We have a new paper led by Natasha Khanna-Dang on bird foraging activity in California walnut woodlands across Los Angeles County. The punchline: more native plant diversity = more foraging birds in urban green spaces. doi.org/10.3160/0038... #UrbanEcology #Ornithology #ConservationBiology

*New paper in Biological Invasions* Invasive giant reed is hammering riparian birds in Big Bend NP. Butterflies are more buffered by the native vegetation mosaic. Ongoing Arundo control in the park should benefit both taxa as native vegetation recovers. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Invasive giant reed shifts riparian habitat mosaics, with stronger effects on birds than butterflies across spatial scales - Biological Invasions

Giant reed (Arundo donax) has invaded biologically diverse riparian ecosystems in warm and arid regions globally, yet its impacts on wildlife are still poorly understood. Resolving the multi-taxa, sca...

link.springer.com

New paper from my lab! "Native-plant landscaping enhances floral visitation by insects and birds in residential yards," led by Esmeralda Reyes & Noriko Smallwood. If you add some native plants, your yard can be a pollinator powerhouse. See below for details. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

If you're in Urbana or Chicago, I will be giving a seminar next week at UIUC. I'll be talking about our work in LA, focused on historical ecology, redlining, and our current urban ecology research. Super psyched to see friends and connect with new colleagues. calendars.illinois.edu/detail/7076/...

Rapid butterfly declines across the United States during the 21st century | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Rapid butterfly declines across the United States during the 21st century

Numerous declines have been documented across insect groups, and the potential consequences of insect losses are dire. Butterflies are the most surveyed insect taxa, yet analyses have been limited in ...

science.org

[new paper] You probably suspected that loss of pollinator diversity consistently reduces reproductive success for wild and cultivated plants, but here we quantify it: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Loss of pollinator diversity consistently reduces reproductive success for wild and cultivated plants

Nature Ecology & Evolution - A meta-analysis finds that decreasing diversity of pollinator species has a negative affect on multiple measures of plant reproductive success, with wild plant...

nature.com

For you SoCal people, if you have not seen this episode of 'Nature' (San Diego - America's Wildest City), you need to. My Ecosystems of California class will be watching it today discussing the awesome ecology, and identifying the plants, & wildlife featured. www.pbs.org/video/san-di...

Nature | San Diego: America’s Wildest City | Season 43 | Episode 3

Experience San Diego, where dazzling biodiversity thrives amidst a transformed urban landscape.

pbs.org

**FORESTGEO STAFF SCIENTIST POSITION!** We are hiring a Research Ecologist to focus on Central and South American Forest Dynamics, to be based at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Smithsonian staff scientist positions are excellent, as is the ForestGEO team! Come be our colleague!

I'll be giving a free webinar Thurs, Dec 5, 7 p.m. Central time for the Minnesota Native Plant Society on the topics of #oak reproduction, #species, #hybrids, & #phylogeny / #treeOfLife, from my new book (press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...). Join us, and pls share! us06web.zoom.us/j/6977108818...

A few years ago, postdoc Gail MacInnis led this great project showing that urban beekeeping doesn't help "save the bees" (and can do more harm than good). peerj.com/articles/146...

@ndevere.bsky.social Hi - we do a bunch of urban pollinator work. Would be happy to network with you and others in the starter pack.

As usual, students in my lab have been busy with many projects. One that has taken off recently is our NSF-funded urban food webs project, which generally explores relationships between native/nonnative oaks, insects, and birds right on our LA campus. A fun project with long-term data potential!

A flower that mimics aerial leaf litter (e.g., dead leaves trapped in vines, branches etc) tricks an aerial leaf litter specialist beetle into pollinating it. Super crazy and cool pollination syndrome.

Journal of Ecology@journalofecology.bsky.social · 2y ago

🍃🪲The flowers of Meiogyne heteropetala imitate leaf litter clumps trapped in the undergrowth to trick beetles into pollination: besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

The Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University, affiliated with our Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences Department, is hiring an Assistant / Associate Prof. Join us! jobs.oregonstate.edu/postings/161...

Assistant/Associate Professor: Marine Mammal Biologist

The Marine Mammal Institute invites applications for a part-time (0.75 FTE), 12-month, tenure-track Assistant/Associate Professor position. This position is located in Newport, Oregon.Appointment at t...

jobs.oregonstate.edu

Remarkable view of #BombCyclone west of Oregon & Washington and associated #AtmosphericRiver west of California this PM. Fortunately, the strongest winds will remain well offshore, but very heavy rainfall is likely across portions of northern CA into weekend. #CAwx #ORwx #WAwx

Cat "What have you done?"

Birding is the best.

Ed Yong@edyong209.bsky.social · 2y ago

Whew! Popping back here briefly to discuss a very eventful few days. On Sat, a SNOW BUNTING appears at Hayward Regional. 😱 The bird is stunning & super-rare in the East Bay. Many birders go to see it. It's living its best life on a white/brown plastic culvert that it maybe thinks is snow? 1/

If you are interested in #rstats, hierarchical modeling in ecology, and in particular occupancy models, then check out my blog! The one post that gets the most traffic is this one here on how to combine presence-only and detection/non-detection data. 🧪 masonfidino.com/bayesian_int...

People are suggesting Bluesky is just an echo chamber. Possibly. But there needs to be a place to network with friends and colleagues and learn about amazing science and ways to improve our planet. That used to be the other site - and it was amazing. That is long gone and now this is where it's at.

🚨Looking for two PhD students to join our lab in Fall' 25🚨 If you know someone that loves/works with Neotropical birds and/or species interactions, and is looking for a PhD please share this with them! (application deadline is January 3rd). More info here --> montanolab.com/join-us/

A really interesting critique of the ‘luxury effect’ in urban ecology studies and a discussion on an alternative framework to understand variability in biodiversity within cities.

Madhusudan 🦉 Katti@leafwarbler.myatproto.social · 2y ago

1. Thrilled to share a new paper from my group out this week in Ecosphere where we critique the much researched “luxury effect” in urban ecology and offer a power-based socioecological framework to complicate our understanding of how wealth may or may not influence biodiversity. #oa 🧵:

Bluesky and fellow #urbanists - I am an ecologist at Cal State Los Angeles. My research is focusing more and more on urbanist issues, e.g., walkability, urban design, etc., and the intersection between benefits for people and biodiversity. I'd love to connect with others thinking of similar things.

💡 Tip: You can set your website as your username on Bluesky! This is one form of self-verification, and we especially encourage official organizations and brands to do this! Examples include @npr.org @react.dev @duolingobrasil.com.br. Here's our guide for how to do this:

go.bsky.app/HKhn9FZ just made a starterpack for LA Urbanists. These are accounts that I followed on Twitter that often (but not always) chimed in on LA urbanist issues like housing, bikes, transit, and the environment.

youtube.com/watch?v=06eU... This is amazing - a cool surf gang in Pakistan. Send these guys your spare boards and lets get these guys to the Olympics.

Cool study finding differences in herbivory between island and mainland sites - but no real vertebrate predation effects. We have an oak exclosure experiment going too and are finding strong predation effects related to herbivory patterns. Will be interesting to further compare with this neat study.

Journal of Ecology@journalofecology.bsky.social · 2y ago

🐛A broad-scale study on insularity effects on herbivory in oak trees shows ⬇️insect herbivory on islands compared to mainland, but no evidence of topdown (via predator effects) or bottomup (via leaf traits) forcing contributing to observed patterns: besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Some amazing crossbill vagrancy going on in North America, White-winged Crossbills arriving on Bermuda over 1000km from the mainland! Worth scrutinising any “Two-barred Crossbills” that turn up near shipping lanes…

Today in relatable science: Gulls making a mysterious daily trip that turned out to be to a potato chip factory

I haven’t posted in a while, what have I been up to… well for starters Frontiers finally published our urban coyote connectivity paper after almost a year of being accepted. Bit criminal, but we are happy its out & somehow still relevant considering we submitted in 2022 doi.org/10.1002/fee....

Hi folks, I'm new here! I'm an Urban Ecologist based in Melbourne, Australia. I spend most of my time thinking about how to make our suburbs more bird-friendly. 🌳🏠🦜 I'm keen to connect with others interested in #Ecology, #Environmental #Science, #Wildlife #Conservation, and of course #Birds! 😊