Joel Pick

#SORTEE2026 Conference is over but you can (re)watch the two plenary sessions by Dr. Lauren Cadwallader and Dr. Tatsuya Amano, as well as the introductory & concluding remarks by SORTEE’s president, Maria Purgar here! www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

IMO simulation based power analysis is the gold standard here -- not because it's better or more accurate (though often...), but because doing it requires knowing enough about the phenomenon you're studying to be able to plug in values that are even remotely reasonable in the first place!

Do otters that go on pub crawls know they don't have to?

Job Alert! I am recruiting for a post doc in my group. The position will focus on establishing how changes in climate cause population change in birds and mammals. @edinburgh-uni.bsky.social

New preprint led by Kasha Strickland and @joelpick.bsky.social with the @hyenaproject.bsky.social. Accounting for social network structure is important when estimating genetic variance in lifetime reproductive success in spotted hyenas. ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

PhD at Swansea/Exeter investigating how urban living shapes reproductive decisions and success in herring gulls. Details: bpb-eu-w2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.bristo... How to apply: www.swbio.ac.uk/agriculture-... Please share. Supervisors listed below for more info.

I’m excited to share a PhD opportunity in my group, focussed on ecological forecasting of blue tit population responses to climate change as part of the e5-dtp.ed.ac.uk @edinburghbiology.bsky.social.

We are excited to advertise two phenoweb PhDs through the e5-dtp.ed.ac.uk @edinburghbiology.bsky.social. Both projects focus on better understanding the impacts of climate change on birds and involve fieldwork on nestbox populations of blue tits across Scottish woodlands #phenology #ornithology

Metacheck is now hosted by Surf! This offers us the possibility to offer an all in one online solution. Before we advertise this more, we would love to trial the new tool with data managers and editors of Diamond open access journals who want to try out automated checks. Especially of data and code.

Such a wonderful time: celebrating the 50th anniversary of the research programme on Corsican and Mediterranean blue tits / Montpellier great tits ! In 1976, Jacques Blondel was considering a 2-3 year-long project! Several generations of researchers together #LongTermProjects #AnimalEcology #EcoEvo

🌱PhD position in my lab at the University of Edinburgh to study adaptation to novel environments during plant range shifts: e5-dtp.ed.ac.uk/project?item... Competition for funding through the E5 Doctoral Training Partnership, apply by December 2nd. Please send me an email if you'd like to discuss!

Thanks for letting us know, Steve.

Blown away with how many people came along! Amazing!! A fantastic @sortee.bsky.social conference once again!

It happened in a seminar yesterday at my institute that somebody bullied a phd student to change an analysis, because two of the predictors were correlated. Multicollinearity is a brain worm, isn't it? It never makes sense to choose control variables based on pre-model correlations.

You can submit those records to our map! github.com/BrunaLab/hol...

Steve is trying his best...

Join us tomorrow morning for some data and code sharing fun!! If you can't make the hackathon you can still contribute asynchronously, just message me or @eivimeycook.bsky.social

🚨Exciting project alert!!🚨 Are you interested in data and code sharing in Ecology and Evolution? @eivimeycook.bsky.social and I are running a hackathon to quantify data and code availability and sharing quality across 90 society journals, and looking for people who want to be involved.

Yes, come join us!

With fieldwork, I didn't get to advertise our (not so now) new paper on the quantitative genetics of growth in the 🦎 in @journal-evo.bsky.social: dx.doi.org/10.1093/evol... It's an exciting paper paper in which we disentangle what it means to treat the whole growth curve as a function-valued trait!

A reminder to sign up to the @sortee.bsky.social conference: 13-14th October sortee.org/upcoming/! The advocacy committee will be running a hackathon (second event) looking at EcoEvo society journal policies and data/code availability/quality.

📖 Published📖 This perspective argues that reframing persistent challenges as interconnected problems of implementation, rather than aspiration, will help in overcoming a century of inertia in quantitative ecology education 📚️ 📈 🎒 🔎 buff.ly/EdhVNrV

An interesting thing is happening to me at the moment. I have a standing bug bounty policy for my first authored scientific work. That means, I've committed to pay people who report bugs in my code, up to 750€ for severe errors. Since GPT-6 Astra came out, I'm now getting several bug reports daily.

Do you use #iNaturalist data in research—or advise students who do? We put together a practical guide to using iNaturalist data in scientific research, covering how to access, acquire, analyze, and attribute the data, with examples in R and Python. Paper: doi.org/10.1093/bios... #ecology

Tyrannosaurus xkcd.com/3300/

New preprint! 🎉 I analysed 1660 papers from 4 psychology journals and found materials sharing went from 9% of papers in 2015 to 82% in 2025, and these materials *do* get downloaded — a median of 135 times each. BUT shared code is often hard to run. doi.org/10.31234/osf... Let's walk through it 🧵

If you know me, you know that Am Nat 🐌 is one of my fav journals. So I am delighted (and a little terrified) to say I've recently accepted a role as one of its Senior Editors! Be sure to keep us in mind as home for your favorite work (including behavior) 😉! @asn-amnat.bsky.social

Before writing an introduction, make a one-line roadmap for each paragraph. Then read only those lines. Do they form a logical argument? If not, reorganize the roadmap before polishing the text. 🌐🧪

"Is plastic pollution getting worse?" It's the question we get asked more than any other. After 15 years of data from Lord Howe Island, we finally have a straight answer. 🧵 🔗 agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

@prof-tregoning.bsky.social argues that scientific paper format does not reflect how we do science: 🤥are we telling a false story? 💡are we dismissing the central role of creativity in science? What do you think? Let us know in the comments... journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

The distance between Uranus and Earth correlates with Asthma prevalence in American children (r=0.932)

Tired of reviewing for for-profit academic publishing? How about reviewing for diamond open-access journals instead? Sign the Diamond reviewer pledge and spread the word! forrt.org/diamond-revi...

My lab @ Edinburgh university is recruiting a postdoc to work on the weird and wonderful germline-specific chromosomes of flies. elxw.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid... collaboration with @germline.bsky.social and yukiko yamashita funded by @novonordisk.bsky.social please repost!

For once, I actually agree with Steve's advice. Being silly is good for the soul.

Hope you get the job, Steve! (He won't)

Thanks for that, Steve...

Congratulations to Dr @katelaskowski.bsky.social for receiving the 2026 Ctrl-Z award by the Center for Scientific Integrity. The award celebrates scientists who discover errors in their work and take the necessary steps to correct the record. 👉 Learn more about the prize: https://bit.ly/4hSKk0b

Great collection of Shiny apps (and R package) for #teaching #ecology. Apps come in different languages (including Spanish) ecoevoapps.gitlab.io

🚨Update: Our analysis of global APC expenditure has now been expanded to cover more publishers (7 -> 14) and more years (2019-2025). We estimate $15B in APCs paid over seven years, $3.7B in 2025 alone. Elsevier crosses the $1B threshold by itself in 2025. arxiv.org/abs/2608.16322 #ScholComm

Good philosophy when you think about it.

⏰ Final call: Nominations for the 2026 SORTEE Commendation Awards close in one week! Know a project promoting Open Science in ecology & evolution? Projects of any scale are welcome. Submit now: sortee.org/awards/ #OpenScience #EcoEvo #SORTEE

I meant to post that #FLoRA now has over 2,500 replications and reproductions - but we are already at >2,600! This is only possible due to our team of >200 researchers submitting + validating entries, approving them, and maintaining the search pipeline and validation app. forrt.org/flora-explor...

Stop thinking so hard, Steve. It's a fruitless endeavor. #SteveThoughts

Attention: dream job alert!! 🚨 This is *my* home department, which I unabashedly love! We're a super collegial group (that really protects & supports junior faculty 💪) and Davis is a great place to live. Happy to chat more about what it's like to be a faculty here

Many of you will have seen the recent post about changes at OSF. If you'd like to learn more about how to use other services (particularly Zenodo) to share data and code, see my book chapter on resource sharing. bettercode-book.org/book-sharing...