It's #ReptileAwarenessDay 🦎! Since the start of 2025, there have been >120,000 observations recorded of reptiles in the Atlas of Living Australia, with skinks the most recorded family Code 💻 & high-res image 📷 👇 #rstats #dataviz 🌏🧪
Dax Kellie
@daxkellie.bsky.social
Data Analyst & Science Lead at the Atlas of Living Australia | Evolutionary biologist & social psychologist (PhD) 🧪 | #rstats 📊 | Music enthusiast 🎵 Opinions are my own, and they do not express those of my employer
This week's #TidyTuesday is about frogs and toads. AmphibiaWeb lists 8,018 species. Six families hold 54% of them, and one genus, Pristimantis, has 631. Code: https://github.com/gkaramanis/tidytuesday/tree/master/2026/2026-week_42 #RStats #dataviz
🔎📷 Want to identify wildlife in camera trap images in #Python? Learn to download & classify images with {galah-python} + {speciesnet}, a deep-learning model for wildlife image classification, in a new ALA Labs guest post by Renuka Sharma & Xiang Zhao labs.ala.org.au/posts/2026-0... #pydata #ML 🧪🌏
This thread is so great! 🤩 To avoid annoying resizing, figured I'd mention an alternative to {ggview}: {showtext} can resize all text to a specific dpi Text is the part that I find I have to fiddle with most when saving #ggplot2 plots, so this usually works for me 😀 #rstats #dataviz
If you missed today's @rinpharma.bsky.social workshop, here are a few of my favourite "quick fixes" for some common #ggplot2 issues 📊 1. Use {ggview} to preview plots at the same size and resolution as you want to save them with ggsave() to avoid the annoying resizing #RStats #DataViz
Insect declines threaten wildlife far beyond insect world. Apart from being food, insects provide other species with homes, protection, chemical defence and sanitation - to name a few things. Great review article by @r-cooke.bsky.social with BEAUTIFUL visuals. 🧪🪳 www.nature.com/articles/s44...
New study published in @natecoevo.nature.com ! We assembled the largest global dataset of plant–pollinator networks to ask a simple question: do interactions become more specialised towards the tropics? doi.org/10.1038/s415... Study led by @saileesakhalkar.bsky.social and myself ☺️ 1/8
This study captures a part of mate choice that is easy to trivialise Females *want* to choose the best mate, but choosing is hard and they can only do their best. Conditions aren't always perfect - it's dangerous, choice is limited and males are SCREMING all at once 🧪🌏 doi.org/10.1038/d415...
Too much mate choice overwhelms frogs
Female treefrogs select less carefully when hearing a chorus of males.
nature.com
3 decades of data 😮 on this fairy-wren population showed how many cumulative effects of climate change (lower food supply, chick rearing, higher pesticides) can lead to population decline, even for a species categorised as “least concern” on the IUCN Red List 🥺 🌏🧪🦜 news.mongabay.com/2026/08/supe...
Superb fairywrens disappearing in Australia’s capital: Conserving insects could help save them
If you sit in an Australian park or garden for long enough, chances are you might catch a flash of brilliant feathers out of the corner of your eye: the superb fairywren. With its bright blue and soft...
news.mongabay.com
And check out this scrolly-telling article that highlights some of the data stories in the painting! 👀 labs.ala.org.au/stories/stor... (made using Quarto + {closeread}) #rstats 🧪🌏📊 #NationalScienceWeek #quartopub
Cultural knowledge + Western data on one canvas! 🖌️ That's the idea our recent intern Gullara McInnes and her mother Ann-Marie Keating had. The result: This incredible painting of biodiversity in their local area featuring occurrence data from the Atlas of Living Australia 🧪🌏📊 #NationalScienceWeek
Cultural knowledge + Western data on one canvas! 🖌️ That's the idea our recent intern Gullara McInnes and her mother Ann-Marie Keating had. The result: This incredible painting of biodiversity in their local area featuring occurrence data from the Atlas of Living Australia 🧪🌏📊 #NationalScienceWeek
I want to tell you a story, and it begins with this VERY WEIRD animal: Meet Thetys vagina... [a thread 🧵] 📸 m_patton bit.ly/2Mgw8Sf 🌿🧪🦑🐙🌊
Very special hermit crab for your feed. This is potentially only the second-ever iNaturalist observation of the species Dardanus insignis!
Issue 40 of #rdmweekly is out! 📬 ➡️ Reproducible R Code @daxkellie.bsky.social @sortee.bsky.social ➡️ Generating Universes Within Universes with a Single Seed @andrew.heiss.phd ➡️ AEA Replication Tracker @paulgp.com ➡️ Informed Consent Template and more! rdmweekly.substack.com/p/rdm-weekly...
RDM Weekly - Issue 040
A weekly roundup of Research Data Management resources.
rdmweekly.substack.com
galah 2.2.0 is on CRAN! 📦 🛡️ Authorised users can access sensitive data from the command line 🌏 GBIF gets full support for predicate or DOI queries, new support for the Flemish and Kew Gardens portals 🗂️ We’ve tidied scripts to be more versatile, efficient & consistent galah.ala.org.au/R/ #rstats
Whoa when this invasive mushroom grows on a dead or dying hardwood tree, the fungal diversity of that tree is cut in half (on average) 😯🍄 Spreading across the US & Canada as well as Switzerland, Italy, Hungary, Serbia & Germany, this fungus could have a huge cascading impact on global ecosystems 🧪🌏
If it didn't make bright yellow mushrooms, we probably wouldn't even know golden oyster was reducing fungal diversity on decaying hardwoods worldwide. A very interesting genetic banking endeavor to conserve imperiled native fungi whose ecosystem roles we certainly don't understand yet. 🍄🧪
Happy National Eucalypt Day! I summarised 100 years' of eucalypt data from the Atlas of Living Australia as a landscape #EucalyptoftheYear #rstats @eucalyptaus.bsky.social 📊🧪 See more here: shandiya.com/dataviz.html...
Missed @daxkellie.bsky.social’s @sortee.bsky.social webinar this morning? Now up on YouTube! youtu.be/2_Aum45rYlU
Webinar: Dax Kellie on reproducible R code
YouTube video by SORTEE
youtu.be
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
Webinar: Dax Kellie on reproducible R code
YouTube video by SORTEE
youtu.be
This is happening tomorrow! See you then 😀 #rstats 🌏🧪
In one week I'll be talking about tips for reproducible R code and why science would love you to try these tips on your own code too 🧪😍🌏 It's an online talk, so feel free to watch comfortably from your couch. Hope to see you there! @sortee.bsky.social #rstats events.humanitix.com/sortee-webin...
Awesome dataviz 🤩 So interesting how much variation there is in phrases like "Realistic possibility" compared to "About even" No wonder it's so difficult to use experimental survey data as strong evidence in research. People are too varied at interpreting scales! 🧪 #psychscisky
A really fun dataset for this week's #TidyTuesday, looking at how people interpret different probabilistic statements 📊 There's so many aspects of this to visualise, but I decided make some barcode plots comparing how people from the UK and US responded! #DataViz #RStats #ggplot2
A nice visual, and a worthwhile one to remember when considering gaps and biases in biodiversity data in Australia 🦘🌱 Nearly 70% of the population lives in a greater capital city, meaning that incidental observations of animals and plants outside of those areas are rare and valuable 🧪🌏📊
Love these population density spike maps. (by @researchremora) www.kontur.io/solutions/au...
In one week I'll be talking about tips for reproducible R code and why science would love you to try these tips on your own code too 🧪😍🌏 It's an online talk, so feel free to watch comfortably from your couch. Hope to see you there! @sortee.bsky.social #rstats events.humanitix.com/sortee-webin...
SORTEE Webinar: On what makes good sharable and reproducible R code, how to do it, and why it’s good for science
For this month's SORTEE webinar, Dr. Dax Kellie from the Atlas of Living Australia will present on good, sharable, and reproducible R code in science
events.humanitix.com
When every "easy" problem at work this week decides that they don't want to be easy problems
squidward from spongebob wearing a green hat
Alt: squidward from spongebob wearing a green hat
media.tenor.com
Want to make your code better at running again in the future? My talk next month will be filled with lots of tips about how to write sharable, reproducible R code and why it's good for science Hope to see you there! #rstats 🌏🧪👩💻
a woman in a yellow sweater is using a laptop
Alt: a woman in a yellow sweater typing with some real confident swagger on her laptop
media.tenor.com
Coming up in March! Join @sortee.bsky.social for a webinar with @daxkellie.bsky.social on good, shareable, and reproducible R code - register here: events.humanitix.com/sortee-webin...
Wow, this is spectacular! Evolution of beak size in an urban population of juncos in response to the loss of supplementary food (bird feeders) during the COVID pandemic, and subsequent regression. Is the UCLA campus the new Daphne Major? pnas.org/doi/full/10....
I just finished a three-year term as an editor at an international relations journal. I began at the start of the LLM era but ended right in the middle of it. Our volume of submissions tripled and our desk reject rate rose to 75%. I have some thoughts. open.substack.com/pub/hegemon/...
The Age of Academic Slop is Upon Us
what happens when AI automates "normal science"?
open.substack.com
Populations of endangered animals on an island have increased by 90-100% in five years, after effectively controlling non-native predators. www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01...
'Predator-free' fence project praised for restoring Kangaroo Island's native wildlife
Five years after feral cats were removed from inside the Western River Refuge on Kangaroo Island, populations of endangered species have boomed.
abc.net.au
I listened to 171 albums in 2025 apparently. These were my favourites 💿🎶🤘
What a massive loss for science in Australia. Emma was a force, and responsible for many of my friends’ careers in biology. Very sad news, my condolences to her friends and family www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12...
Family, colleagues in 'disbelief' after leading scientist dies aged 52
University of Melbourne vice-chancellor Emma Johnston has died from complications associated with cancer, aged 52.
abc.net.au