In our household, Pumpkin Cowboy is canonically a Halloween song
Random thought while watching Insidious - the real horror is that they moved into their house, and immediately had to move AGAIN. No thank you
This is such a cogent take on how AI will change our field. As many have pointed out, AI flattens the field for computational expertise (to some extent at least). But well-constructed, long-term, and/or experimental datasets will be the real bottleneck.
Really interesting take on the future of ecology in an AI world. The take home: experiments and long-term studies will have increasing value. @jdrakephd.bsky.social onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
recruiting a couple new grad students to start in january, please share! www.gilbertecology.com/opportunities
Me: Exploring an animal's habitat selection reveals tons of useful insights into understudy aspects of natural history Also me: I am personally offended that this turtle chose to hide in swamp rose, the nerve
Some massive icicles from Fern. Stay warm out there, everyone!
Haven't seen much chatter about this on Bluesky - but if you use #AHDriFT, there's now an image recognition model for bucket cameras! Greg is looking for additional image contributors too - if you have images, consider contributing! u.osu.edu/lipps.37/ahd...
AHDriFT-ID | Gregory Lipps
u.osu.edu
There is much to be done, at all levels. www.nature.com/articles/s44...
How scientists can contribute to the social movements essential to protecting climate and nature - npj Climate Action
Scientists have much to contribute to the growing social movements pushing for urgent and transformative change to address the climate and biodiversity crises. Depending on their skills, interests and...
nature.com
Yup, Greg is a great speaker - and this resonated with me yesterday, too!
“If we’re being honest, can we really be optimistic? I don’t think so, but we have reasons to be hopeful” -Herpetologist Gregory Lipps Jr. at the Ohio Wildlife Management Association conference today speaking about wildlife conservation, but seems relevant well beyond that right now
Funny, but also one of the two best career pieces of advice I got -- get exercise, especially when you are too stressed or don't have time for it.
discovered a pretty critical coding error in The Human Body where sometimes the way to feel better when you feel too bad to work out is to work out. this is suboptimal for user experience of The Human Body
📖Published! Can hierarchical modelling of co-occurrence data provide accurate inference into species interactions? This review finds pitfalls in the use of hierarchical models applied to co-occurrence data in understanding species interactions🧪 🌍 Read more:
buff.ly
As someone trained as both a field ecologist and quantitative scientist, this tension runs deep for me. Some of my group are entrenched in the field whereas others work with models for a living. ‘I rarely get outside’: scientists ditch fieldwork in the age of AI www.nature.com/articles/d41... 1/4
Client Challenge
nature.com
Yup. Shying away from difficult or complex problems or skills is a sign of atrophy, in many ways.
Last spring, I was asked to give carreer advice to grad students. And the one thing I told them was: our best skill is our ability to learn difficult things -- it's also the first skill you will lose unless you intentionally don't let yourselves go.
Should ecologists be worried about the carbon footprint of their own use of “AI” and LLMs? esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
The role of AI in ecology’s computational carbon footprint
Click on the article title to read more.
esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Resurfacing on Bluesky to remind people of the camera trapping starter pack!
We have a starter pack for scientists using camera traps! 📸 If you work with camera trap data in any way, either collecting data, running ecological models, training CV/ML models, let me know I’ll add you to this list 🎉 go.bsky.app/CbJkbVw
Had a real "shoe on the other foot" moment today! I logged onto a zoom webinar, while finishing up a phone call. I wasn't muted. It was a thesis defense. Bye everyone, gonna go walk into the sea.
a man in a suit is walking into the ocean .
ALT: a man in a suit is walking into the ocean .
media.tenor.com
A bit late in announcing this, but we have a manuscript out in Ecological Applications on breeding bird occupancy across urban-rural gradients! Open access link here: doi.org/10.1002/eap..... We also have an RShiny app for the dataset, available here: testudinidude.shinyapps.io/bbsapp/.
Breeding bird sensitivity to urban habitat quality is multi‐scale and strongly dependent on migratory behavior
Human-caused conversion of natural habitat areas to developed land cover represents a major driver of habitat loss and fragmentation, leading to reorganization of biological communities. Although pro...
doi.org
Manuscript acceptance on a Wednesday afternoon 🥂 can't wait to share it with you all soon!
Growing up (during my PhD, 25 y ago), I was imprinted with Hurlbert ‘s 1984 paper on « Pseudoreplication and the design of ecological field experiments ». This new paper is essential reading for all students in ecology (and beyond), digging deeper in terminology of design and design flaws 👇
I wrote (ranted) on experimental design as I was frustrated as an editor at how little guidance students were getting. I underestimated the interest in the issue: it has been downloaded 10,000+ times! Clearly it’s something we need to be talking about more. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
Also! In case you missed it, some of our UNH partners (Taylor Readyhough and Rem Moll) just published a paper on some of our deer management data! Check it out: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Unveiling drivers of fecundity in an urban white-tailed deer population over 20 years of active management - Urban Ecosystems
White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus; hereafter “deer”) are keystone herbivores that exert considerable ecosystem impacts. Quantifying drivers of urban deer demography, including fecundity (numbe...
link.springer.com
Interested in quantifying animal diel activity with hierarchical models? Check out this amazing how-to guide from @fa-bio-la.bsky.social , @science-action.bsky.social , and John Fieberg! 🧪 besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
A ‘how‐to’ guide for estimating animal diel activity using hierarchical models
We illustrate how hierarchical models can be used to estimate animal diel activity whilst accounting for variability in activity levels and sampling effort. These models also allow researchers to mor....
besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Alright! First blue sky post! I'm a quantitative ecologist and Conservation biologist in Cleveland OH. I work on lots of fun datasets, but worked with turtles for most of my career!