Cole Brookson

Coral restoration has become a popular reef management method, but it is widely acknowledged to be only a 🩹 solution. Using a mathematical model, @colebrookson.bsky.social and I clearly delineate the conditions under which restoration may or may not be helpful. 🔗: journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Thrilled to share that my first dissertation chapter is now published at Ecology! dx.doi.org/10.1002/ecy.... We embed TPCs into population dynamics to show how changing temperatures' ordering — not just its distribution — increases extinction risk (i.e. heatwaves matter!) @esajournals.bsky.social

Come work with us!! Great group and super cool work 😎

🚨 Very, very big news. Today, a global coalition - including members of the IPCC, IPBES, and WHO expert advisors, as well as independent virologists, epidemiologists, and lawyers - started the process of creating an "IPCC for Pandemics." 🔓 www.thelancet.com/journals/lan... 🧵 Five things to know 👉

It's hard to overstate how devastating these cuts will be for our incredible group of people working on these important questions.

An update from the team on the uncertain future of our program and the impact of NSF budget cuts. Please share and reach out 🦠

Do you write code? Do you wonder why we don't review code like we review writing? Well, we should :) Led by @jpeters7.bsky.social, we wrote some guidelines and resources for reviewing code, check it out! ecoforecast.org/resources-fo...

Little known, recently discovered fact: Measles wipes out immune protections OTHER diseases: many who recover actually face big future risk. Earlier measles may be implicated in HALF OF ALL LATER CHILDHOOD DEATHS from ALL infectious diseases before vaccines. Gift🔗👉 www.nytimes.com/2025/02/28/o...

FWIW, the reason "academia had it coming" is usually some thinly veiled version of (1) my colleagues keep making fun of my shitty race science, (2) people called me an asshole for saying false things about COVID, or (3) mommy says I'm a very clever boy but my professors didn't appreciate my genius.

This a summary of last part o my Ph.D. We investigated how temperature can affect the outcome of dengue infection. The study covers a 10y period in all five regions of Brasil and all sub-climates of the country We conclude that higher temperature makes risk of hospitalizations due dengue bigger!

The Data Life Cycle is a useful narrative device to understand how data flow within a project. But understanding how it fits with complex model pipelines has been awkward. So we wrote a thing! It's called the Model Life Cycle, and it's now out in PLOS Comp Biol: 🧪 journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

NEW: Census Bureau working papers on poverty measurement--research the public paid for and has a right to access--have been removed. Example analysis of "Alternative School Lunch Valuation in the 2022 Supplemental Poverty Measure" is missing www.census.gov/content/dam/...

Just got a story approved to run on Monday on the crisis happening at the NSF. If you are an NSF-funded scientist and have been personally impacted by the funding pause this week, I'd love to hear from you. Reach me securely on Signal: 3162958947

Agree! The NIH and academic institutions are rushing to implement changes and freezes in response to executive orders that could be illegal or rescinded in days. Maybe we should push back a little, yeah?🧪

If you're a non-UK scientist who wants to come to the UK for a postdoc, this year's Newton Fellowships are now open. You'll need a lab to host you (which could be me, but truly, could be any PI, so get in touch with someone you'd like to work with!) royalsociety.org/grants/newto...

Chat, is science political now?

Who is Russell Vought? “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains....We want to put them in trauma.” www.propublica.org/article/vide...

NSF PRFB POSTDOCS: Pull the remainder of this funding cycle’s stipend, all remaining research funds, and all remaining travel funds (if you have them). Do it before 5PM today. Per instructions from multiple NSF POs. If you’re not already on the PRFB slack, DM me and I’ll send you an invite

"where are all the protests?" read our series showing the legacy of both the Trump and Biden admins—from BLM in the 2010s, to Standing Rock, to George Floyd, to the Palestine encampments—as protest suppression and criminalization. politicians want to call blocking traffic and masking "terrorism."

While all this insane grant freezing is going on, Kansas currently has the largest TB outbreak in US *history* going on right now. www.cidrap.umn.edu/tuberculosis...

This is truly insane to see happening. Not all that surprising, but definitely insane — cannot imagine how folks are supposed to deal with this

The world has been through anti-science cycles before, to disastrous results On a detour on my lit review, a mosey through the history of our familiar friend, the standard onion (Allium cepa) brought me right to one of botany's greatest cautionary tales of what happens when ideology overrides data

Ecologists (or similar)!!! Apply for the @asn-amnat.bsky.social Student Research Awards by March 14!! Ten awards of $2K each will be given to research that advances the the conceptual unification of ecology, evolution, or behavior. More here: bit.ly/asn_grant_25

Back 2017 I wrote about a just-leaked style guide for a popular neo-Nazi publication. I call it “Strunk and White Power” and “The ‘half-joking’ advice and much else in the guide is: ‘Don the Magic Cloak of Plausible Deniability and come with us!’”

Today the Trump admin abruptly and indefinitely terminated many of the activities of the National Institutes of Health, the $50B/year collection of agencies that power the US biotech and health ecosystems. Even if these orders were lifted tomorrow, the disruption would be enormous. Why care? 🧵

As we honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. today, we reflect on his legacy of advancing equity, dismantling systemic injustice, and serving those in need. 1/10

In 2018, @blkahn.bsky.social said that the warming stripes graphic 'belongs in a damn museum', even suggesting that it was 'fit for the Museum of Modern Art' (see gizmodo.com/this-climate...). Well... Later this month, they will appear in the Museum of Modern Art: press.moma.org/exhibition/p...

🚨😷🧪 NEW: A growing body of evidence shows that pandemics, biodiversity loss, and climate change are part of a broader polycrisis - but there are no simple solutions. A sweeping overview of "Pathogens and planetary change" for the first issue of @natrevbiodiv.bsky.social, out now 🔓 rdcu.be/d6lHl

Meta is deleting links to Pixelfed, a decentralized, open source Instagram competitor that has had skyrocketing signups in recent days: www.404media.co/meta-is-bloc...

Happy this is finally pre-printed! A fun piece to work on with @arielgreiner.bsky.social where we show that coral restoration needs to be complimented by other, more fundamental sustainability measures to be useful ! 🪸

I am looking for a PhD student to start in fall of 2025 at MSU. Potential topics include trait-based approaches to plankton community resilience, temperature effects on communities, harmful algal blooms and many others. Please get in touch if interested. More info: www.kl-lab.group.

For my first Bluesky post...I wrote about what it’s like when the world’s foremost source of weather and climate data went offline during Hurricanes Helene and Milton, exactly when it was needed most www.carlsonlab.bio/thoughts/the...

I've been calculating these numbers for over 10 years. While there are individual bright spots in any given year, the global numbers are unfortunately sobering.

New preprint up! Really happy to have this study come together. We delve into predicting reservoirs of orthopoxviruses, including mpox virus, using ML models that integrate ecology and viral genomics 🦠🧬🐭 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...