iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Robert Tropek @robtrop.bsky.social · 16h

New study published in @natecoevo.nature.com ! We assembled the largest global dataset of plant–pollinator networks to ask a simple question: do interactions become more specialised towards the tropics? doi.org/10.1038/s415... Study led by @saileesakhalkar.bsky.social and myself ☺️ 1/8

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Dax Kellie @daxkellie.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

This study captures a part of mate choice that is easy to trivialise Females *want* to choose the best mate, but choosing is hard and they can only do their best. Conditions aren't always perfect - it's dangerous, choice is limited and males are SCREMING all at once 🧪🌏 doi.org/10.1038/d415...

nature.com

Too much mate choice overwhelms frogs

Female treefrogs select less carefully when hearing a chorus of males.

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Dax Kellie @daxkellie.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

3 decades of data 😮 on this fairy-wren population showed how many cumulative effects of climate change (lower food supply, chick rearing, higher pesticides) can lead to population decline, even for a species categorised as “least concern” on the IUCN Red List 🥺 🌏🧪🦜 news.mongabay.com/2026/08/supe...

news.mongabay.com

Superb fairywrens disappearing in Australia’s capital: Conserving insects could help save them

If you sit in an Australian park or garden for long enough, chances are you might catch a flash of brilliant feathers out of the corner of your eye: the superb fairywren. With its bright blue and soft...

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Dax Kellie @daxkellie.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

And check out this scrolly-telling article that highlights some of the data stories in the painting! 👀 labs.ala.org.au/stories/stor... (made using Quarto + {closeread}) #rstats 🧪🌏📊 #NationalScienceWeek #quartopub

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Dax Kellie @daxkellie.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Cultural knowledge + Western data on one canvas! 🖌️ That's the idea our recent intern Gullara McInnes and her mother Ann-Marie Keating had. The result: This incredible painting of biodiversity in their local area featuring occurrence data from the Atlas of Living Australia 🧪🌏📊 #NationalScienceWeek

A painting by Ann-Marie Keating and her daughter Gullara McInnes depicting animals and plants in Mareeba, a rural town near Cairns, Australia. The painting has a black border, and inside there are over 60 species of animals and plants painted using many different painting techniques. Traditional dot art is used on each species to show the number of observational records on the Atlas of Living Australia, Australia's largest data infrastructure of biodiversity data.

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Rebecca R Helm @rebeccarhelm.bsky.social · 10/04/2025

I want to tell you a story, and it begins with this VERY WEIRD animal: Meet Thetys vagina... [a thread 🧵] 📸 m_patton bit.ly/2Mgw8Sf 🌿🧪🦑🐙🌊

tubular clear animal being held near a beach

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Dax Kellie @daxkellie.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

🐌 How much data do we have of our slimy snail & slug friends? How many species do we know virtually nothing about? Despite having over 1.5 million observations of gastropods in Australia, many species have fewer than 10 records, or no records at all 😯 Code & high-res 📷 👇 🧪🌏📊 #rstats #dataviz

A waffle bar chart showing the taxonomic coverage of gastropod records in the Atlas of Living Australia. The plot shows the number of species in each gastropod suborder with 100+ records, 10+ records, 1+ records or no records at all. In general, there is quite a high proportion of species (between 13% and 36% depending on the group) with fewer than 10 records or no records at all.

The waffle chart consists of squares in different shades of purple to show species record count. Each group is shown in a separate bar. The background is a very dark purple. Example images of snails from each suborder group are shown below each bar.

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iNaturalist @inaturalist.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

Very special hermit crab for your feed. This is potentially only the second-ever iNaturalist observation of the species Dardanus insignis!

A vibrant orange-red hermit crab with large textured claws and big eyes crawls across wet sand.

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Crystal Lewis @cghlewis.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

Issue 40 of #rdmweekly is out! 📬 ➡️ Reproducible R Code @daxkellie.bsky.social @sortee.bsky.social ➡️ Generating Universes Within Universes with a Single Seed @andrew.heiss.phd ➡️ AEA Replication Tracker @paulgp.com ➡️ Informed Consent Template and more! rdmweekly.substack.com/p/rdm-weekly...

rdmweekly.substack.com

RDM Weekly - Issue 040

A weekly roundup of Research Data Management resources.

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Dax Kellie @daxkellie.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

galah 2.2.0 is on CRAN! 📦 🛡️ Authorised users can access sensitive data from the command line 🌏 GBIF gets full support for predicate or DOI queries, new support for the Flemish and Kew Gardens portals 🗂️ We’ve tidied scripts to be more versatile, efficient & consistent galah.ala.org.au/R/ #rstats

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Dax Kellie @daxkellie.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

Whoa when this invasive mushroom grows on a dead or dying hardwood tree, the fungal diversity of that tree is cut in half (on average) 😯🍄 Spreading across the US & Canada as well as Switzerland, Italy, Hungary, Serbia & Germany, this fungus could have a huge cascading impact on global ecosystems 🧪🌏

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Shandiya Balasubramaniam 🍉 @shandiya.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

Happy National Eucalypt Day! I summarised 100 years' of eucalypt data from the Atlas of Living Australia as a landscape #EucalyptoftheYear #rstats @eucalyptaus.bsky.social 📊🧪 See more here: shandiya.com/dataviz.html...

This is a stylised landscape with the sea in the foreground, which is in shades of dark blue with ripples on it, and seven hills in shades of brown, orange, and yellow in the middle ground. The background is of a night sky, with a thin crescent moon and stars in an ascending pattern from left to right.

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Saoirse Kelleher @saoirsekelleher.eco · 17/03/2026

Missed @daxkellie.bsky.social’s @sortee.bsky.social webinar this morning? Now up on YouTube! youtu.be/2_Aum45rYlU

youtu.be

Webinar: Dax Kellie on reproducible R code

YouTube video by SORTEE

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Dax Kellie @daxkellie.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

If you missed my talk today about how to make your R code more reproducible and why it's good for science, the recording is already online! Apologies for the internet issues, I hope you can forgive me, they do go away after a few minutes 😅 #rstats 🧪🌏 @sortee.bsky.social youtu.be/2_Aum45rYlU

youtu.be

Webinar: Dax Kellie on reproducible R code

YouTube video by SORTEE

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Dax Kellie @daxkellie.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

This is happening tomorrow! See you then 😀 #rstats 🌏🧪

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Dax Kellie @daxkellie.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

Awesome dataviz 🤩 So interesting how much variation there is in phrases like "Realistic possibility" compared to "About even" No wonder it's so difficult to use experimental survey data as strong evidence in research. People are too varied at interpreting scales! 🧪 #psychscisky

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Dax Kellie @daxkellie.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

A nice visual, and a worthwhile one to remember when considering gaps and biases in biodiversity data in Australia 🦘🌱 Nearly 70% of the population lives in a greater capital city, meaning that incidental observations of animals and plants outside of those areas are rare and valuable 🧪🌏📊

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Dax Kellie @daxkellie.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

In one week I'll be talking about tips for reproducible R code and why science would love you to try these tips on your own code too 🧪😍🌏 It's an online talk, so feel free to watch comfortably from your couch. Hope to see you there! @sortee.bsky.social #rstats events.humanitix.com/sortee-webin...

events.humanitix.com

SORTEE Webinar: On what makes good sharable and reproducible R code, how to do it, and why it’s good for science

For this month's SORTEE webinar, Dr. Dax Kellie from the Atlas of Living Australia will present on good, sharable, and reproducible R code in science

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Dax Kellie @daxkellie.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

Want to make your code better at running again in the future? My talk next month will be filled with lots of tips about how to write sharable, reproducible R code and why it's good for science Hope to see you there! #rstats 🌏🧪👩‍💻

media.tenor.com

a woman in a yellow sweater is using a laptop

Alt: a woman in a yellow sweater typing with some real confident swagger on her laptop

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Simon Evans @sevans.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

Wow, this is spectacular! Evolution of beak size in an urban population of juncos in response to the loss of supplementary food (bird feeders) during the COVID pandemic, and subsequent regression. Is the UCLA campus the new Daphne Major? pnas.org/doi/full/10....

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Seva @seva.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

I just finished a three-year term as an editor at an international relations journal. I began at the start of the LLM era but ended right in the middle of it. Our volume of submissions tripled and our desk reject rate rose to 75%. I have some thoughts. open.substack.com/pub/hegemon/...

open.substack.com

The Age of Academic Slop is Upon Us

what happens when AI automates "normal science"?

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Dax Kellie @daxkellie.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

I listened to 171 albums in 2025 apparently. These were my favourites 💿🎶🤘

Yellow and purple text on a navy background:

Favourite albums 2025
10–Sault
Choke enough –Oklou
Lotus–Lil Simz
🥇The Passionate Ones–Nourished by Time
LOVED–Parcels
The Crux–Djo
Getting Killed–Geese
Baby–Dijon
Guitar–Mac DeMarco
Showbiz!–MIKE

Honourable mentions
DONT’T TAP THE GLASS–Tyler, the Creator
Deadbeat–Tame Impala
Big City Life - Smerz
Joni’s Jazz–Joni Mitchell

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Dax Kellie @daxkellie.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

What a massive loss for science in Australia. Emma was a force, and responsible for many of my friends’ careers in biology. Very sad news, my condolences to her friends and family www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12...

abc.net.au

Family, colleagues in 'disbelief' after leading scientist dies aged 52

University of Melbourne vice-chancellor Emma Johnston has died from complications associated with cancer, aged 52.

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Dax Kellie @daxkellie.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

It's December!🎄 But where are all the Christmas beetles? 😕🪲 Share any Christmas beetle observations with @inaturalist.bsky.social to help figure out why they seem to have disappeared. Even if you're unsure, mis-ID'd observations are valuable too! www.inaturalist.org/projects/chr... 🧪🌏📊 #rstats

An orange, burly round christmas beetle on a green leaf, facing the camera. Photo by nature-lover2 2025 (CC-BY-NC 4.0 (Int))

An orange christmas beetle with green, shimmering colouration reflecting off of its exoskeleton, sitting on a brown leaf. Christmas beetles are well-known for their bright, reflective colouration (known as iridescence).

A bar plot showing observation counts of Christmas beetles since 1900 in the Atlas of Living Australia. The bars are red and the background is a beige/cream colour. The plot shows that despite huge numbers of Christmas beetles historically, there are relatively few records over the last 100 years of Christmas beetles. This lack of data makes it difficult to know why Christmas beetles seem to be disappearing. After the Christmas Beetle Count began in 2021, the number of observations had a large spike in number in subsequent years.

A series of 3 bar plots showing the number of observations of 3 taxa commonly misidentified as Christmas beetles - Argentinian scarab beetles (invasive), Golden stag beetles and June beetles. The growth of Christmas beetle records after the Christmas Beetle Count initiative began in 2021 coincides with a spike in data for these other taxa as well, a positive but unintended outcome of more people interested in recording Christmas beetle observations!

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Nature Portfolio @natureportfolio.nature.com · 13/12/2025

Killer whales or orca have been observed hunting with Pacific white-sided dolphins in the waters off British Columbia, Canada, and sharing fish scraps with them after making a kill, according to research in Scientific Reports. go.nature.com/4rZ08RJ 🧪

A Pacific white-sided dolphin approaching a Northern Resident Killer Whale.

Credit: University of British Columbia (A.Trites), Dalhousie University (S. Fortune), Hakai Institute (K. Holmes), Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (X. Cheng)

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 09/12/2025

Big new blogpost! My guide to data visualization, which includes a very long table of contents, tons of charts, and more. --> Why data visualization matters and how to make charts more effective, clear, transparent, and sometimes, beautiful. www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/salonis-gu...

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samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 28/11/2025

New in Science, Macaques tap to the beat. Very cool study for its main result and its null one: consistent with nearly every other comparative study of music, monkeys don't differentiate beats by their relative strength—which even young children do innately. Monkeys have rhythm but not meter!

science.org

Monkeys have rhythm

Synchronizing movements to music is a hallmark of human culture, but its evolutionary and neurobiological origins remain unknown. This ability requires (i) extracting a steady rhythmic pulse, or beat,...

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Dax Kellie @daxkellie.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

If you missed my talk but still want some tips for writing good code for scientists, my slides are here: daxkellie.quarto.pub/a-guide-to-w... All the links and references are there too in case you want to see more! 😀🧪🌏 #ESA2025 #rstats #quartopub

Title slide with text:
A guide to writing good code for the busy scientist

Black text over stripey pale brown-green background

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Dax Kellie @daxkellie.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

We all want to write good code…but…how? In my talk later today, I’ll give all few tips I’ve learned about good scientific code writing that have really helped me & maybe they’ll help you! Riverbank room 8, 2:50pm #ESA2025

White text on navy background:
How to write good code in R for science

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Dax Kellie @daxkellie.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

We’re at #ESA2025! Come to the Atlas of Living Australia booth, located conveniently by the coffee cart! Come grab a hex sticker and say hi to me & @shandiya.bsky.social while you’re there 😀☕️

Shandiya and me holding stickers in front of a poster. We are holding fun hex stickers and generally full of excitement

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Dax Kellie @daxkellie.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

@shandiya.bsky.social shows how huge data infrastructures like the ALA also show what we *don’t* know about biodiversity, but how Data Mobilisation programs & our new {galaxias} package can help people provide data to fill the gaps 👇👀 www.ala.org.au/abdmp/ galaxias.ala.org.au 🧪🌏 #ESA2025 #rstats

A slide from Shandiya’s talk with a green hex map of Australia on a beige background. The map shows areas with lots of data are near cities, but areas with less data are near deserts

A slide from Shandiya’s talk. Shows purple squares with stats of how much data a Data Mobilisation Program project of Click Beetles added to the ALA

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Science Magazine @science.org · 12/11/2025

For the first time, scientists have documented an unusual defense: Some species of arachnids build giant doppelgängers on their webs, creating a frightening deception that scares off would-be killers. scim.ag/487Myn0

A fake spider in a web, with text: That’s no spider! It’s a decoy

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Dax Kellie @daxkellie.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

Large-eyed animals like owls 🦉 have a trade-off between large eyes & short optic nerves, which lowers eye mobility (to compensate they evolved swivelly necks) But chameleons 🦎 have long, coiled optic nerves with extra slack for eye mobility, allowing them to use their famous large swivelly eyes 👀🧪🌏

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Dr. Dominic Royé @drxeo.eu · 08/11/2025

New #dataviz on summer heat-stress anomalies in Europe, 1950–2025. 🥵 This map shows hours with WBGT > 29.5 °C—extreme stress where work should be limited. Since 2010, positive anomalies dominate. 300h = 12.5 days of danger. It’s important to focus on the sub-daily exposure. #rstats #climatechange

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Aussie Moths @wa-moths.bsky.social · 04/11/2025

Spotted this beautifully hairy #owlfly (Acmonotus incusifer) this week. One of the Split-eyed Owlflies, it seems this isn't a commonly observed species. There are only 5 observations in #inaturalist with all of those in Western Australia. #ausinverts #Neuroptera #wildoz #insects #nature

Picture of an owlfly resting on a cream-coloured wall. The owlfy is quite hairy and holds its black and orange abdomen at an angle from the rest of its body. It has translucent wings and long, striped antennae with very obvious bulbs at the ends

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tomjwebb @tomjwebb.bsky.social · 27/10/2025

Heard about this at #LivingData2025, if you have biodiversity data you want to share but are not sure how, I think this will be really useful.

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Holly Kirk @hollykirk.bsky.social · 24/10/2025

www.theguardian.com/environment/... Everyone deserves to see this beautiful piece of science communication. 🌏🧪🪶 There are many things I love about this, but I think number one is that it features the story a little known, but amazing seabird species, the Desertas Petrel.

theguardian.com

Bird migration is changing. What does this reveal about our planet? – visualised

Bird migrations rank as one of nature’s greatest spectacles. Thanks to GPS tracking, scientists are uncovering extraordinary insights into ancient and mysterious journeys – and new threats that are re...

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GBIF @gbif.org · 22/10/2025

(1) 🥁 Announcing the 2025 Ebbe Nielsen Challenge winners! First place: 🥇 @rukayaj.bsky.social (@gbifnorway.bsky.social) for BDQEmail Sharing first place: 🥇 @daxkellie.bsky.social, Amanda Buyan, @shandiya.bsky.social and @rowdynerd.bsky.social (Atlas of Living Australia) for galaxias!

Collage photo of the ALA galaxias development team

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Dax Kellie @daxkellie.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

I’m a few episodes in and this podcast is *fantastic*

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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

VERY proud to release the first version of the OceanOmics per-site #eDNA reports: every site we sampled over the past 4 years, summarised and visualised. We have >5,500 samples over 950 sites, so eventually we will have 950 reports. Features: (Thread: 1/6)

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Dax Kellie @daxkellie.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

Want to see what {galaxias} can do? 🤔 Check out slides from a talk we presented on galaxias this week at the Living Data conference: martinwestgate.com/presentation... Or, check out this intro video about galaxias: www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO4-... #rstats 🌏🧪🐟

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Dax Kellie @daxkellie.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

🚨Our new package {galaxias} is released in R & Python today! 🚨 📦 galaxias makes it easy to standardise data to Darwin Core, the accepted format for sharing ecological data with infrastructures like @gbif.org and the Atlas of Living Australia galaxias.ala.org.au #rstats #python 🧪🌏🐟 A thread 🧵👇

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Dax Kellie @daxkellie.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

These worms can jump up to 20 times their body length—the equivalent of a human jumping the height of an 11-story building—by riding on electrostatic charges 🪱⚡😮 An incredible example of how important electrostatic forces are for many insects & plants (eg pollination) 🧪🌏🐙

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Dax Kellie @daxkellie.bsky.social · 17/10/2025

🎉Congrats to 2025's Australian Bird of the Year, the Tawny Frogmouth (everyone's favourite tree-stump-that's-not-actually-a-tree-stump)! 🦉 Here's a map of where they've been recorded. Take a photo of the next tree stump you see, it might be a bird of the year!😉 🌏🧪📊 #rstats @birdlifeoz.bsky.social

A map of tawny frogmouth observations in Australia. The map is a Jacques Bertin map, which consists of a grid of dots over all of Australia, and each dot's size relates to how many observations are in that area. The dots are dark brown and the background a light grey/brown, much like a tawny frogmouth's feathers. The map shows many bigger dots along the east coast of Australia, showing that most observations are recorded there, though there are several other smaller groups of large dots in the south east and northern regions of Australia

Two tawny frogmouths sitting on a branch. They both have fuzzy, speckled dark brown and light grey/brown feathers and wide, short beaks. One tawny frogmouth is looking at the camera, one eye half open and the other mostly shut. Its eyes are large and orangey colour. The second tawny frogmouth is just behind it facing to the left, both eyes closed, with an expression as if it has just smelled a lovely cup of coffee and is cherishing the scent. Photo by Thomas Mesaglio 2020 (CC-BY 4.0 (Int))

A tawny frogmouth seated on a branch facing the camera. There are blurry dark green leaves in the foreground, showing that this frogmouth was seen through foliage. The tawny frogmouth has speckled dark brown and light grey/brown feathers that look remarkably like tree bark. The eyes are a rich yellow/orange. Photo by buluurr 2024 (CC-BY-NC 4.0 (Int))

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Dax Kellie @daxkellie.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

And of course a big benefit of joining a group like SORTEE is meeting other like-minded people who care about robust and transparent science. Many are on Bluesky! If you’re a member and want to be added, send me a DM 😀 🧪🌏 go.bsky.app/44PpngU

Image of a few people in the Society for Open, Reliable, Transparent Ecology and Evolution (SORTEE) Bluesky starter pack. It’s an image because Bluesky’s link preview didn’t work for me for whatever reason, so at least I’ll try to make it look like it did

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Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

Looks like a good guide - the general data cleaning part is a lean intro to some very common issues in all sorts of data. Would be great if every phd who touches raw data was offered a short course in these basics (in R or Python or whatever HipsterScript) cleaning-data-r.ala.org.au/2_general-cl...

cleaning-data-r.ala.org.au

3 Column classes & names – Cleaning Biodiversity Data in R

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Dax Kellie @daxkellie.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

Still want to make cleaning biodiversity data shrimp-ler? 🦐 Good news: We just updated our Cleaning Biodiversity Data in R book, so you still can! We've updated data for 2025, added new content & fixed lots of silly typos 😀 Live the shrimp-le life: cleaning-data-r.ala.org.au #rstats #ecology 🧪🌏

The cover of the Cleaning Biodiversity Data in R book. It has an illustration of an Pacific Cleaner Shrimp in the middle of a navy background. The shrimp has a bright red-orange shell, pale-yellow body and white whiskers.

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