Ethan White and Morgan Ernest's blog for discussing issues and ideas related to ecology and academia.

Ethan White

A couple of weeks ago we made it possible for folks to subscribe to JE using email. We did this because we realized that many scientists, even those who are otherwise computationally savvy, really haven’t embraced feed readers as a method of tracking information.

Why you should use a feed reader to monitor journal table of contents

Within the small community of ecologist bloggers much has been of the lack of blogging (and other odd pursuits like twittering) among ecologists (this is, afterall, EEB &amp; Flow‘s raison d’etre), and I recently read over at academHacK that “in the future [academics] can be online or be irrelevant”. So, this semester I did what I could to get some future ecologists blogging.

Starting young: getting ecologists to blog

UPDATE: Both Ecology Letters and the British Ecological Society journals now allow preprints. Thanks to both groups for listening to the community and supporting the rapid and open exchange of scientific ideas. Dear Ecology Letters and the British Ecological Society ,  I am writing to ask that you support the scientific good by allowing the submission of papers that have been posted as preprints.

An open letter to Ecology Letters and the British Ecological Society about preprints

Morgan Ernest

The Portal Project turns 40 this year! In celebration, we will be regularly posting about the history of the site, new things going on, natural history of the desert, and other fun things over at the Portal Blog.

The Portal Project 40th Anniversary

The Weecology lab group run by Ethan White and Morgan Ernest at the University of Florida is seeking a Project Manager to conduct and manage a long-term field study of breeding wading bird colonies in the Florida Everglades.

Florida Everglades Wading Bird Project Manager

UPDATE: If you’re looking for the information for 2014, checkout the DEBrief post for links. UPDATE: If you’re looking for the information for 2013, here’s an updated post.

NSF Pre-proposal guidelines/instructions

Someone (**cough** **cough** Morgan) fell down on their job rebloging the Portal Project 40th anniversary posts to Jabberwocky. But that means this week is the week o’ Portal as we reblog the various posts from the past few weeks. First up, what happens when we go out in the summer to count plants?

2017 Summer Plant Census

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. —Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher (1788 – 1860) Via Signal vs. Noise.

All truth passes through three stages [Quote]

How then is it possible to modify and improve upon an academic culture populated by smart, creative individuals who are motivated by ideals more than by money, who have deep, intense interests, value substance over form, have little patience for conformity, think for themselves, do not defer to authority, and see their work not as […]

Morgan &amp; Ethan

This is just one of many brilliantly reasoned (and worded) arguments from

 Saving Alma Mater

. If you are an academic, or an administrator at an academic institution, you really should read this book.

Laying the Groundwork for Change [Quote]

It seems that it was just time for ecologists to start blogging. We have recently come across two other ecology blogs:  Ecotone (the official ESA News &amp; Views blog) which has been kicking out a respectable 4-5 posts/week on a combination of interesting papers and policy. and  The EEB and flow which looks a fair bit like NCEAS circa 2007 and was started because  I think EEB and flow has this one right.

Here be ecologists blogging

I have never been a big fan of comprehensive exams. In my opinion being able to perform on a test (of whatever form) has very little to do with what it takes to be successful as a scientist and most of the exam systems that I am familiar with have serious structural problems above and beyond this basic objection.

Drug Monkey on comprehensive exams

The current model of writing up collaborative research in science is that a single individual “takes the lead” and writes a complete draft of the manuscript, which is then sent on to coauthors for comments, corrections, etc.

Another opportunity to change the way we collaborate – G o o g l e  W a v e  I n v i t e s for ecologists

Last week an exciting new addition to the R ecosystem was announced: webR. webR lets you run R from inside your browser, without installing R

 1

. This is a really exciting development for educational materials, because it makes it possible to provide interactive materials where students can modify, create, and run code right inside a web page with zero setup.

A brief introduction to using WebR and Quarto for client-side interactive lesson material

Understanding and managing forests is crucial to understanding and potentially mitigating the effects of climate change, invasive species, and shifting land use on natural systems and human society. However, collecting data on individual trees in the field is expensive and time consuming, which limits the scales at which this crucial data is collected.

Data science competition: Converting remote sensing into trees

How has our collection of weather data at the Portal Project changed through time? Weecology Project Manager Glenda Yenni recounts the saga of the weather stations.

The Portal Weather Station

I’m looking for one or more graduate students to join my group next fall. In addition to the official add (below) I’d like to add a few extra thoughts. As Morgan Ernest noted in her recent ad, we have a relatively unique setup at Weecology in that we interact actively with members of the Ernest Lab. We share space, have joint lab meetings, and generally maintain a very close intellectual relationship.

White Lab PhD openings at the University of Florida

We are excited to announce that Weecology will be moving to the University of Florida next summer. We were recruited as part of the UF Rising Preeminence Plan, a major hiring campaign to bring together researchers in a number of focal areas including Big Data and Biodiversity.

Weecology is moving to the University of Florida

As part of the Carnival that Prof-like Substance is organizing on Pre-tenure advice, I thought I’d throw in a piece of advice that anyone who asks me this question gets from me. Here it is:  Create a calendar and block out time for you. Sounds simple, and honestly a little stupid, but it’s the best advice I can give. Why? When you start your job, or a semester, your calendar is empty.

Pre-tenure Advice: Blocking out time for your research

If you’ve every worked with scientific data, your own or someone elses, you know that you can end up spending a lot of time just cleaning up the data and getting it in a state that makes it ready for analysis. This involves everything from cleaning up non-standard nulls values to completely restructuring the data so that tools like R, Python, and database management systems (e.g., MS Access, PostgreSQL) know how to work with them.

EcoData Retriever: quickly download and cleanup ecological data so you can get back to doing science

Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Mentoring Program Gordon Research Conference:  Unifying Ecology across Scales ADDED BELOW: Who can apply is added under financial support (why it’s where will make more sense when you read it) Time and Place: July 19-25, 2014 at the University of New England in Biddeford, Maine Conference Description: Ecological patterns and processes […]

Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Mentoring Program
 


 
 Gordon Research Conference:  Unifying Ecology across Scales
 


 ADDED BELOW:

Who can apply is added under financial support (why it’s where will make more sense when you read it)


Time and Place: July 19-25, 2014 at the University of New England in Biddeford, Maine Conference Description: Ecological patterns and processes

UPDATED: Unifying Ecology across Scales: Mentoring Program [announcement]

Doing science in academia involves a lot of rejection and negative feedback. Between grant agencies single digit funding rates, pressure to publish in a few “top” journals all of which have rejection rates of 90% or higher [1], and the growing gulf between the number of academic jobs and the number of graduate students and postdocs [2], spending even a small amount of time in academia pretty much guarantees that you’ll see a lot of rejection.

How I remember the positive in science and academia: My Why File

It’s job season. It’s that time of year again when our young scientists pour over a wide variety of job ads and ask themselves that critically important question: do I apply? In some ways, this is the most critical step in the entire job application process. Yes, your job packet is important. There’s the goldilocks problem of conveying your awesome in the cover letter but worrying about sounding conceited.

The best way to not get a job: don’t apply

This is a guest post by Elita Baldridge (@elitabaldridge), a graduate student in Ethan White’s lab in the Ecology Center at Utah State University.

As a budding macroecologist, I have thought a lot about what skills I need to acquire during my Ph.D. This is my model of the four basic attributes for a macroecologist, although I think it is more generally applicable to many ecologists as well:

 Data


 Statistics


 Math

Four basic skill areas for a macroecologist [Guest post]

We had a great time at ESA this year and enjoyed getting to interact with lots of both old and new friends and colleagues. Since we’re pretty into open science here at Weecology, it’s probably not surprising that we have a lot of slides (and even scripts) from our many and varied talks and posters posted online, and we thought it might be helpful to aggregate them all in one place. Enjoy.

Open talks and posters from Weecology at #ESA2013

Today, I was watching a great episode of the History Channel show “The Universe“, which was exploring the concept of the nature of the universe. (On the off chance you are some type of physicist or astronomer who has stumbled on to this blog, you might want to skip to the next paragraph.

Evolution in the Multiverse

Slides and script from Morgan Ernest’s Ignite talk on Why constraint based approaches to ecology from Elita Baldridge and Ethan White’s thought provoking ESA 2013 session on Constraints in Ecology. Slides are also archived on figshare.


 Slide 1-3:

As this coral reef food web so aptly demonstrates, nature is complex.

Ignite Talk: Why constraint based approaches to ecology?

It’s that time of year again where we let people know which Weecologists are doing what and where at the annual Ecological Society of America meeting! We have an action packed schedule this year.

 Sunday:


 Workshop 12: Software Carpentry for Ecologists


 8am-5pm, 101G Minneapolis Convention Center

Ethan White and former Weecology undergrad Ben Morris will be helping out with a Software Carpentry Workshop.

Weecology at #ESA2013

ESA has just announced that it has changed its policy on preprints and will now allow articles that have been posted on major preprint servers, like arXiv, to be considered for publication in its journals. I am very excited about this change for two reasons. First, as nicely laid out in INNGE blog post by Philippe Desjardins-Proulx*, there are many positive benefits to science of the preprint culture.

ESA journals will now allow papers with preprints

Joan Strassman has a very nice post about why it is sometimes useful to step back from the intricate details of biological systems in order to understand the general processes that are operating. Here’s a little taste of the general message  The whole post is definitely worth a read.

Sometimes it’s important to ignore the details [Things you should read]

Next week is the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America. If you’ve ever been to ESA, then you know it’s….big, often between 3000-5000 ecologists (which I thought was big until I heard about some of the biomedical conferences which have the attendance of a small city). It seems like most of those people are giving talks or posters.

Navigating ESA

Some time ago in academia we realized that it didn’t make sense for individual scientists or even entire departments to maintain their own high performance computing resources.

Why computer labs should never be controlled by individual colleges/departments

Advertisements for three exciting postdoctoral positions came out in the last week.

 Interface between ecology, evolution and mathematics

The first is with Hélène Morlon’s group in Paris. Hélène and I were postdocs in Jessica Green’s lab at the same time. She is both very smart and extremely nice, oh, and did I mention, her lab is in PARIS. Here’s the ad. If it’s a good fit then you couldn’t go wrong with this postdoc.

Postdocs Galore [Jobs]

Introduction

I have been very encouraged of late to see more and more ecologists embracing the potential of the web for communication and interaction. I’ve recently blogrolled some graduate student blogs and in the last few weeks I’ve come across American Naturalist’s trial run of a forum system, Ecological Monographs’ blog, and a blog soliciting feedback on a new initiative to digitize existing biological collections.

Getting your own domain name: a recommendation, justification, and brief tutorial

Transient Theorist is planning on doing something with his Spring Break that most of us don’t do often enough – take a week to think. In the rush to do all of the things that

 have

to be done, we often lose track of doing the things that are really important to our core mission – advancing scientific knowledge as quickly as possible.

Spring Break = Think Week for academic scientists

Positions available to work within an integrated terrestrial and marine research program addressing fundamental questions on the origin, maintenance, conservation and future of life and biological diversity on Earth. Candidates should have a strong publication record, relevant analytical and data handling skills, and an ability to communicate within a research team. Competitive salaries are offered.

[Postdoc and PhD positions] Danish Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate

I had an interesting conversation with someone the other day that made me think I needed one last frequency distribution post in order to avoid causing some people to not move forward with addressing interesting questions. As a quantitative ecologist I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out the best way to do things. In other words, I often want to know what the best method is available for answering a particular question.

Frequency distributions for ecologists V: Don’t let the lack of a perfect tool prevent you from asking interesting questions

I’d recommend checking out this post by River Continua about an impressively sophisticated phishing scam targeted at academics. They’re going to catch a bunch of folks with this one.  UPDATE: Apparently this is something that the EPA does that the EPA employee who wrote the original post was unaware of. They definitely need to rethink the composition of the email though as I would have been (and obviously was) equally suspicious.

Beware of Reviewer based phishing scam

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or are a new assistant professor), you are surely aware by now that Darwin’s 200th birthday is this week. However, unless you’re a certified blog-crawler, you may not be aware of Blogging the Origin.

Blogging the Origin

Over the weekend I saw this great tweet: Personal publishing policy for the PhD: always submit to http://t.co/dE2HMGlP and only publish (as 1st author) in arXiv-friendly journals. — P Desjardins-Proulx (@phdpqc) July 14, 2012 by Philippe Desjardins-Proulx and was pleased to see yet another actively open young scientist.

Over the weekend I saw this great tweet:    by Philippe Desjardins-Proulx and was pleased to see yet another actively open young scientist. Then I saw his follow up tweet:    At first I was confused.

ESA journals do not allow papers with preprints

This is the first of a new category of posts here at Jabberwocky Ecology called Research Summaries. We like the idea of communicating our research more broadly than to the small number of folks who have the time, energy, and interest to read through entire papers. So, for every paper that we publish we will (hopefully) also do a blog post communicating the basic idea in a manner targeted towards a more general audience.

Characterizing the species-abundance distribution with only information on richness and total abundance [Research Summary]

Jeremy Fox over at the Oikos Blog has written an excellent piece explaining why fundamental, basic science, research is worth investing in, even when time and resources are limited. His central points include: Fundamental research is where a lot of our methodological advances come from. Fundamental research provides generally-applicable insights. Current applied research often relies on past fundamental research.

On the value of fundamental scientific research

Figuring out how to teach well as a professor at a research university is largely a self-study affair. For me the keys to productive self-study are good information and self-reflection. Without good information you’re not learning the right things and without self-reflection you don’t know if you are actually succeeding at implementing what you’ve learned.

Am I teaching well given the available research on teaching

A couple of months ago Micah J. Marty and I had a twitter conversation and subsequent email exchange about how citations worked with preprints. I asked Micah if I could share our email discussion since I thought it would be useful to others and he kindly said yes. What follows are Michah’s questions followed by my responses. At the level of the journal nothing happens.

Thoughts on preprints and citations

I logged into one of my reviewer accounts at a Wiley journal this morning and was greeted by a redirect that took me to a page with the following message:  Asking someone who is already working for you for free if it’s OK to also try to sell them stuff while they’re doing it seems like a pretty good definition of classless to me.

Stay Classy Wiley

This is a guest post by Elita Baldridge (@elitabaldridge). She is a graduate student in our group who has been navigating the development of a chronic illness during graduate school. She is sharing her story to help spread awareness of the challenges faced by graduate students with chronic illnesses.

I am a graduate student. I have fibromyalgia.

Sadly, Ethan and I are missing ESA this year, but our group still has a strong presence this year. In fact you can see a weecologist every day of the conference if you so desire! If you’re at ESA and want to know what the weecologists are up to, go check out our various talks and posters.

Weecology at ESA 2012

There is an exciting postdoc opportunity for folks interested in quantitative approaches to studying evolution in Michael Gilchrist’s lab at the University of Tennessee. I knew Mike when we were both in New Mexico. He’s really sharp, a nice guy, and a very patient teacher. He taught me all about likelihood and numerical maximization and opened my mind to a whole new way of modeling biological systems.

Postdoc in Evolutionary Bioinformatics [Jobs]

George Monbiot has just published a piece in The Telegraph berating for-profit academic publishers that will surely be castigated by some as over the top hyperbole and praised by others as a trenchant criticism of the state of academic publishing*. Starting off with the, perhaps, ever so slightly, contentious title of

 Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist

Monbiot proceeds to fire zingers like and backs up his position

An excoriation of for-profit academic publishers

I’ve been waiting for a while now for Ted Hart’s blog to get up enough steam to send folks over there, and since in the last two weeks he’s had three posts, revamped the mission of the blog, and engaged in the ongoing conversation about Lindenmayer &amp; Likens, it seems like that time has arrived.

Distributed Ecology [Blogrolling]

We are pretty excited about what modern technology can do for science and in particular the potential for increasingly rapid sharing of, and collaboration on, data and ideas. It’s the big picture that explains why we like to blog, tweet, publish data and code, and we’ve benefited greatly from others who do the same. So, when we saw this great talk by Michael Nielsen about Open Science, we just had to share.

Michael Nielsen on the importance and value of Open Science

When last we left our intrepid scientists, they were starting to ponder the changes that might result from the new pre-proposal process. In general, we really like the new system because it helps reviewers focus on the value of big picture thinking and potentially reduces the overall workload of both grant writing and grant reviewing.

The NSF Preproposal Process: Pt 2. A promising start

Therapy for interdisciplinary biologists

You don’t become great by trying to be great

There is an excellent post on open science, prestige economies, and the social web over at Marciovm’s posterous*. For those of you who aren’t insanely nerdy** GitHub is… well… let’s just call it a very impressive collaborative tool for developing and sharing software***. But don’t worry, you don’t need to spend your days tied to a computer or have any interest in writing your own software to enjoy gems like:  Thanks to Carl Boettiger

A GitHub of Science? [Things you should read]

If you use R (and it seems like everybody does these days) then you should check out RStudio – an easy to install, cross-platform IDE for R. Basically it’s a seamless integration of all of the aspects of R (including scripts, the console, figures, help, etc.) into a single easy to use package. For those of you are familiar with Matlab, it’s a very similar interface. It’s not a full blown IDE yet (no debugger;

RStudio [Things you should use]

Jarrett Byrnes‘ first turn at the helm of the ESA Bulletin’s Ecology on the Web feature is now up. It’s definitely worth a look.

Ecology on the Web [Things you should read]

I just restumbled over the Daily Routines blog. The blog is about “how writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days” and is basically just excerpts from interviews with famous creative folks. The blog appears to be “on hold” pending an upcoming book, but I definitely recommend pulling it up some lazy afternoon and working your way through how some of the most creative people around structure their days.

Daily Routines [Things you should read]

As I’ve mentioned before I’m not a big fan of the configuration of most comprehensive exams, but my post on the matter keeps languishing on my out of control To Do list.

Fighting the snake [Things you should read]

The Ecological Database Toolkit

Large amounts of ecological and environmental data are becoming increasingly available due to initiatives sponsoring the collection of large-scale data and efforts to increase the publication of already collected datasets. As a result, ecology is entering an era where progress will be increasingly limited by the speed at which we can organize and analyze data.

Beta Release of Database Toolkit

The peer review system has recently been under increasing pressure as the number of papers submitted has been skyrocketing.

PubCreds: Paying for journal submissions with reviews… or maybe we should just use money

We’ve been thinking a lot recently about the idea that the social web can/should play an increasing role in filtering the large quantity of published information to allow the best and most important work to float to the top (see e.g., posts by The Scholarly Kitchen and Academhack). In its simplest form the idea is that folks like us will mention publications that we think are good/important and then people who think we’re worth listening to

Things you should read

I think we make things that we like and that we think our friends would like, and we cross our fingers and hope that enough other people like it that we can earn a living.


I think we make things that we like and… [Quote]

If we embrace the fact that no one can or should ever care about the health of our passions as much as we do, the practical decisions that help ensure Our Good Thing stays alive can become as “simple” as a handful of proven patterns—work hard, stay awake, fail well, hang with smart people, shed […]

A great quote from an interesting article about Future-Proofing Your Passion that includes lots of great advice for young and old scientists alike.

If we embrace the fact that no one can or should ever care about the health of our passions… [Quote]

American Naturalist (one of the top journals in ecology and evolution) has just announced that they are rolling out a forum system to allow for online discussions about their published papers.

American Naturalist Adds Online Forum

We’ve recently been following a couple of blogs by graduate students studying ecology and have been enjoying them enough that we thought we’d point folks in their direction. Transient Theorist is a first year PhD student interested in quantitative and interdisciplinary approaches to ecology. How could we not love his blog. Particularly good recent posts include Ups and Downs and Intimidating questions.

Upcoming meetings on metabolic scaling and ecology

Summary

Likelihood, likelihood, likelihood (and maybe some other complicated approaches), but definitely not r^2 values from fitting regressions to binned data.

 A bit more nitty gritty detail

In addition to causing issues with parameter estimation, binning based methods are also inappropriate when trying to determine which distribution provides the best fit to empirical data.

Frequency distributions for ecologists IV: comparing model performance

If you’re looking for a quantitatively oriented postdoc in ecology this position with Kiona Ogle is a great opportunity.  I can’t vouch for her collaborator, but I’ve worked with Kiona and she is smart, has a good scientific philosophy, and is a patient &amp; hard working collaborator – all goods signs for a postdoctoral mentor.

[Postdoc position] Effects of elevated carbon dioxide on ecosystem C and N dynamics in the Mojave Desert

A nice piece in the New York Times (via Ecotone).

Lawrence Slobodkin RIP

Many of us have had the feeling that something is not right these days with the peer-review system in science. Whenever I chat with colleagues about the peer review system, two issues consistently crop up: an increasing number of review requests that we cannot possibly keep up with and/or reviews that seem to indicate a reviewer did not spend much time with the manuscript they were reviewing.

The broken peer-review system: a reviewer’s opinion

This is a table of contents of sorts for five posts on the visualization, fitting, and comparison of frequency distributions. The goal of these posts is to expose ecologists to the ideas and language related to good statistical practices for addressing frequency distribution data. The focus is on simple distributions and likelihood methods.

Frequency distributions for ecologists

Last week, I enjoyed Marc Cadotte’s post over at EEB and Flow on learning that he had one of the worst jobs in science: Triage Biologist. I thought both the post was funny and also the fact that I would never have thought about the work he does as being one of the worst jobs in science. I mean, many of us can think of much much worse things to do with one’s time than to have Cadotte’s research career.

Who are you calling Vermin?

It is increasingly common for journals to employ fairly strict length limits on submissions. I’m actually a big fan of this. I feel that the most important points of most manuscripts will fit into 6-8 published pages and details that only a small fraction of an already small readership will be interested in can easily be placed in online supplements.

A catch 22 of length limits in publication

Yesterday’s post made me think of this great scene between Michael Douglas and Katie Holmes’ characters in the movie Wonder Boys:

 Hannah Green

: Grady, you know how in class you’re always telling us that writers make choices?

 Grady Tripp

: Yeah.

 Hannah Green

: And even though you’re book is really beautiful, I mean, amazingly beautiful, it’s… it’s at times… it’s… very detailed.

Making choices when writing

Those of you who attend conferences will be familiar with the standard – walk up to someone you know, who is talking to someone you don’t, get introduced to new person – conference interaction.

Lazy reviewers and whiny AEs

Counting plants and rats in the desert is fun to collect but also hard won data. Another Portal Project blog post is up!

Walking the beat

So here it is, the first of the positions we’ll be advertizing as part of our move to the University of Florida. The official ad is below, but a few comments first. The position is for a student to work with me, but for those who aren’t really familiar with our groups, it’s important to note that my group works closely with Ethan White’s lab (we provide desk space that mixes the labs together, we have a single group lab meeting,

Ernest Lab Ph.D opening at University of Florida

A few months ago Mick Watson wrote an awesome post about How to recruit a good bioinformatician. We’re in the process of hiring a scientific software engineer so I thought I’d use Mick’s post to illustrate why you should come work with us doing scientific software development and data-intensive research, and hopefully provide a concrete demonstration of the sort of things Mick suggests for appealing to talented computational folks.

We’re recruiting a good Scientific Software Engineer

This is a guest post by Elita Baldridge (@elitabaldridge). She is a recently finished PhD in our group who has been navigating the development of a chronic illness during graduate school and beyond.

This is the second in a series of posts about my experiences completing a PhD with a chronic illness (Part 1, see also these two earlier, posts). As I mentioned in the first post, having a chronic illness means that there can a lot of

External challenges of chronic illness (in graduate school)

EcoBloggers is a relatively new blog aggregator started by the awesome International Network of Next-Generation Ecologists (INNGE). Blog aggregators pull together posts from a number of related blogs to provide a one stop shop for folks interested in that topic. The most famous example of a blog aggregator in science is probably Research Blogging. I’m a big fan of EcoBloggers for three related reasons.

EcoBloggers: The ecology blog aggregator

The Department of Zoology and Physiology at the University of Wyoming is advertising some postdoctoral fellowships (details below). There are a number of stellar people out there (including friend of Weecology, Jake Goheen, who sent us the ad), so we strongly recommend checking out the opportunity if you’re looking for a postdoc or know someone who is:

 Berry Postdoctoral Fellowships

Berry Postdoctoral Fellowships are

Post-docs at the University of Wyoming

I’ve read two great posts in the last couple of days that highlight what the recent debate over the the possibility of ‘arsenic based life’ has shown about how scientists are leveraging the modern web to quickly evaluate, discuss and improve science. Marc Cadotte, Nicholas Mirotchnick and Caroline Tucker have a great post over at EEB &amp; flow that will fill in the background for you.

Science 2.0 [Things you should read]

We’ve had a bit of discussion here at JE about potential solutions to the tragedy of the reviewer commons, so I found a recent letter in

 Nature

(warning – it’s behind a pay wall) suggesting that there may not actually be a problem interesting.

No peer review crisis after all?

Cell Press has recently announced what I considered to be the most interesting advance in journal publishing since articles started being posted online. Basically they have started to harness the power of the web to aggregate the information present in in articles in more useful and efficient ways.

Journal Article 2.0

“It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds”  Samuel Adams

Rooted in revolution

Imperial College London is offering a new masters degree program in quantitative biology. It sounds like a great opportunity to get some good quantitative training via an intensive 1 year MS program. The best part of their pitch follows below. If you’d like to see the whole ad check out the flier that Dan Reuman sent me.

New Masters Program in Quantitative Biology at Imperial College London

UPDATE: If you’re looking for the information for 2014, checkout the DEBrief post for links. It’s that time of year again when we’re all busy working on preproposals for the National Science Foundation, and just like last year it’s more difficult than you would think to track down the official guidelines using Google.

NSF Preproposal Guidelines 2013

The first, throat clearing post to kick off what (we hope) will be a revitalization of the Portal Project Blog

PORTAL: The times, they are a’changin

Communicating research more broadly is not only important for outreach to the public, but with the rapidly expanding literature, we think it’ll also be important for communicating to other scientists.

Do macroecological patterns respond to altered species interactions? [Research Summary]

The weecology group is coming in force to the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America which is being held in New Orleans next week. We’ve been up to a quite diversified list of things over the past year ranging from temporal dynamics of communities to forecasting and remote sensing. We also have people involved in a number of outreach or training events this year.

Weecology at #ESA2018 [updated]

PH.D STUDENT POSITION IN COMMUNITY ECOLOGY

The Ernest Lab at the University of Florida has an opening for a Ph.D student interested in research in the area of community ecology, forecasting, and/or temporal dynamics to start fall 2020.

Ph.D Student Opening in Weecology

While the Portal Project focuses primarily on rodents and plants, there is more to our ecosystem than just those taxa. This week’s Portal Project post focuses on some insect work at the site.

Ode to six-legged wonder

Today’s reblog from the Portal Project is a piece by Tom Valone how the site inspired him to ponder vegetation change.

A Vegetation History

We are very excited to announce the newest release of our EcoData Retriever software and the first release of a supporting R package, ecoretriever. If you’re not familiar with the EcoData Retriever you can read more here.

EcoData Retriever now supports R and environmental data, and has more datasets

The British Ecological Society has announced that will now allow the submission of papers with preprints (formal language here). This means that you can now submit preprinted papers to Journal of Ecology, Journal of Animal Ecology, Methods in Ecology and Evolution, Journal of Applied Ecology, and Functional Ecology. By allowing preprints BES joins the Ecological Society of America which instituted a pro-preprint policy last year.

British Ecological Society journals now allow preprints

This is a guest post by Elita Baldridge (@elitabaldridge)

I am currently the remotely working member of Weecology, finishing up my PhD in the lower elevation and better air of Kansas, while the rest of my colleagues are still in Utah, due to developing a chronic illness and finally getting diagnosed with fibromyalgia.  The relocation is actually working out really well.  I’m in better shape because I’m not having to

How technology can help scientists with chronic illnesses (or Technology FTW!)

UPDATE: If you’re looking for publicly available grants go check out our new Open Grants website at https://www.ogrants.org/. It has way more grants and is searchable so that you can quickly find the grants most useful to you.

Recently a bunch of folks in the biological sciences have started sharing their grant proposals openly.

A list of publicly available grant proposals in the biological sciences

Before we start, this post refers to posts already written on this topic. To make sure no one gets lost, please follow the sequence of operations below:

 Step 1:

Do you know about the new pre-proposal process at NSF?

Jabberwocky Ecology

Gordon Research Conference & Student/Postdoc Conference on Unifying Ecology Across Scales