Mason Fidino, PhD

Ecologists have limited options when modelling species distributions through time, especially when data are limited. The autoOcc R package provides a solution to this, making it simple to fit autologistic occupancy models, compare them, and make model predictions.

Out today, a companion article for my autoOcc R package: Estimating species occupancy across multiple sampling seasons with autologistic occupancy models via the autoOcc R package. #rstats 🧪

besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Two Cooper’s hawks in a tree

Took a little walk just outside @lpzoo.org and came across a family of Cooper’s hawks. There were four flying from tree to tree, got a good picture of two of them!

In the past I've told people that "I've seen it all" when it comes to conducting an urban #cameratrapping study for 15 years. But today, after literally millions of images collected, we now have our first image of a deer peeing in the woods, so I guess there is still more to see out there 🤣🤣🤣🧪

Really excited about our new pub on how health (of people, animals, and ecosystems) can affect, and are affected by, human-wildlife interactions

tinyurl.com/OneHealthHWIs

In the BioScience One Health collection @aibsbiology.bsky.social 🧪

#humanwildlifeconflict #onehealth #urbanwildlife

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Disability in ecology and evolution In this TrendsTalk series ‘Disability in ecology and evolution’ in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, we hear from people about their experiences being disabled in ecology and evolution. We are asking ecologists and evolutionary biologists with disabilities what the community could do to make our field more inclusive – these changes can be very practical things (e.g., large fonts), they could be institutional, or involve people’s attitudes and beliefs. If you identify as disabled or have a chronic condition, and would like to share your thoughts, please get in touch – tree@cell.com, we would love to hear from you.

Online now: Disability in ecology and evolution

Apps are open for the 2026 Biota Awards postdoctoral fellowship! My coworkers and I would love to chat about this opportunity with recent PhD grads (or those close to finishing). We've been honored to receive funding from the Walder Foundation in the past! 🧪

www.biotaawards.org/2026-applica...

🦨 Ever wonder how skunks decide where to live in urban landscapes like Chicago?

New research from @masonfidino.bsky.social, @lizalehrer.bsky.social, & @sbmagle.bsky.social from @lpzoo.org used nearly a decade of data to find out! 🦊🌍🧪

A 🧵

A minimum data standard for wildlife disease research and surveillance - Scientific Data Scientific Data - A minimum data standard for wildlife disease research and surveillance

Do you study wildlife disease? Don't just share your sequences - share your testing data! We've developed a minimum data standard and an R package to help you, and wrote a little how-to-share-data handbook for disease ecology and One Health surveillance projects 🦇🦟🦠🗺️🔢

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The title of the paper: "A minimum data standard for wildlife disease research and surveillance" - and an example data table

NEW! 🎉 We need wildlife disease surveillance to predict epidemics, but data sharing is rare - we found that only 2-3% of studies share raw data. So, we spent three years developing a data standard and R package to help get wildlife disease data into FAIR repositories. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The Human Shield Hypothesis: Does Predator Avoidance of Humans Create Refuges for Prey? The human shield hypothesis posits that predators avoid areas of human disturbance due to perceived risk from humans, and prey therefore seeks refuge in these areas of perceived safety. Our systemati....

Have you ever cited or come across a mention of the 'human shield hypothesis' and wondered: what is the evidence for this hypothesis, and what is the quality of that evidence? Wonder no more!
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

GitHub - diel-project/Diel-Niche-Modeling Contribute to diel-project/Diel-Niche-Modeling development by creating an account on GitHub.

Tiny Diel.Niche R package update, bin.diel.times() outputs the proportion of time diel periods take up over a day (e.g., night, day, twilight) by setting prop.time = TRUE. VERY helpful if you want to quantify use of a given diel period relative to availability! #rstats 🧪

github.com/diel-project...

Congrats Sara!!!

Some difficult news from the team: In NSF's FY25-26 Budget Request to Congress, we learned that our program will take a whopping 50% cut - meaning that in September, we'll be $1.25m short of an operating budget that currently supports a cohort of seven PhD students, four postdocs, and three full-time staff. Verena is one of the largest and last pandemic prevention-focused programs in the United States: since 2020, we've supported the training of over 60 postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduates. Our researchers have established unique laboratory resources for studying animal immune systems, and discovered new antiviral immune adaptations in bats; developed risk assessment algorithms for wildlife and livestock viruses, and diagnostic algorithms for viruses like dengue, Ebola, and Zika; and quantified the effects of climate change, deforestation, and factory farming on spillover risk. Everything we develop is 100% open source, and our data has supported the research of nearly 150 external researchers in 21 countries to date. We have three months to make up our budget shortfall. Every dollar spent on Verena supports not just our team, but the community of researchers who use our data, code, and resources. You can help us by sharing this post, and reaching out if you're able to support a unique and vulnerable program. Or just head over to viralemergence.org, and take a look at what we do. 🦟 🦇 🦠

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

🌆🐾 The International Urban Wildlife Conference kicks off this weekend in Atlanta! We’re bringing together researchers and practitioners to explore the ecology and evolution of cities. Stay tuned for updates, session highlights, and behind-the-scenes glimpses of #IUWC2025! 🌇🦝🧬🌳

Ecologists’ endless quest for automatic inference
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/05/28/e...

Forecasting Dynamics of a Recolonizing Wolf Population Under Different Management Strategies We use a novel spatially explicit projection model to evaluate how different management strategies and system uncertainties affect the recolonization dynamics of wolves. We found that scenarios relat....

🐺🐺🐺 NEW PAPER! 🐺🐺🐺

Recovering wolves in WA tolerate threats except high harvest, high lethal removals, and lack of immigration

With @labgardner.bsky.social, Sarah Converse, & Ben Maletzke

zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Also my shop is a mess 😆😆😆

Four pieces of cherry wood about to be joined up with biscuits and glue.

By far the largest glue up I’ve done. My shop isn’t great for dimensioning boards this size, so I’ve been putting off doing this for a while. Hopefully this does indeed become the top to my dresser!

Yeah I feel like I could polish this up to be something more. Never thought about JMamm for it though! Adding in how prevalent this is with a review would help, but then it would also suck to write a paper where I’m just calling out statistical errors.

As climate warms, migratory songbirds’ fall feather molt advances by a day every year - @theU Study by U biologists taps data from 22,000 songbirds captured at Bonderman Field Station to reveal changes in how they replace their feathers

Check out the @uofubiology.bsky.social press release on our recent paper documenting advances in molt phenology! attheu.utah.edu/research/as-...

Reviewing a revised manuscript and the other reviewer linked to this blog post of mine in one of their comments. It's little things like this that makes me think my statistical musings are actually helpful. 🙂

masonfidino.com/camera_days/

A ternary plot showing the traditional hypothesis set in the Diel.Niche R package.

New blog post sharing updates on the latest version of the Diel.Niche R package, which we just released about an hour ago. Interested in quantifying if a species is nocturnal with data? Well it is easier than ever now! 🧪 #rstats #cameratrapping

masonfidino.com/Diel.Niche_u...

a camera trap photo of a goose with bright shining eyes

Arguably the goofiest goose #cameratrapping photo we have collected in over 15 years of biodiversity monitoring throughout #Chicago. Be on the look out for laser eyes here in Humboldt Park! 🧪

Looking for ideas of how to structure a repository when publicly sharing data files from research projects?

I've created a sample project on @cos.io to help you think through this. 👇
#databs #edresearch

osf.io/59gte/

A great blue heron with its beak stuck through an American flag

My graduate school held onto this banner for years (I placed in a research image competition while I was there), and now it has made its way back to my office.

Ha! Was not a good paper to sneak one in (was running a bit long) 😆

In stark comparison to a recent paper I helped lead with over 200 coauthors, I just submitted my first sole authored paper today. VERY DIFFERENT WRITING PROCESSES.

Local and long-distance colonization influence the distribution of a species in a fragmented landscape - Stacks Journal Peer-reviewed research - Local and long-distance colonization influence the distribution of a species in a fragmented landscape

New publication out this week in @stacksjournal.bsky.social where we looked at the relative roles local and long-distance colonization play on the distribution of striped skunks throughout the Chicago Metropolitan area! 🧪

www.stacksjournal.org/article/kase...

five different records for mouse, which should all be the same

Ah, yes, the joys of cleaning data from large-scale collaborations.

Our analysis of BBS data (through 2023) just came out!
doi.org/10.5066/P1F2...