iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ollie Wearn @olliewearn.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

🚨 Consultancy opportunity with the Snow Leopard Trust ✅ Advanced skills in species distribution modelling & spatial prioritisation ✅ Great communication skills ✅ An understanding of conservation realities in Central Asia/Asia snowleopard.org/wp-content/u... 🧪🌍 #conservationscience

Slide summarising the details of the job, specifying the main topic, which is SPARC (Spatial Planning for Protected Areas in Response to Climate Change). Deadline for proposals 30th Sept. Start date October.

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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

love that reporters now have to announce tech product launches the way your local water authority informs you of an effluent release about to hit your favourite beach

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Ollie Wearn @olliewearn.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

I cannot complain one iota about the vistas here. 📍 South Gobi, Mongolia

Red quad bike/ATV in bottom left of image, with desert landscape below blue skies of South Gobi, a mountain rocky outcrop in the middle distance and green bushes in foreground

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Ollie Wearn @olliewearn.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

There’s a certain poetic neatness to the Pacific Swifts nesting on the State Ballet & Opera Theatre in the centre of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. I bloody love swifts, whether seen high on a mountain top or in the heart of a capital city. Don’t their screams in Summer bring everyone a bit of joy?

Neoclassical style column of the state ballet & opera theatre, with a Pacific swift nest in the light fitting

Close up of the nests around the light fitting

Front view of the theatre lit up at night

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Julia Koricheva @juliakoricheva.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

Exciting times at @royalholloway.bsky.social Peregrines livestream! First chick has arrived (11.25) and now second is on its way (12.49) 🐣 www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDv_...

youtube.com

Royal Holloway Peregrines

YouTube video by Royal Holloway Peregrines

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Ollie Wearn @olliewearn.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

Really interesting #dataviz that I’ve never seen before. Also what is happening to people once they enter their 40s?! (or alternatively what happened ~1985?)

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James Dyke @jamesgdyke.info · 28/04/2026

Good to see this new report from bank J.P. Morgan on deep uncertainty about climate change & tipping points. One way it could significantly reduce this uncertainty is by stopping being the world's largest funder of oil & gas. jpmorgan.celero.site/s/ab29c67c/c... bank.green/banks/jpmorg...

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Iago Ferreiro @iagoferreiro.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

1/8 🐺📢 Our study in Behavioral Ecology is out now! We explore the drivers of daily movements of wolves in human-dominated landscapes and found out that they shorten considerably their movements 🔗 Paper: sl1nk.com/xkue00q 🧵👇 (📸 Francisco J. Lema Fuentes).

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Ollie Wearn @olliewearn.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

Scouting for #cameratrap spots 🤩 Spring is in full swing in green Spain! 📍Asturias, north of Spain

A verdant view over forests and mountains, with flower spikes (white asphodel) in the foreground

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Robert Francis @birdhistory.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

There are more than 11,000 kinds of birds. I evaluated them all and made a definitive list of the 100 greatest names. I consider myself a bird name connoisseur but these blew me away. Over the next 10 days I'll add them to this thread. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

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Ollie Wearn @olliewearn.bsky.social · 25/04/2026

Spotted a #wildcat, my 1st in broad daylight! 📍 Las Ubiñas-La Mesa Natural Park, Asturias, north of Spain Hybridisation likely an issue for the species in the park (as elsewhere); cat colonies are present in most villages. This one at least looks relatively pure bred to me (but genetics needed).

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Ollie Wearn @olliewearn.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

An ex-guillemot. On the beach in St Andrews (East Sands). Hoping these little guys are doing OK out there! #seabirds #deadseabird #beachcombing

A common guillemot (bright white belly, black head) lying on its back in the orange sand, one wing outstretched and with a small bracelet of wrack

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molly conger @socialistdogmom.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

birds: they will never email you. and that’s a promise.

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Rosemary Mosco @rosemarymosco.com · 03/04/2026

I posted about this on my Facebook page, but I'm heartbroken about the God Squad's recent decision to allow oil and gas companies to harm Rice's Whales. You can learn more about these whales here: www.ourgulfwhale.org

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Ran Blekhman @blekhman.bsky.social · 05/04/2026

I wrote about why every lab should have AI use guidelines, and how to do it. open.substack.com/pub/blekhman...

open.substack.com

You need to make AI guidelines for your lab

Here's why you should, and how to start

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Ollie Wearn @olliewearn.bsky.social · 11/04/2026

Gold OA has allowed those in the Global South & in conservation NGOs w/out journal subscriptions to jump the paywall, finally. Whilst also, partially (could do a lot better) protecting the ability for those same people to publish through waivers. So there’s also that. #conservationscience 🧪🌍

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Mike Kaspari @mikekaspari.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

NSF LTER program “archived”. LTER=“Long Term Ecological Research”. This program has been incredibly successful, incredibly frugal for what they accomplish, and…of course…targeted by evil know-nothings. My heart is breaking.

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Ollie Wearn @olliewearn.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

And as an extension of this: BirdNet and other global AI classifiers are not useful, generally, for biodiversity research. Despite the #AIhype 😏 For example, I saw a recent paper in PNAS using BirdNet concluding that bird diversity was higher in pasture and agriculture than in old-growth forest 🙃

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Miguel Clavero @chikichanka.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

Surprising piece of information: on average, European eel reach sexual maturity at large age than any whale species. And certainly much older than any other exploited fish species. That's why short-term measures are not useful. Eels need a moratorium mimicking the whaling ban (see below)

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Ollie Wearn @olliewearn.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

Celebrated #WorldRewildingDay looking for brown bear signs in a wild corner of northern Spain. Success! Evidence of a bear enjoying last autumn’s beech mast. We also found clues of other interactions with the beech tree: some glistening inkcaps, and a dormice’s cache of hazelnuts inside a treehole

A lone hiker is in the mid distance, traversing heather & gorse, with a beech forest behind. In the distance a snow capped ridge of mountains

A series of bear dung boluses filled with beech seed husks sits in a crack in a rock surrounded by soft dry moss

A wonderful ent of a beech tree, its centre completely rotted out and three tripod legs left holding it up. All the “legs” and branches a shooting out a twisting at different angles

A cluster of glistening inkcap mushrooms growing inside a tree hole, surrounded by mulch filled with beech seeds and hazelnuts

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Ollie Wearn @olliewearn.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

I've had this from a journal: "Print your figure in a a letter size paper, place it *on the floor*, stand next to the page. Any text or number that you can´t read from that distance needs to be enlarged" Who is reading papers like this?! Also, I haven't had access to a printer since about 2007...

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Ollie Wearn @olliewearn.bsky.social · 15/03/2026

At the sharp edge of defending nature across the planet, rangers suffer. That’s for sure. They are also largely overlooked and undervalued. Hence, the importance of this call for urgent mental health support for rangers👇 Now that we can’t claim we didn’t know, what are we all going to do about it?

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Ollie Wearn @olliewearn.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

My kind of paper: tech (collars/tags), cool movement data, a hypothesis rooted in field observations, and a surprising finding!

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George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

In 2023, I sought to explain to a parliamentary committee what a structural collapse of the global food system would look like, and why this this is plausible - even likely. I think the likelihood has just ratcheted up a notch. I beg you to read and understand. Thanks www.monbiot.com/2023/03/09/t...

monbiot.com

The Hunger Gap

A gulf in public understanding prevents us from seeing how and why our food supply is at risk.

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Ollie Wearn @olliewearn.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

Incredibly shortsighted decision by our govt to cut development funding, including taking an axe to nature recovery projects. It diminishes us a country, both at home & abroad. And so we slip inexorably ever closer to the little Britain dream of Farage and his billionaire mates.

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Ollie Wearn @olliewearn.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

You can now add (for $20) an AI agent to your RStudio session… Any support for non-profits @posit.co? This could help to speed up analyses in wildlife conservation.

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Chris Sharpe @sharpebirder.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

Although we have known this for many years—e.g. @neobirdconserve financed early work by Vitek Jirinek—this should have been the top news headline last week. These declines in 'pristine' tropical forests are well-documented, poorly understood and continue apace. www.science.org/content/arti...

science.org

Birds are vanishing from tropical forests. Is another ‘silent spring’ coming?

As mysterious bird declines crop up in the Amazon and beyond, scientists suspect climate change may be to blame

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Miguel Bastos Araújo, PhD @miguelbaraujo.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

Some argue protected areas in fire-prone landscapes can undermine forest carbon (fuel build-up → higher fire risk). This paper shows Spanish protected areas consistently outperform comparable unprotected lands, strongest in National Parks. iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

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Ollie Wearn @olliewearn.bsky.social · 18/02/2026

I don’t know what this is, but I am here for the team names

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Ollie Wearn @olliewearn.bsky.social · 18/02/2026

Essential reading for conservation scientists & ecologists (in fact anyone doing science across borders!) 🌍🧪https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ele.70227?af=R Remote-control science is an internet-enabled form of "parachute" science FWIW, I see a lot of this in AI and macroecology research

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Remote‐Control Science in Ecology: A Hidden Face of Scientific Neocolonialism

We introduce the concept of “remote-control science” as a modern form of scientific neocolonialism in ecology, where researchers, preferably from the Global North, control projects in the Global Sout...

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Miguel Clavero @chikichanka.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

"Podemos vivir sin lobos (...) como estuvimos a punto de vivir sin linces, como posiblemente podamos vivir en pocos años sin urogallos, salmones y anguilas (...). Pero somos muchas las personas que no queremos vivir sin ellos" Léete estoy de @ernestodmartin.bsky.social elpais.com/clima-y-medi...

elpais.com

Podemos vivir sin lobos; viviremos peor

Matar 100 ejemplares, como ya ha sucedido en los montes asturianos y cántabros, es una muestra de populismo rural que desprecia el conocimiento científico y la ética

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Nadieh Bremer @nadiehbremer.com · 12/02/2026

📣 NEW! I’ve just released the BIGGEST and perhaps most creative project I’ve ever worked on! “Searching for Birds” searchingforbirds.visualcinnamon.com 🐤 A project, an article, an exploration that dives into the data that connects humans with birds, by looking at how we search for birds.

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Ollie Wearn @olliewearn.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

February: “Even the land is tired. Most of the birds that can afford it have gone to Florida” 🤓

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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 07/02/2026

Would be interesting to compare the results on more recent models - but this problem won’t go away. LLMs are always going to be extrapolating from what has already, and often, been thought, which is why they aren’t windows to the future but anchors to the past.

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Ollie Wearn @olliewearn.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

And, bonus fact, it actually spells pretty good (unlike, say, cat pee!). A musky, sweet and sour smell. In the dry climate of the Gobi (where our long-term study is), the smell doesn’t last as long as in the wet Himalayas, so it’s extra special when you find a strong scent mark - it must be fresh!

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Ollie Wearn @olliewearn.bsky.social · 01/02/2026

This has been my experience too. When I run out of brainpower, I sometimes turn to LLMs. But then comes the endless back-and-forth with the thing to actually make the code work; I guess that’s the vibe coding part 🥺 I can’t imagine what this is doing to the skills of those newly learning coding…

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WILDLABS Community @wildlabs.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

The 10th Annual #Tech4Wildlife Challenge is starting soon!📸 Help us celebrate a decade of conservation technology by sharing how you use #Tech4Wildlife throughout next week. Learn how to participate 👉 wildlabs.net/article/join... #conservation #conservationtech #naturetech

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Ollie Wearn @olliewearn.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

Cool! Carnivores help mycorrhizal fungi to disperse. Paper is here for those interested (although paywalled so I can’t actually read it): onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

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Ollie Wearn @olliewearn.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

Coffee! ☕️ 🫘 For the UK: Kiss the Hippo has great credentials (direct sourcing, carbon neutral, organic) kissthehippo.com/pages/kiss-t... For the Netherlands: Wakuli does some great work direct with suppliers www.wakuli.com/pages/mission

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Ollie Wearn @olliewearn.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

Love to see this: a women’s camera trapping group in the high mountains of Himachal Pradesh, western Himalaya. All power to them. Exemplary data collection in the field shown as well, including proper testing of camera setup using “walk test” 😇 #cameratrap 🌏🧪 youtu.be/98Tigg7WXCg?...

youtu.be

The Himalayan women tracking India’s snow leopards | BBC News India

YouTube video by BBC News India

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Ollie Wearn @olliewearn.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

Beautiful and incredible scenes from the centre of the Netherlands, a country with 1.5 times the density of people in the UK. A pack of 11 wolves roaming through the snow!

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Ollie Wearn @olliewearn.bsky.social · 14/01/2026

Alongside “AI colonialism”, the other big worry with this is that modelling results are never confronted with reality, they exist in some kind of desk-based bubble. All models are wrong, only some are useful. It’s by going out & touching the grass that we can sort the useful from the nonsensical.

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Ollie Wearn @olliewearn.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

A drone’s-eye view of the South Gobi, Mongolia, at sunset. Home to our long-term study of snow leopards & the social-ecological system of ungulates, carnivores & livestock herders. You might wonder if anything was living down there. But there are 20 snow leopards & 2000 ibex. Life finds a way! 🌏

A landscape view of the rugged and barren Tost Mountains in the South Gobi, Mongolia. Taken using a drone at around sunset, the mountains have an orange-green hue, and the scene would not look out of place on Mars!

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Pekkaa pahempi Mervaala @mervaala.eurosky.social · 16/11/2025

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair I do over-share this quote, but it's just so apt for so many things wrong with the world (pretty timeless too).

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Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below.

1. The four-fold drain
1.1 Money
Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for
whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who
created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis,
which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024
alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit
margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher
(Elsevier) always over 37%.
Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most
consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial
difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor &
Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American
researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The
Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3
billion in that year.

A figure detailing the drain on researcher time.

1. The four-fold drain

1.2 Time
The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce,
with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure
1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material
has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs,
grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for
profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time.
The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million
unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of
peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting
widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the
authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many
review demands.
Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of
scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in
‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow
progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to
volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier,
local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with
limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging
with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks
intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.

A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below:

1. The four-fold drain
1.1 Money
Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for
whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who
created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis,
which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024
alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit
margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher
(Elsevier) always over 37%.
Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most
consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial
difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor &
Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American
researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The
Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3
billion in that year.

The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised
scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers
first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour
resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.

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Ollie Wearn @olliewearn.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

Hey everyone, is there a literature (can be grey) discussing the ethics of using #generativeAI in #conservation and-or #ecology? I have to persuade some folks to consider the “darker” side of it and some authoritative/academic sources would really help. Thanks for any links. 🌍#conservationscience

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Ollie Wearn @olliewearn.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

Enjoyed reading about this partnership between the Kuikuro and Brazilian/US archaeologists. ✅Trust built over decades ✅Shared research objectives ✅Indigenous data sovereignty ✅Credit sharing ✅Respect & humility (“I didn’t “discover” anything”) #participatoryscience www.science.org/content/arti...

science.org

To unearth their past, Amazonian people turn to ‘a language white men understand’

A model partnership between archaeologists and the Kuikuro people has helped rewrite the history of early Amazonian societies

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