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Adam Csank

@acsank.bsky.social
3.3K followers 335 following 252 posts

Geographer at U Nevada, Reno. Interested in past and present climate, dendrochronology, forest health, environmental history, and the Arctic. 🇨🇦 (he/him). views my own.

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Reposted by Adam Csank
JGR: Biogeosciences @jgrbiogeo.bsky.social · 17h
When the Rains Don't Come: Legacies of North American Monsoon Failure on Tree Growth agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...
agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
When the Rains Don't Come: Legacies of North American Monsoon Failure on Tree Growth
Failures of the North American monsoon produce growth legacies in dominant southwestern tree species for up to 4 years The occurrence of these growth legacies is modulated by climate conditions d...
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Reposted by Adam Csank
Nature @nature.com · 22h
International students in the US would face a $100,000 price tag to work a science job in the country after graduation under a proposal made public yesterday by the Trump administration go.nature.com/4AWqQi8
go.nature.com
US proposes $100,000 charge for international students to do post-graduate work
Proposed rule would choke off a crucial STEM talent pipeline, policy specialists say
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Adam Csank @acsank.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Career goals.
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Neil Pederson @yellowbuckeye.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
A kind of nurture vs nature for trees study. Kinda academic.oup.com/treephys/adv...
academic.oup.com
When environments mismatch - The limits of transgenerational climate memory in Scots pine
Abstract. A long-term irrigation experiment in the dry Rhône Valley of Switzerland provides a unique opportunity to examine transgenerational environmental
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Kelly Hereid @kellyhereid.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Striking, and appropriate, that this piece comes from a professor from a business school. The business world relies on public research and universities for its talent pipeline. Cutting off international students with an unachievable degree deadline cuts that pipeline. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Taxing the talent that builds American science
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Jennifer Ouellette @jenlucpiquant.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Enraging. Agency Diverted $1.4 Billion in Science Funds Mandated by Congress. The move, affecting about one-fifth of the National Science Foundation’s primary research budget, is the latest sign of how the White House is asserting more control over grants. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/02/u...
nytimes.com
National Science Foundation Diverted $1.4 Billion in Science Funds Mandated by Congress
The move, affecting about one-fifth of the National Science Foundation’s primary research budget, is the latest sign of how the White House is asserting more control over grants.
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Reposted by Adam Csank
UNR Biology Buzz @unr-biologybuzz.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
We are hiring! 🧪 Tenure-track position in Evolutionary Biology at the University of Nevada, Reno. Great colleagues, nearby mountains, and of course a certain lake... Application info: nshe.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/UNR-external... www.unr.edu/biology #evolution #EEB #ecoevo #evolsky #academicjobs
A winter view of Lake Tahoe and the Sierra Nevada mountains with snow on the ground and trees
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Pat Coleman @patcoleman.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/...
nationalgeographic.com
How will we explain glaciers to generations who have never seen one?
In “Time and Water,” Icelandic author and documentary subject Andri Snær Magnason tells the story of the deep bond between a family and Iceland’s rapidly melting glaciers.
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Reposted by Adam Csank
Erin J. Wamsley 🧠📈😴 @wamsleylab.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Yeah, that's a problem www.chronicle.com/article/high... #academicsky #edusky
A line graph demonstrating the nonacademic spending has outpaced academic spending, from 2010 to 2024. The note indicates this is for 146 R1 institutions. Source: NCES, Created with Datawrapper
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Adam Csank @acsank.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
If a drought (Mega or other) never ends is it really a drought? www.sciencenews.org/article/unit...
sciencenews.org
Will the U.S. megadrought ever end?
For 27 years, the Southwest has been gripped by a historic drought. Scientists think it might be here to stay.
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Reposted by Adam Csank
Costa Samaras @costasamaras.com · 13/09/2026
This will be bad for: - the students - the research progress - the universities - the towns the universities are in - the companies hiring students - the states the universities are in - the national economy - national security - the country - the world
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WSL Umweltforschung @wslresearch.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
🌏🌲Do trees produce more #wood as a result of #globalwarming? Not necessarily, according to a new study led by the WSL and published in @science.org. Annual wood production depends more on growth rate than on duration of growth – with implications for carbon storage. www.wsl.ch/en/news/more...
wsl.ch
More time for trees to grow doesn’t always mean more wood
Although climate warming extends growing season for trees, the rate of growth is the main driving factor when it comes to wood formation.
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Adam Csank @acsank.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
Well this is going to screw over large swaths of the western US. River's like the Salt and Verde don't necessarily make the cut under these rules.
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Adam Csank @acsank.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
I’m not from the US but as a Maritimer this put me the closest of any of these I have ever taken.
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American Association of Geographers @geographers.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Bhuta’s training as a #geographer brings a valuable perspective to his work as a Natural Resources Specialist: “Thinking about space and place and how different states operate in maintaining forests is important ... because it helps bring context.” 🌲 Read more about his journey: buff.ly/a7ywI2k
AAG Career Profile highlighting a USDA Forest Service natural resources specialist and a quote about how geography shaped a holistic, critical approach; photo shows the specialist smiling behind a log‑cabin desk, a stuffed ranger bear reclining, and a cartoon globe holding a flag.
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Kevin Anchukaitis @thirstygecko.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Recent high-severity wildfires in a dry-conifer landscape are unprecedented over five centuries and foretell future forest loss www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
pnas.org
Recent high-severity wildfires in a dry-conifer landscape are unprecedented over five centuries and foretell future forest loss | PNAS
Dry forests of the western United States evolved with frequent, spatially extensive, low-severity fires, followed by a century of fire exclusion. R...
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Drew Peltier @peltierdrew.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
If you haven't already seen this we are recruiting for a new position in my department, in Evolutionary Biology. I can answer some questions or direct you to someone else who can. Please share widely. nshe.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/UNLV-Externa...
nshe.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com
Assistant Professor in Evolutionary Biology, School of Life Sciences [R0153361]
The University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) appreciates your interest in employment. We ask that you keep in mind the following when completing your application: Once you start the application process ...
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Reposted by Adam Csank
Andy Farke @andyfarke.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Your big data is only a big data set because a whole bunch of people did the insignificant, unworthy of your time, not important enough to publish, effort to build & maintain collections over the years, which you then scooped up into your dataset for a proper "big picture" study. <6/n>
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Dr. Dawn Wright @deepseadawn.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
#gischat
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Brandon Bishop @brandontbishop.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
NSG GEO email: "I hope to see many of you at our upcoming virtual office hours on Sept. 15 at 1 p.m. ET to discuss this funding opportunity, among other topics. I encourage you to register for the Zoom event and submit questions ahead of time." We're all gonna be on this Zoom? Right? RIGHT???
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Brad Johnson @climatebrad.hillheat.com · 25/08/2026
The Trump Department of Interior is forcing out dozens of its most senior career staff, giving them two weeks to accept involuntary reassignments or leave. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Geological Survey, Bureau of Land Management, and more. www.notus.org/agencies/int...
notus.org
‘They Want Us All To Leave’: Interior Reassigns Dozens of Senior Staff
Around 30 top staffers have been reshuffled, with some people moving to teams outside their areas of expertise.
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The Beaverton @thebeaverton.com · 22/08/2026
Art Of The Deal author fails to secure deal with friendliest nation on planet
thebeaverton.com
Art Of The Deal author fails to secure deal with friendliest nation on planet
WASHINGTON D.C. - President Trump, a man who was elected based on his self-proclaimed "deal-making genius", has failed to secure a trade deal with Canada, a nation most known for maple syrup and neigh...
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Neil Lareau @neillareau.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
Radar reconstruction of today's (8/22) plume development from the #HawkFire in Reno, NV. Notable transition to a hydraulic like flow late in the day (~00 UTC) linked to dangerous run into town. We were conducting onsite lidar scans during the transition.
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Glen O'Hara @gsoh31.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
Britain's universities are changing. Far more of their 18-21yo undergrads will have to live in the parental home. Yet whole regions are becoming subject deserts and are going to have far less HE. So stupid: no plan, no policy, no-one in charge. Dumb as rocks. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
bbc.co.uk
More students planning to live at home for uni over 'insane' living costs
Students like Jessica say they worry about missing out on student life, but feel they have no choice but to stay at home.
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WIRED @wired.com · 21/08/2026
“People have talked about the Colorado River crisis for decades—we’re now in it,” says one expert. “Everyone you talk to is like, ‘Shit, man.’” www.wired.com/story/the-su...
wired.com
The Super El Niño Won’t Fix the West’s Water Crisis
“People have talked about the Colorado River crisis for decades—we’re now in it,” says one expert. “Everyone you talk to is like, ‘Shit, man.’”
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Joe Mason @moreorloess.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Arguments about AI among people who experience it as 1) a tool used by students that completely devalues a career's hard work on effective teaching, 2) fast solutions to coding problems, or 3) identifying customized cancer treatments are not going to be very productive.
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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 19/08/2026
i don’t want “accelerated”, “increased-speed” or “fast-paced” research. in fact, am not interested in any shortcuts to mindful, intentional, and slow science
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Mike Dettinger @mdettinger.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
FWIW if you emptied Lake Tahoe completely tomorrow, it would take over 600 yrs for it to refill, at present-day natural inflow rates.
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Adam Csank @acsank.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
moving somewhere off grid is look better and better.
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Adam Csank @acsank.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
My office last Friday :)
Picture of a mountain slope covered in bristlecone pine
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Reposted by Adam Csank
Zack Colman @zcolman.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
SCOOP: Trump is ending federal support for NOAA's Arctic Report Card, a major annual update shedding light on the effect climate change has on the Arctic. subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2026...
subscriber.politicopro.com
POLITICO Pro: NOAA to end support for Arctic climate change report
The authors were informed Monday of the action, which jeopardizes public dissemination of the report on the fast-changing region.
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Adam Csank @acsank.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
Ian Malcolm saying “scientists were too busy seeing if they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should”
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Arn Keeling @arnkeeling.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
“Washington is looking at the Imperial Valley and saying that’s just a desert, that’s just wasteland.” A classic example of what @tracibrynne.bsky.social calls Wastelanding: rendering places extractable & pollutable by defining them as waste places.
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Ryan J Hollister @phaneritic.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
Newsom has done a lot of shady stuff while in office, but working with utilities to limit liability for fires their equipment caused (usually due to poor maintenance or some other form of negligence) is just a major betrayal to the people he’s supposed to serve. www.latimes.com/business/sto...
latimes.com
Utilities threaten action if lawmakers fail to cut their wildfire liability risk
Top executives of California’s two biggest utilities warned they would take action to protect their shareholders if Sacramento lawmakers fail to pass legislation limiting their companies’ liabilities ...
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Adam Csank @acsank.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
I may borrow this for next time I go to the field off grid.
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Kevin Anchukaitis @thirstygecko.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
In the southwestern US, there is no clear signal of ENSO on summer/monsoon precipitation. Plot shows El Nino and La Nina years (columns) for 3 time periods (rows) from 1896 to 2022 for 5 regions. From Woodhouse et al. 2025 rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
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Adam Csank @acsank.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
I have noted this problem. It has become exacerbated by GenAI because the attitude of the students is “why should I develop these skills when I can just ask ChatGPT.”
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Alexandra (Alex) Duggan @alexdugganreports.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
More than 600 (likely homes) burned in and around Spokane County yesterday. The devastation is incomprehensible www.spokesman.com/stories/2026...
spokesman.com
Wildfire in northwest Spokane destroys 640 structures
The Old Trails wildfire in northwest Spokane destroyed 640 structures Saturday, according to Cody Rohrbach, Spokane County Fire District 3 fire chief.
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 31/07/2026
Nature did a short piece on our preprint about how LLMs will affect the practice of science; my more detailed thread is below.
nature.com
Scientists using LLMs will ‘do more, less well’, modelling study predicts
Research suggests that the combination of incentives to publish and the use of large language models will lead to more papers, but they will be less refined.
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Kevin Anchukaitis @thirstygecko.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
I am pleased to announce that we are inviting applications for a Lead Laboratory Coordinator at the University of Arizona’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research. Review of applications will begin on September 15, 2026. For details and to apply, visit arizona.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...
arizona.csod.com
Lead Laboratory Coordinator, Tree Ring Laboratory
In this role, you will:Lead the oversight of a dendrochronology laboratory in collaboration with the Director, including the mentoring, training,...
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 31/07/2026
Absolutely nuts: Google Earth now has a feature that lets you convincingly fabricate satellite imagery www.digitaldigging.org/p/how-to-pla...
a fakje satellite image of a craterWe take misinformation seriously - every image created with Nano Banana in Google Earth includes the SynthID digital watermark, so if someone is unsure about an image, they can ask the Gemini app or use Lens in Search to see if the image was Al-generated. In addition, we prevent image creation on harmful topics and are continually updating our protections.

One clause in there is checkable tonight, so I checked it. Google prevents image creation on harmful topics. Refugees at a border. A nuclear plant in Iran. A fatal crash on an Amsterdam street. A hospital with a bomb crater in Gaza.

Nothing was refused. No warning, no softened output, no suggestion to try a different prompt.

Now look at the rest of the answer. The watermark is Google’s. The app that reads the watermark is Google’s. The search that reads it is Google’s. Every road out of the problem runs back through the company that built it.

I understand that Google has Google products to run Google checks. Planet Earth is bigger than Google.

I put one of tonight’s clips on X and asked nobody to check it. Hive, one of th
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Adam Csank @acsank.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
A testament to the sorry state of geography education in the US.
thedailybeast.com
Little Marco’s Goons Get Every Single Country Wrong in Map Disaster
There were a few glaring errors in a map the State Department used at a global conference.
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Kevin Anchukaitis @thirstygecko.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
This is important - Honest Brokers (TM) and their echo chamber will often point to the decreasing global wildfire, but that reflects changing human land use practices. In temperate and boreal forests, climate's role is more clear. See this paper by Cunningham et al. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Increasing frequency and intensity of the most extreme wildfires on Earth - Nature Ecology & Evolution
Analysis of fire radiative power derived from satellite data finds that the frequency of extreme fire events increased 2.2-fold from 2003 to 2023 and that these increases were mostly driven by extreme...
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Cate Macinnis-Ng @loraxcate.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
This is an excellent piece - "remote control science" captures it so well.
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Adam Csank @acsank.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
When landing in Inuvik I flew over this burn scar meadow filled with fireweed.
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Adam Csank @acsank.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
The lesson is that if you live in the central Sierra, do not assume that just because we are heading into a strong El Niño, it means we will have a record-breaking snow year. We might, but the odds are equal that it might be just an average year. 3/3
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Adam Csank @acsank.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
This is an important reminder that for the central Sierra, El Niño doesn't always mean above-average snowfall. In fact, if you look at this image from the NCEI of the past 11 strong El Nino events, you can see that the central Sierra do not have a consistent connection. 2/3
Map of precipitation departures from average for the Continental US. Shows the only consistent pattern is above-normal precipitation in Texas and Florida.
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Adam Csank @acsank.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
Just saw the first post arguing that El Nino means it will be a snowy winter in the central Sierra. I thought it would be a good time to share this graph the Central Sierra Snow Lab made in 2023 showing the top 10 snowiest winters and what phase of ENSO they were in. 1/3
Graph shows snowfall totals for the 10 snowiest winters and what phase of ENSO they were in. 1952 812" (weak El Nino), 2023 745" (weak La Nina), 1983 671" (very strong El Nino), 2011 643" (very strong La Nina), 1982 624 (Neutral), 1989 602" (El Nino), 1995 598 (El Nino), 1956 594 (La Nina), 1956 593" (Strong El Nino), and 2017 573" (weak la nina).
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Randall Stephens @randalljstephens.bsky.social · 27/05/2026
"In the past few years, I’ve spoken to a number of academics and instructors at the college and high-school level who have said similar things. They talk about a sense of loss and of despair, because the one thing that brought them meaning has been erased, or blotted out, by the arrival of A.I."
newyorker.com
The Despair of the Professor in the Age of A.I.
“Was it always the case that half of our students would cheat if it were easy enough?”
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Marc Hudson @marchudson.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
From the LinkedIn of an academic I have a lot of respect for.
Last week, I emailed a (previously?) respectable journal in my field to let them know that a recent article I had been hoping to cite had hallucinated hashtag#AI references and that the author should be asked to update their article with credible citations to support their arguments. 

Someone from the admin team responded to say, basically, that they weren't going to do anything about it. 

I feel like this is how academic credibility dies. The main recourse I have in the face of AI slop is academic papers. If you can't trust journal articles to contain established evidence (even though the system has never been perfect) then I don't know how we can make policy recommendations, advise NGOs and charities, design credible experiments, etc., etc. 

My only hope is that this is the trigger that begins to kill the profiteering publishing system and the 'quantity over quality' performance criteria under which we all are drowning - but I have a feeling that all of academia will need an overhaul to maintain any kind of credibility.
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