New from openDendro: • xDateR and iDetrend: crossdate and detrend tree-ring data in your browser, with R code to reproduce your work • dplR 1.8.0 is on CRAN • dplPy 0.7.0 prerelease for Python Free and open source. opendendro.org

Heat advisory. Just a warning to my Seattle peeps that it might not drop back into the 40s tonight.

I found this neat tool that lets you generate text and images just from your ideas. It's really good!

"The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir." --Carl Sagan elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/summary-of...

Summary of Key Changes in OMB’s Proposed Federal Financial Assistance Rule

Russell Vought is going to destroy American Science

elizabethginexi.substack.com

Long time friends and such might remember that I made a record a few years ago titled “Hickory” after the town where my mom’s people lived. The NYT has an article about the town (not the record!) www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/o...

Opinion | The Town That Reveals All of Trump’s Bad Economic Ideas

nytimes.com

🌲🌳 PhD opportunity: Forest Vulnerability to Hotter Droughts Interested in forest ecosystems, climate extremes & tree stress resilience? 🎓 Dual PhD (KIT 🇩🇪 + Melbourne 🇦🇺) 🔬 Plant Ecophysiology Lab, Garmisch-Partenkirchen 🇩🇪 🌍 +1-year research stay 🇦🇺 👉 Apply here: t1p.de/g39co

Oh no! This is my favorite phenology record.

Katharine Hayhoe@katharinehayhoe.com · 7mo ago

A 1200+ year climate record is at risk. Do you know know anyone in Japan who could help? See below.

There is a new spiffier interface for xDateR. Since I'm teaching shiny apps this quarter I used it as an excuse to learn new UI and UX stuff. And I'm doing some more work on more graceful error handling that will come soon. viz.datascience.arizona.edu/xDateR/

Welp. charts.ecmwf.int/products/sea...

This is so, so well-articulated.

Minas Karamanis@minaskar.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Hey, I wrote a thing about AI in astrophysics ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...

Hey dendro folks. I did a full redesign of the xDater app. I've heard from several folks that last push busted the canonical link (hosted by UA). Until we fix it you can use it here: andybunn.shinyapps.io/xDateR/

Sort of surprised this isn’t big news in the (especially) west coast media. www.fs.usda.gov/about-agency...

I had a feeling this was going to happen. Sad news, especially given the poor state of sea ice after this winter. Looks like we won't be getting any more data for Arctic sea-ice thickness and volume for a while from PIOMAS. See: psc.apl.uw.edu/research/pro...

Exciting new work from Taylor et al in J of Clim. showing tree-ring PDSI reconstructions can identify compound drought-heatwave events in regions with strong land-atmosphere coupling. Clever disentangling of temp and ppt in PDSI recons! journals.ametsoc.org/downloadpdf/...

The Env Sci dept at WWU (my department!) is hiring a TT forest systems scientist. jobs.sciencecareers.org/job/677245/a...

Assistant Professor in Forest Systems - Bellingham, Washington State job with Western Washington University | 677245

Full-time, tenure-track position in Forest Systems with focus on forest ecosystems in the context of global environmental change.

jobs.sciencecareers.org

I agree. This event has been meteorologically astonishing, and its impacts will be felt long after it ends in terms of record low snowpack, sharply increased wildfire risk, and extreme low watershed runoff/streamflow into summer and beyond.

Nahel Belgherze@wxnb.bsky.social · 8mo ago

As the first reanalysis data become available, I think I can say with a fairly high degree of confidence that the March 2026 heatwave will go down as the most anomalously extreme heat event ever observed at any time of year in the southwestern U.S.

It is important to remember that the 'Breakthough Institute' is run by terrible people with bad ideas and even worse opinions

Ancient bristlecone pines have been collecting data for us for millennia. Scientists like Long Now Research Fellow Anne Heggli (@driscience.bsky.social) work to build a long-term scientific legacy among these ancient trees. longnow.org/ideas/long-s...

Long Science in the Nevada Bristlecone Preserve

Ancient bristlecone pines have been collecting data for us for millennia.

longnow.org

Obscure hot take: Having POSIXct and POSIXlt is overkill. POSIXlt should be deprecated.

🧵New paper out in Remote Sensing of Environment led by Katie Orndahl and Logan Berner! In this study, we (really they) mapped aboveground plant biomass and woody plant dominance across the entire Arctic tundra biome—at 30 m resolution. A thread 👇 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Next generation Arctic vegetation maps: Aboveground plant biomass and woody dominance mapped at 30 m resolution across the tundra biome

The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on Earth, placing tundra ecosystems at the forefront of global climate change. Plant biomass is a fund…

sciencedirect.com

We are hiring a visiting assistant prof next year for freshwater sci and climate. Great dept! Spread the word. hr.wwu.edu/careers-facu...

We have a new paper now online in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences with a group of amazing ECR coauthors reviewing methods and applications of (offline) paleoclimate data assimilation and looking toward the future www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Paleo poster session in lieu of class final. Here the beringia productivity paradox. So proud.

Interesting paper. Neat blend of chironomid data with a variety of dendro proxies. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Low-frequency patterns in Late-Holocene tree-ring records from northern Fennoscandia - Samuli Helama, 2025

Northern Fennoscandia is a cradle of tree-ring based climate reconstructions. These Late-Holocene data come from several types of tree-ring proxies and are typi...

journals.sagepub.com

Paleo folks know @xkcd.com temperature timeline, yeah? xkcd.com/1732/ I have a 12' version printed and once per year the students are always amazed (me too).

To the student whose class eval read in it’s entirety, “🔥 🔥 Fr fr on god no cap,” I salute you.

1/n Please see our new paper in Nature Communications! We used 1,851 tree-ring fire-scar sites and contemporary fire perimeters to quantify the prevalence of wildfire from 1600-1880 compared to 1984-2022. 🧪🌍🔥 Our key findings are as follows ...

A fire deficit persists across diverse North American forests despite recent increases in area burned - Nature Communications

Across many North American forests, recent years with exceptional area burned are not unprecedented when considering the multi-century perspective offered by fire-scarred trees. Nevertheless, abundant...

nature.com

In landscape ecology, I emphasize how simple models can illustrate complex patterns—like how dispersal on an environmental gradient can look like species sorting and niche partitioning. So, I make toy models for class.

Classic reading from Wally can be a balm for hard times.