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Robert Fletcher

@fletcherecology.bsky.social
4K followers 957 following 186 posts

Miriam Rothschild Chair of Conservation Biology, University of Cambridge (formerly a professor at Univ. Florida) Working on ecology, conservation, and ornithology. Love telling a good story. Fond of maths. Husband and Dad. www.fletcherlab.com

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Reposted by Robert Fletcher
BTO | British Trust for Ornithology @btobirds.bsky.social · 10h
Congratulations to @rufusdawson.bsky.social winner of @marshawards.bsky.social for Young Ornithologist! 🎉 Rufus has conducted tremendous work in leading a monitoring scheme for Lesser Spotted Woodpecker using Passive Acoustic Monitoring. We can’t wait to see more of his work in the future!
An image of Rufus Dawson features in a circular frame. Wording over the image tile reads: Winner. Marsh Award for Young Ornithologist. Rufus Dawson. The BTO and Marsh Charitable Trust logos feature top right of the image.
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William (Bill) Sutherland @billsutherland.bsky.social · 22h
How running an experiment was critical for the survival of this rewilding project. youtu.be/e8loyBgiNPs?...
youtu.be
Why Conservation Needs Experiments
YouTube video by Bill Sutherland's Conservation Concepts
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c0nc0rdance @c0nc0rdance.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Omigod, this is the most heartwarming story possible! Backpack (bear 89) is the son of the 2019 winner of Fat Bear Week, Holly (bear 435). In 2007, he injured his foot & a practice of riding on momma's Holly's back had a new meaning: he was mobility-restricted while it healed. So Holly moved him.
From DISCVR blog's Facebook page, a momma bear & a yearling cub on her back in the shallow water.  I think the background has been swapped out, and I can't rule out some AI use there?  God, Facebook has become the social media for AI slop : (

The title of the article, which I link below, is "How Bear 89 earned the name Backpack"
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Mongabay @mongabay.com · 30/09/2026
12 critically endangered Nubian giraffes were relocated from Uganda’s Murchison Falls National Park to make way for oil extraction. As economic priorities increasingly undermine protected areas, how safe is critical biodiversity inside national parks? Watch more 👉️ mongabay.cc/Conservation...
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GBIF @gbif.org · 29/09/2026
🕷️ Introducing community metrics: a new pilot set of national-level metrics that are designed to quantify data gaps in GBIF and help to identify priorities for biodiversity data mobilization. 🔎 Explore the metrics and share your feedback! 🔗data-blog.gbif.org/p...
Photo of  a jumping spider
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Robert Fletcher @fletcherecology.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Excited for the BOU Avian Futures Conference today. Looking forward to meeting folks and learning a lot! #BOUasm26
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Brian J. Enquist @bjenquist.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Please pass along: I’m recruiting PhD students to join our Macroecology Lab. We study physical ecology, macroecology, and biodiversity — spanning scaling, trait-based ecology, theory, comparative biology & ecoinformatics. Several avenues for funding. Please reach out if interested 🧪🌐🌾
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Joshua Weitz @joshuasweitz.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
“I’ve heard from a bunch of people in our field who say, ‘Uh oh, are they training on my prompts?’” Dr. Shipman said. “We can’t not think about it.” ... '[A]fter Anthropic’s announcement last week, he is winding down his projects with Claude.' “I’m shutting down everything,” [Dr. Mestre] said.
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Mark Brown @markjfbrown.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Great to seeing the word go out - come visit!
Back of bus with advert for University Museum of Zoology Cambridge
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Robin Hayward 🌳 🏳️‍⚧️ @canopyrobin.com · 25/09/2026
We're publishing new guidance to support trans people who do fieldwork (any work outside the office)! Now we need your help to get them seen so please share! inclusivefieldwork.leeds.ac.uk/trans/
a cartoon of three fieldworkers. One has a small trans flag. The logos of the university of leeds, research england, and canopy robin are shown, as well as the URL: InclusiveFieldwork (dot) Leeds (dot) AC (dot) UK (slash) trans
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Brian J. Enquist @bjenquist.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
"... The very sharp-sighted always find discrepancies and are able to say that there is no generality, only a spectrum of special cases. This diversity of outlook has proved useful in every science, but it is nowhere more marked than in ecology." - R.H. MacArthur 1968 🧪🌐
Ecological patterns, about which we construct theories, are only interesting if they are repeated. They may be repeated in space or in time, and they may be repeated from species to species. A pattern which has all of these kinds of repetition is of special interest because of its generality, and yet these very general events are only seen by ecologists with rather blurred vision. The very sharp-sighted always find discrepancies and are able to say that there is no generality, only a spectrum of special cases. This diversity of outlook has proved useful in every science, but it is nowhere more marked than in ecology.
Robert MacArthur (MacArthur 1968)
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Professor Euan Ritchie FAMS @euanritchie.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
By my clever and wonderful friend, @jessharwick.bsky.social
Cartoon by Jess Harwood making commentary about the *real* data centres we should support.
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People and Nature @peopleandnature.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Big congratulations to all of our 2026 BES Award winners 🎉 It's amazing to see our Editor-in-Chief, Kevin Gaston, receiving an honorary membership - the highest honour given by the society. We hope to see as many of you as possible at our December BES Annual Meeting to celebrate! ⭐
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Elina Mäntylä @elinamantyla.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
"By 1980, the species had been reduced to just five birds. Only one was a fertile female, known as Old Blue. Conservationists began an intensive breeding program using Old Blue and a male, Old Yellow, as the founding pair." edition.cnn.com/2026/09/21/t... #ornithology
edition.cnn.com
This tiny ‘goth’ bird was nearly extinct. Now it’s New Zealand’s Bird of the Year | CNN
Small, shy and clad head-to-claw in black, New Zealand’s karure, or black robin, has been crowned the country’s 2026 Bird of the Year.
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Tadashi Fukami @fukamit.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Systems Ecology, a new journal launched today, "run by researchers, for researchers, and is free to read and free to publish, with no article processing charges" systems-ecology.org/index.php/se...
systems-ecology.org
Systems Ecology
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Richard K Broughton @richardkbroughton.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Quite emotional to report that we've just found our amazing survivor Marsh Tit, still here in his ancient woodland kingdom. He's now 11 yrs 4 months old, survived the 2026 heatwaves/drought and smelt the wildfires of nearby Holme Fen. I ringed him in my 30s and I'm now in my 50s.
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Robert Fletcher @fletcherecology.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
New Species of Cat Discovered for First Time in a Century www.nytimes.com/2026/09/18/s...
nytimes.com
New Species of Cat Discovered for First Time in a Century
The species, called a tilcayo, is smaller than a house cat and lives in the cloud forests of the Andes Mountains in Bolivia.
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Alexander Lees @alexanderlees.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Our new paper led by Leo Miranda in @science.org - Comparing #Amazon protection strategies reveals that avoiding deforestation is most cost-effective for carbon storage, while avoiding forest disturbance yields the highest benefits for #biodiversity 🌎🪶🌴🧪 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
science.org
Protecting tropical forests is more cost-effective for biodiversity and climate than restoration
Halting deforestation and promoting restoration are at the core of strategies to confront the biodiversity and climate crises in tropical forests. Avoiding forest disturbances is also critically important but has received far less attention, and there is ...
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Stephen Montgomery @ebablab.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Are you a #NewPI in Ecology & Evolution? Would you like to meet with peers to chat about work, the future and life as a new PI? 🍪☕️ Then I have the form for you! 📋 Help us gauge interest in a new network/event by filling in this short survey: forms.cloud.microsoft/e/K4wUiuLuFn Please RT! 🙏
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BirdLife International @birdlifeglobal.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Discover the State of the World’s Birds!🐦 This sixth edition by BirdLife International focuses on migratory birds and their flyways, and what they reveal about the state of nature, the drivers of biodiversity loss, and the solutions needed to reverse declines.🗺️ Find it here👉 sowb.birdlife.org
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McClure 🦉🦅🦤 @mcclure.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Maxent produces a map with no error bars, despite there often being great uncertainty in species distributions. We examine the trouble with using Maxent for delimiting species distributions, especially for Red List assessments. Open access: doi.org/10.1111/ddi....
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Robert Fletcher @fletcherecology.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
What Are We Doing to Our World of Wonder? www.nytimes.com/2026/09/11/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | Trump Is Trying to Defang the Endangered Species Act
What if 50 years from now, having destroyed the habitat for the creatures around us, we are plagued by an inconsolable loneliness?
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Mongabay @mongabay.com · 11/09/2026
Northern European raptors face severe threats along their West African migratory routes, from habitat loss to hunting. Researchers analyzing tagged birds emphasize that saving Europe's raptors requires cross-continental collaboration across their full migration pathways. Sean Mowbray reports.
mongabay.cc
To save Europe’s raptors, conservationists say, look to West Africa
In 2020, a juvenile osprey was fatally shot in Ghana. The bird, one of hundreds of raptors killed in similar circumstances across West Africa every year, had been fitted with a leg ring by the…
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Martin Jung @martinjung.eu · 11/09/2026
Interesting paper. Showing how - despite the hype around nature credits, finance, no-net-loss metrics etc - private investments are still negligible for ecosystem and species conservation.
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Robert Fletcher @fletcherecology.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
August Ties the Record for Earth’s Hottest Month on the Books www.nytimes.com/2026/09/09/c...
nytimes.com
August Ties for Hottest Month on Record
Sweltering summer temperatures put last month on par with July 2023 for global warmth, scientists said. More records could be broken in the months ahead.
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RSPB Science @rspbscience.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
New job alert🪶 Research assistant to support research on Willow Tit demographics. Must have a BTO ringing licence at C level or above Location: Midlands and North of England Duration: Oct-Nov 2026 Deadline: This Wednesday Sept 9th Apply here: app.vacancy-filler.co.uk/salescrm/Car... 📷Ben Andrew
A Willow Tit perches in a branch, looking directly to camera
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CABES @cabes.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Busanya Masolele Isaya’s research in the Serengeti–Mara ecosystem investigates the rapid decline of vulture populations, one of East Africa’s most urgent conservation crises. #cabes #ipbes #iki_bmuv #zef #biodiversityconservation
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Lars Brudvig @lars-brudvig.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
The front yard pocket prairie is buzzing today with lots still in bloom, including New England aster, grass-leaved goldenrod, and black-eyed Susan
A small planted prairie in a front yard Black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta)New England aster (Symphyotrichum novae-angliae)Grass-leaved goldenrod (Euthamia graminifolia)
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Erik Svensson @evolodonata.ecoevo.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/09/2026
Come join me and my colleagues at the Department of Biology at #LundUniversity in #Sweden! New position as Senior Lecturer in Computational Biology just announced. Apply or spread the word to all interested candidates! […]
ecoevo.social
Original post on ecoevo.social
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Jen , the MT liberal bird lady @liberal-jen.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
A murmuration of starlings above Sardinia, Italy. One of my favorite natural phenomena.
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BTO | British Trust for Ornithology @btobirds.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
We're seeking a Research Ecologist to develop & apply methods for analysing large-scale passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) datasets & to lead work on the collection/analysis of restoration & rewilding data. Apply via www.bto.org/jobs Closing date: 22 September. #Ornithology #bioacoustics
The heads of two Puffins appear above a bank. Wording above reads: We're hiring! Senior Research Ecologist: Landscape Restoration & Monitoring Science.
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Louise Blight @louiseblight.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Funded PhD opportunity to study bird-window collisions, with the wonderful Dr. Rachel Buxton at Carleton University, Ottawa. #PhDOpportunity #ornithology #windowstrike #conservationscience🌎 www.biodiversityconservationsolutions.com/join-us 📷 Rebecca Golat
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Brian J. Enquist @bjenquist.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Thrilled to announce that my department - Ecology and Evolutionary Biology - at the U of Arizona will likely be hiring for a tenure-track position in "Population and Community Ecology" this fall. Watch this space for more details and official announcements coming soon ... #Ecology #EcologyJobs 🌐🌾🧪
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keholsinger.bsky.social @keholsinger.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
The National Park Service may sell a bit of western Yosemite to a real-estate private equity firm based in Las Vegas. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/28/u...
nytimes.com
Trump Administration Looks to Give a Swath of Yosemite Park to Developer (Gift Article)
The proposed land swap would allow easy access to the crown jewel of the national park system. Democrats and former Park Service officials are incensed.
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The Upshot @upshot.nytimes.com · 28/08/2026
“This is so ridiculous, it makes you sick,” said Don Neubacher, a former supervisor at Yosemite. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/28/u...
nytimes.com
Trump Administration Looks to Give a Swath of Yosemite Park to Developer (Gift Article)
The proposed land swap would allow easy access to the crown jewel of the national park system. Democrats and former Park Service officials are incensed.
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Mongabay @mongabay.com · 26/08/2026
At least 18 elephants, mostly females and calves, have died in Kenya’s Amboseli ecosystem from suspected pesticide poisoning. As four suspects are arrested, conservationists call for urgent reforms to pesticide oversight to protect wildlife and communities. Lynet Otieno reports.
mongabay.cc
Kenyan investigators arrest 4 people linked to 18 Amboseli elephant deaths
At least four suspects have been arrested in connection with the deaths of 18 elephants in the Amboseli ecosystem in southern Kenya, near the border with Tanzania. Preliminary investigations by a…
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Starre Vartan @starrevartan.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Riddle Me This: How might cougars—just cougaring around as they do—prevent human deaths? -->When cougars are active in a landscape, expected deer-vehicle collisions fall by 76%, a study shows. My latest for @mongabay.com on how cougars are likely saving humans: news.mongabay.com/2026/08/coug...
news.mongabay.com
Cougars cut deadly vehicle-deer collisions in the U.S. by up to 76%, study shows
If you’re a black-tailed deer on the Olympic Peninsula in the U.S. state of Washington, you’re always surrounded by friends and family. You are free-range, with abundant food to forage in familiar woo...
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Andrew Stoehr @andrewstoehr.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Come work with me! We're hiring a vertebrate biologist! I'm on the search committee, and happy to answer questions. (Butler University, Indianapolis, IN). Please spread the word! fa-exer-saasfaprod1.fa.ocs.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...
fa-exer-saasfaprod1.fa.ocs.oraclecloud.com
Assistant Professor, Biology
The Department of Biological Sciences at Butler University invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position starting in August 2027. We are searching for a broadly trained vertebra...
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Meade Krosby @meadekrosby.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Administration: building roads will lower wildfire risk. Reality: wildfire ignitions in national forests are highest in lands within 50m of roads (7.99 fires/1000 ha), lowest in wilderness areas (1.75 fires/1000 ha) and designated roadless areas (1.97 fires/1000 ha). Roads = people. People = fire.
link.springer.com
Three-decade record of contiguous-U.S. national forest wildfires indicates increased density of ignitions near roads - Fire Ecology
Background Roads play an important role in managing fire on the national forests. But roads also are known to increase ignitions and damage ecosystems. Roads may limit the size of wildfires, which may...
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Aerin Jacob, PhD @aerinj.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Part 1 of 2 in this month's roundup of #ConservationJobs in Canada: Land and wildlife. 💫 Multiple positions pay $100K+, have flexibile location or a four-day work week 💫 All postings show salary Part 2 will focus on climate and communications. www.linkedin.com/posts/aerinj...
linkedin.com
#conservationjobs #hiring #greenjobs #wildlifejobs | Aerin Jacob
[18 August 2026] Part 1 of 2 in this month's roundup of #ConservationJobs in Canada: Land and wildlife. Part 2 will focus on climate and communications. Multiple positions pay $100K+, have flexibile l...
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Society for Conservation Biology @society4conbio.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
A new study warns the Timor green pigeon is on the brink of extinction after decades of neglect, despite being listed as endangered since 2000. #endangeredspecies
news.mongabay.com
Timor green pigeon nears extinction after decades of inaction, study warns
On April 20, Jafet Potenzo Lopes was surveying the south coast of Manatuto municipality, in Timor-Leste, when he recorded something he had not seen in years: three Timor green pigeons, alive, in a loc...
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Mongabay @mongabay.com · 13/08/2026
Protecting wildlife is only part of conservation, relationships with Indigenous and local communities matter just as much. After his first year as @wcs.org's CEO, Adam Falk argues that ecological integrity matters as much as acreage in 30x30 targets. An interview by Rhett Ayers Butler.
mongabay.cc
What conservation looks like from the outside: A conversation with Adam Falk after his first year as CEO of WCS
Soon after becoming president and chief executive of the Wildlife Conservation Society, Adam Falk visited the giraffe keeper at the Bronx Zoo. What struck Falk was the source of the keeper’s…
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Joseph Tobias @josephtobias.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
Back from couple weeks in West Papua enjoying mind blowing sights like this practise display from a male Western Parotia. It’s bizarre ballerina dance with perfectly circular shadow on a pristine dancefloor was one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen in real life.
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Brian J. Enquist @bjenquist.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
Likely also in ecology "is facing an ‘extinction of experience’ whereby junior researchers are not gaining enough fieldwork expertise ... risking the discipline disconnecting from nature and impacting the acquisition of new data" ... a reason why we started the #PlantFunctionalTraitCourse #PFTC 🧪🌐🌾
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Jakub Nowosad @jakubnowosad.com · 12/08/2026
If you like interactive maps in R, this is worth a look. Nicolas Lambert’s *geovizr* is an htmlwidget wrapping the geoviz (d3-based) library, supporting everything from choropleths and spikes to pictograms and cartograms. 🗺️ riatelab.github.io/geovizr/ #rspatial #rstats #Cartography #GIS
riatelab.github.io
geoviz: thematic cartography
This package is an implementation of the geoviz javascript library. can be used to create a wide range of interactive, zoomable vector maps, taking advantage of d3’s many features: proportional…
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Colin Carlson @colincarlson.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
I wrote about a reason not to use generative AI in your writing that I haven't seen anyone talking about. Once I realized this, banning GenAI in our lab's writing became a no-brainer. Feel free to share, I think this is probably useful especially for trainees: www.carlsonlab.bio/thoughts/the...
carlsonlab.bio
The only reason you’ll ever need not to write with AI — The Carlson Lab
Over the last year, our lab has been developing a policy on AI use. To do this, we did three main things: We read a lot of academic publications and tech news. We set up an #ai channel on our la...
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Marcelo Lima @marcelocegonha.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
Costa Rica has approved a law requiring wildlife crossings in public road infrastructure where ecological connectivity is affected—bringing connectivity conservation directly into infrastructure planning and policy. delfino.cr/2026/08/asam... @fletcherecology.bsky.social
delfino.cr
Asamblea aprueba ley que obliga a incluir pasos de fauna en la infraestructura pública del país
Iniciativa aprobada por unanimidad indica que MOPT, municipalidades y otras entidades públicas deberán coordinar con el Sinac para estudiar la necesidad o no de estas estructuras en nuevas obras viale...
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Rob Thomas @robthomasbirds.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
Really happy to see this paper out in the wild, after 27 wonderful years of sitting on a Portuguese cliff with a lot of lovely people, waiting for storm petrels to materialise out of the darkness. #seabirds
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Marcelo Lima @marcelocegonha.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
Have you heard of the Cerrado biome? The world’s most biodiverse savanna and a conservation hotspot? Better be quick to learn about it as it’s lost more than 50% of it’s original 200 million hectares.
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American Naturalist / ASN 🐌 @asn-amnat.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
Historical Perspective: Sridhar et al. use the backstories of famous scientific papers in Ecology and Evolution to uncover the background roles of natural history that are written out of papers. Available now ahead of print! www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
The American Naturalist classic cover
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