I shared this email with my department, the School of Biology and Ecology, on June 1, 2020. I’m sharing it here for two reasons: 1) I was inspired by an email written by Dr. Julie Libarkin at MSU, which she shared on her blog. I hope others feel empowered to […]
The following is a transcription of a keynote lecture given by Maester Abelard, instructor of natural history at the Citadel, at the 219th Congress on the Natural Resources of the Seven Kingdoms. The Wall that separates the Seven Kingdoms from the wildlands beyond has long been lauded as one of humankind’s greatest […]
You can’t go far on the internet these days without stumbling upon a story of someone leaving academia. These are important stories, and it’s good that people are sharing them. These authors are often making valid critiques about Academia and the state of research funding, and are opening up a really […]
There are five letters in this week’s PNAS, responding to an article by Isabel Israde-Alcántara et al., that came out earlier this year on purported impact markers in Lake Cuitzeo, Mexico. In one letter (Gill et al. 2012), my coauthors (Jessica Blois, Simon Goring, Jenn Marlon, Pat Bartlein, Andrew Scott, and Cathy […]
I’ve been mostly attending talks on community assembly and trait-based ecology so far, as both are subjects I don’t know much about but am interested in. I think there are some really neat opportunities to apply a paleo-perspective to both fields, and I’ve been kicking around potential project ideas for […]
It’s Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of celebration of women in STEM fields. The Geek Feminism blog made the point in the post “How Not to Do Ada Lovelace Day” that the ideal outcome of ALD would be to end the invisibility of women in science and technology, and […]
Last month, Mark Davis and 18 ecologists argued in a Comment published in the journal Nature that the native-versus-alien dichotomy in conservation is not only increasingly impractical, but potentially counterproductive. The authors acknowledged that while some invasive species (e.g. zebra mussels) have widely-documented negative impacts, the application of the “invasive” […]
When Georneys announced that June’s Accretionary Wedge Global Carnival was “What’s your favorite geology word?” I knew that this would be the perfect launching post for this blog. As a physical geographer, an ice-age ecologist, and a frustrated English major, I have a lot of favorite geoscience words (where else […]
The Contemplative Mammoth 