iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Charlotte H. Chang @harpactes.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Grim US data as per usual (even CA), and expect to see an impact of Dear Leader’s lawless and reckless war … fascinating to see the rise in EVs (and other fleets eg ethanol in BRA) globally Awesome #datascience by @robbieandrew.bsky.social

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Reposted by Charlotte H. Chang

Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

NEW: In March the White House released an FY27 budget request that zeroed out the National Science Foundation's directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). For months it was unclear what would happen. Now, with FY26 over, the damage to SBE is coming to light. My reporting:

science.org

‘Complete devastation’: How NSF gutted its social sciences research

Agency body that funds sociology, linguistics, and archaeology studies in U.S. gave 90% fewer new grants this year

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Charlotte H. Chang @harpactes.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Curious to learn more? H/t to my amazing collaborators (Michael Levin & @wildfarms.bsky.social led the charge with @mayahiga.bsky.social). We welcome conversations on how #conservation and #climate advocacy can resonate in the age of the #influencer and digital #attention economy.

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Charlotte H. Chang @harpactes.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

More to the point, social media offers scalable pathways for 1️⃣ Compelling Education: influencers like Maya using youth-forward platforms have a massive impact; 2️⃣ Funding Streams: platform features can be new revenue channels for enviro advocates, not just awareness. 4/5

A bar plot of a new fundraising stream that conservation advocates can access via platforms like Twitch

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Charlotte H. Chang @harpactes.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Our results show that #livestreaming is a highly viable method for engaging audiences that legacy organizations often miss: the young & digitally fluent. Bringing conservation advocacy & science into a native streaming format bridged this gap. 3/5

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Charlotte H. Chang @harpactes.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

We partnered with @mayahiga.bsky.social (@alveussanctuary.org) to conduct a first-of-its-kind experiment: integrating 🦜 “animal ambassadors" into Twitch livestreams targeting the exotic animal trade. The goal? Test if the native format of streaming can bypass traditional messaging barriers. 2/5

The four animal ambassador parrots from Alveus Sanctuary: an African Grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus), a Blue and Gold Macaw (Ara ararauna), a Blue-Fronted Amazon (Amazona aestiva), and a Catalina Macaw (Ara ararauna × Ara macao)

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Charlotte H. Chang @harpactes.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Public mobilization is critical for #conservation & #climate action, but traditional messaging doesn’t reach digital natives. 🤔 How do we meet young people where they actually are? We need a new way: we report on one at the intersection of biodiversity and streaming culture. 🧵 #EcoInnovation 1/5

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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 11/09/2026

It takes 0.0001 seconds to realise the AI-bros are lying about "extinction risk" as a marketing trick, given how none of them seem bothered about the deadly fossil fuels they've become obsessed with using to power their data centres.

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

at this point: carbon removal is, at best, essentially a research project. renewable expansion is a policy project

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Reposted by Charlotte H. Chang

Sammy Roth @sammyroth.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Love to see journalism with impact. After @hayleysmith.bsky.social reported on potentially AI-fueled public comments overwhelmingly Southern California air quality regulators, CA lawmakers passed a bill cracking down on the practice: www.latimes.com/environment/...

latimes.com

California lawmakers crack down on AI used in public comment

Senate Bill 1159 will make it easier for public agencies to protect themselves from the rising use of artificial intelligence for civic engagement.

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Daniel Swain @weatherwest.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

I've been talking a lot about the disastrous recent loss of American institutional capacity regarding climate science. But today, I'd like to announce something we've been working on, quietly, in the meantime to offer a lifeline to some of those affected. [Thread]

First page of a 2-page flyer describing the Climate Science and Communications Fund. It shows a map of gift recipient locations, and also summarize statistics regarding the program thus far (including over $3 million disbursed to date), with testimonials from individual recipients.

Second page of a 2-page flyer describing the Climate Science and Communications Fund. It further describes the need for and goals of the program. It also includes a point of contact email: roshan@climate-talent.org

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Helen Alexander @bawley.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

What a handsome Puffin face.

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Reposted by Charlotte H. Chang

Jonathan: Food & Photography @jonathanfoodie.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

. Evolution is amazing.... this female Red Crossbill showing her unique tools which evolved specifically to pry seeds from conifer cones. #LawOfEvolution #birds #crossbills #birdwatching #birding #pnw #wildlife #nature #birdphotography #art #wildlifephotography #nature #photography #WestCoastKin

Photography of a yellow- green female Red Crossbill bird on a rock with its unique bill at the Cabin Lake Wildlife bird blind in Central Oregon Pacific Northwest wilderness

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Charlotte H. Chang @harpactes.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

Shout out to a great group of authors: Brian E. Robinson (linkedin.com/in/brianerob...) JT Erbaugh (linkedin.com/in/james-j-t...) István Molnar (linkedin.com/in/istmolnar) Yuta Masuda (linkedin.com/in/yuta-masu...) Luci Lu, and David Papp. 7/8

linkedin.com

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Charlotte H. Chang @harpactes.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

Together, this work highlights key considerations for restoration and demonstrates that it is possible to generate more inclusive, global syntheses of NCS expertise to complement local empowerment and institutional decision‑making for more effective and equitable restoration action. 5/8

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Charlotte H. Chang @harpactes.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

Importantly, these preferences are not driven by an individual's domain or region of study, suggesting that our experts prefer restoration action based on broader public benefits rather than their narrow private interests. 4/8

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Charlotte H. Chang @harpactes.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

Across more than 2,700 NCS experts, we find: 🌿 A clear preference for investing in diverse portfolios of restoration actions rather than a single ‘blockbuster’ intervention, and 🌻 A strong emphasis on lower‑income and rural contexts. 3/8

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Charlotte H. Chang @harpactes.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

We introduce an approach for synthesizing preferences from thousands of experts, using machine learning to identify authors of relevant articles and a survey‑based discrete choice experiment to analyze their choices related to restoration priorities. 2/8

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Charlotte H. Chang @harpactes.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

New paper alert! 🌳 🤖 👩‍🔬 Bringing many and diverse expert perspectives into decision-making at scale for restoration-focused natural climate solutions (NCS) is hard. 🧵1/8

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Brett "Solidarity 2026" Banditelli @banditelli.org · 06/06/2026

Down at the Grebe Factory interviewing the new apprentices for the Western Grebe Taxi Service, I'll thread in stills/video as I process them As a primer, here's THE BEST WESTERN GREBE MATING RITUAL FOOTAGE OF MY LIFE Warning on this thread: too cute for doom Skip to :41 for just rushing. 🪶 🐣

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Reposted by Charlotte H. Chang

SaraKateW @sarakatew.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

A blue-gray gnatcatcher is an objectively hilarious bird. 🪶

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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 29/05/2026

It’s truly astonishing to see how comprehensively the US government is tearing down every part of the system that has made it up until now a world-leading power in science, research, and technological development. The entire world will suffer from this wanton destruction.

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Reposted by Charlotte H. Chang

jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 27/05/2026

this is incredible

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Charlotte H. Chang @harpactes.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

We value dogs more than moms. I realized today that if my dog had puppies, it would be considered cruel to separate them any earlier than 8-10 weeks postpartum. But so many moms in America are expected to leave baby and get back to work in just 4 weeks!!

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Charlotte H. Chang @harpactes.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

It’s really tough, but I think the answer probably includes some combination of new protocols like ATProto that enable account portability and algorithmic choice, and keeping existing social subgraphs intact. If the switching cost is low, you can fight the network effects of the incumbents.

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Rose 🌹 @rose.bsky.team · 27/04/2026

@attie.ai just told me that the 🐦 #birding community has the warmest replies-per-post ratio of the communities it sampled

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Charlotte H. Chang @harpactes.bsky.social · 29/03/2026

Where can I learn more about the PDF crawl problem? It feels relevant to a working group I’m leading on applied AI for evidence synthesis.

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Charlotte H. Chang @harpactes.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

H/t to my collaborators at Conservation Science Partners & @diogoverissimo.bsky.social, and thanks to the organizations who funded this work (On The Edge Conservation).

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Charlotte H. Chang @harpactes.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

Ultimately, we hope that our pipeline can make it easier for conservation advocates and researchers to track how the public is relating to our fellow members of kingdom #Animalia. Link to the open-access paper: doi.org/10.1111/cobi... 🧵 5/5

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Charlotte H. Chang @harpactes.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

We rapidly classified how people discuss wildlife w/COVID outbreak as a case study. We used open-source transformer language models (#BART) along with more traditional #NLP approaches. We saw marked differences across spp, highlighting the benefits versus risks of notoriety for wildlife. 🦠🧵4/5

Chord diagram of different topics discussed regarding different species

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Charlotte H. Chang @harpactes.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

Using common names for wildlife required resolving which search terms actually relate to distinct families/genera (e.g. lion is a substring of sea lion & mountain lion). We used the longest common substring problem, and show how you can implement this with iterative human expert feedback. 🧵3/5

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Charlotte H. Chang @harpactes.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

One hurdle was discerning species from sports teams, companies, or celebrities. Also, the public rarely uses formal Latin binomial species names. So, we aimed to filter out irrelevant entries while broadening our search to include the real ways that the public talks about #wildlife. 🧵2/5

Sankey diagram of the number of mentions for different species that are relevant or not, and processed at different stages of our pipeline

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Charlotte H. Chang @harpactes.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

New(ish) research alert: How does the public actually talk about wildlife online? Turns out, ‘Tiger’ is ~everywhere~…but people aren’t usually talking about that big Panthera cat 🐅. We created an open-source #ML and transformer #LLM pipeline to track #publicperceptions of #biodiversity. 🧵1/5

Machine learning pipeline for extracting data on public perceptions of biodiversity from different data sources

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Diogo Veríssimo @diogoverissimo.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

Is the public actually talking about biodiversity? 🐾 Our new #OA paper in @ConBiology introduces an automated NLP pipeline to measure wildlife saliency and attitudes from digital media Essential for tracking GBF targets! 📈 conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.... #ConservationScience #AI

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Charlotte H. Chang @harpactes.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

Looking for collaborators, testers, and skeptics to help shape this work and our products. H/t to my collaborators, Adam Pearson, Jingyi Li, DataKind, Caitlin Augustin, and others -- really excited to see where this work takes us all!

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Charlotte H. Chang @harpactes.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

We're also training the next generation and running practitioner workshops through our @cu-esiil.bsky.social working group. If you work in conservation evidence synthesis, environmental policy, or just have strong opinions about AI and NLP in ecology, we’re keen to hear from you.

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Charlotte H. Chang @harpactes.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

We aim to have every output trace back to source documents so users can evaluate credibility themselves. No black boxes that falsely claim they can replace human judgment.

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Charlotte H. Chang @harpactes.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

To that end, we're tackling this problem with practitioners, ethicists, and data sovereignty experts to figure out how we can best use AI to help augment (not replace!) expert opinions.

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Charlotte H. Chang @harpactes.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

I know that many of us in ecology, climate, & the environment are skeptical of "AI", and for good reason (water and energy footprints, plagiarism machines,...the list goes on).

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Charlotte H. Chang @harpactes.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

We plan to build open-source AI and NLP tools that can link evidence across scientific papers, gray literature, and project reports (e.g., connecting specific agroforestry practices to carbon outcomes, or restoration approaches to species recovery).

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Charlotte H. Chang @harpactes.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

Happy to share that we have received funding from the Seaver Institute to tackle an increasingly urgent problem in #conservation and #climateaction: how do you synthesize mountains of research when decisions need to happen rapidly?

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Dr. Wildlife @drwildlife.bsky.social · 14/12/2025

Bluesky has genuinely revived my love for science communication online. After watching the same posts go nowhere on Twitter, seeing them resonate here has been such a good reminder of why I do this. Thanks for being here 🖤

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Charlotte H. Chang @harpactes.bsky.social · 29/11/2025

Introduce yourself with 5 animals you’ve seen in the wild: Giant Ibis Dhole White-throated babbler Diademed sifaka Spoon-billed sandpiper

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