Post provided by Jonathan Syme Picture this idyllic scene: You’re on a research vessel that is steadily making its way through the vast blue sea, surveying back and forth along a set of transect lines, its track recorded by a GPS. Through your binoculars, you see a column of spray, an arching back, a fluke that rises high above the water, then disappears. You call … Continue reading Processing visual survey data with sampley
Post provided by Xi Peng When I first started analysing metagenomic data from cold seeps and hot springs, I didn’t expect to spend quite so much time staring at confusing lines of code and fragmented sequences. Yet these digital traces—broken fragments of DNA scattered across a matrix of microbial complexity—hold the fingerprints of life in Earth’s most extreme habitats. In this work, we developed an … Continue reading A longer read on microbes: Why bigger fragments matter in Earth’s harshest habitats
Post provided by Jeremy D. Pustilnik and Genevieve S. Rios Natural history museums around the world collectively hold over one billion specimens in their collections, from animal skins and fossils to pressed plants, minerals, and cultural heritage artifacts. Only a small fraction of these objects is ever placed on public display, while most remain in collection cabinets where they are studied by scientists, but rarely … Continue reading The future of natural history specimen 3D digitization is here with COPIS
Post provided by Brooke Bond (Gibbons) Ecologists often dream about big datasets—Combining observations from multiple studies across space and time could reveal patterns that would otherwise be impossible to detect. But anyone who has tried to merge datasets from different sources knows the reality is often less glamorous. My first job involved synthesising Baited Remote Underwater Video (BRUV) datasets from across Australia. BRUV systems use … Continue reading What a national marine dataset taught us about the power of quality control and collaboration
BIEN 4.2: A Reproducible Standard for Global Plant Biodiversity Data Post provided by the BIEN Working Group For hundreds of years, biologists have carefully collected information on plants, animals, and other organisms and have created and maintained enormous libraries of physical specimens from all around the globe. Specimens are collected with all kinds of information– often there’s a physical example, but beyond that, scientists record … Continue reading Building the Infrastructure for Reproducible Biodiversity Science
Post provided by Torcuato Pulido Mantas I am a postdoctoral researcher in Marine Biology and Ecology at the Department of Life and Environmental Sciences (DiSVA), Polytechnic University of Marche, where I work in the Zoology Lab (link: https://www.instagram.com/zoomardisva/). We focus on understanding how climate change affects benthic marine organisms, developing new methods for marine environmental monitoring, and promoting effective conservation strategies for vulnerable habitats and … Continue reading As above, so below: a perspective into the application of land-forest monitoring methods for the assessment of marine animal forests
Post provided by Ruairí Donnelly, Israël Tankam, and Alison Scott-Brown Here in the Epidemiology and Modelling Group at the University of Cambridge, our work is driven by the need to secure food supplies for future generations, particularly for those living in areas of the world already under increasing pressure from climate change and extreme weather conditions, making it harder for small-holders to produce and trade … Continue reading Managing plant viral epidemics – linking insect transmission and epidemic risk
Post provided by Benoît Pichon When I first started working on dryland ecosystems in my PhD, I didn’t expect to spend quite so much time staring at black-and-white aerial photographs. Yet these simple images—pixels of vegetation scattered across a matrix of white bare soil pixels—hold fingerprints of the resilience of drylands. In this work, we developed an approach to learn about dryland resilience from vegetation … Continue reading Reading the patterns: vegetation patterns reveal the fragility of dryland sites
By Naupaka Zimmerman and John Zobitz We (Naupaka and John) are faculty at primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs) where our lives are a blend of teaching and scholarship. We’re always looking for projects that impact our teaching, mentoring, and scholarship duties simultaneously—those sweet spots where one effort advances multiple aims. Due to higher teaching loads and institutional missions that focus on undergraduate research, it can be … Continue reading Students, software, and soil flux: lessons learned from development of a package to estimate soil carbon flux at National Ecological Observatory Sites across the United States
Post provided by David Bolduc and Frederic Dulude-de Broin Most people have played some form of tag during childhood – games where certain players try to catch others, who in turn may be able to take refuge in designated areas, or who must collect a flag or another item to win the game. These games are fun and engaging perhaps because they tap into some … Continue reading We impersonated predators and prey to study trophic interactions. It was quite fun, but mostly, it worked
Methods Blog 