiber.bsky.social, "Using Modern Coexistence Theory to understand community disassembly"! We set out to understand how techniques used to study coexistence can be extended to understand community disassembly. (1/X)

A new paper led by @shotashibasaki.bsky.social was published in Theoretical Population Biology! "Applying invasion criterion to cultural evolution" doi.org/10.1016/j.tp...

📣 New preprint with @allyphillimore.bsky.social, out now! As climate change shifts seasonal timing across food-webs, we present an experiment testing the impact of phenological mismatch in *48* plant-caterpillar 🌳→🐛 trophic interactions. Read it here: doi.org/10.64898/202... ...or scroll 🧵👇 1/7

Study about the role of rate-dependency in initiation of mass extinctions journals.aps.org/prl/abstract... . But this is not the whole story: cannot discriminate between a mass extinction (LOME) from other high extinction pulses based purely on rates doi.org/10.1017/pab.... 🧪 ⚒️ #Geology #Paleobio

🧵 Excited to share my final PhD paper in Ecology Letters! A classic question in ecology is why some clades contain more species in local assemblages than others. We argue that part of the answer lies in the timing of speciation itself. doi.org/10.1111/ele....

Anyone at #Evol2026 got any proposals?

Methods in Ecology and Evolution@methodsinecoevol.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Don't forget to submit a proposal for our latest special feature 👉 Time-dependency in Micro- and Macroevolutionary Rates 🌍 🧪 Deadline for proposals is the 10th July, and paper submission will be due in February 2027⏰️ Find out more and submit a proposal 👇 buff.ly/2yt4RLt

🧵 Excited to share my final PhD paper in Ecology Letters! A classic question in ecology is why some clades contain more species in local assemblages than others. We argue that part of the answer lies in the timing of speciation itself. doi.org/10.1111/ele....

BREAKING: two talks are taking place this afternoon from the Anderson Lab at #Evol2026. First, come see postdoc Mukta Joshi present new results on the accumulation of incompatibility-associated genomic features across the speciation continuum in drosopholids. 2:45pm in Room 25C.

#Evol2026 I’m launching a new research group at UNC Charlotte in January 2027. Prospective students, postdocs, and collaborators are welcome to get in touch: jacob.berv@charlotte.edu More at jakeberv.com, lab website coming soon.

Biotic interactions biogeography: A framework for understanding how species interactions shape biodiversity patterns across scales 🧪🌐https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3003813

Biotic interactions biogeography: A framework for understanding how species interactions shape biodiversity patterns across scales

Biogeography and ecology have long developed in parallel. This Essay explores how new data on species interactions across large scales now allow their integration, opening fresh insights into how biod...

journals.plos.org

New paper out today! @sternarchella.bsky.social and I review how modularity and integration influence adaptive radiations and diversification. Read it here: rdcu.be/fpcSX

Two new preprints from my lab, both putting computer science approaches to work for ecology & evolution 🦎 Each tackles the same old bottleneck — turning huge piles of digital images into usable data — and each is a free, open-source web tool you can actually use 🎉 Quick threads on both below 🧵

Robert Ricklefs - in memoriam dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2026/06/11/r...

Robert Ricklefs – in memoriam

Robert Ricklefs, a giant of ecology, passed away on Sunday. It is hard to overstate the extensive impact Bob had on the field. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in the US,…

dynamicecology.wordpress.com

Excited to share our new paper in which we test how competition alters adaptation at a warming range edge @science.org We find that competition can increase adaptation to warming when there is a shared evolutionary response to both biotic and abiotic drivers of selection: tinyurl.com/3j8s9t8b

Competition enables rapid adaptation to a warming range edge in a model plant community

Most predictions of whether populations will adapt to warming range edges ignore species interactions. We experimentally tested whether range-edge populations can adapt to warming within a competitive...

science.org

Paper published, led by Forest Isbell. We developed a new theoretical framework to predict how temporal stability and resilience emerge from the combined effects of resistance and recovery. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Predicting temporal stability and resilience from resistance and recovery - Nature

New predictions for how temporal stability and resilience depend on their resistance and recovery components are explored.

nature.com

Hiring 3 postdocs in ecological resilience @biology.ox.ac.uk for my @erc.europa.eu CoG ResIntegrate project. Deadline May 29th. Details below. Pls share @salgoteam.bsky.social @evoldir.bsky.social @britishecologicalsociety.org @ecologicalsociety.bsky.social @ecolsocaus.bsky.social

Postdoctoral Research Associate in Ecology at University of Oxford

An academic position as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Ecology is being advertised on jobs.ac.uk. Click now to find more details and explore additional academic job opportunities.

jobs.ac.uk

The final "Early Career Researchers in Speciation"-themed seminar is coming up on the 5th of May! This session features talks by Aryeh Miller on Anolis lizards 🦎 and @rishidekayne.bsky.social on speciation research in industry 📊 + we'll hear from Dr Mariana Braga about her career in the Q&A ✋