michael catchen

you have been visited by "Le Boulanger Quebecois"
repost to receive his blessing

Biodiversity science and biosurveillance are fellow travelers The failure to meet the Aichi targets to alleviate global biodiversity decline (Nature 2020) was a wake-up call to the biodiversity monitoring community (T

🦠🌿🐦🧪 How can biodiversity monitoring help global efforts in disease surveillance?

With ✨ fantastic ✨ colleagues from @viralemergence.org and the @geobon.org working group on One Health, we try to identify three key lessons for the future.

🧵 A short thread!

academic.oup.com/bioscience/a...

Poor as a mouse every morning
Rich as a cat every night

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 🦠

2022 Release - North American Breeding Bird Survey Dataset (1966-2021) The 1966-2021 North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) dataset contains avian point count data for more than 700 North American bird taxa (species, races, and unidentified species groupings). These data are collected annually during the breeding season, primarily in June, along thousands of randomly established roadside survey routes in the United States and Canada. Routes are roughly 24.5 miles (39.2 km) long with counting locations placed at approximately half-mile (800-m) intervals, for a total of 50 stops. At each stop, a citizen scientist highly skilled in avian identification conducts a 3-minute point count, recording all birds seen within a quarter-mile (400-m) radius and all birds heard. Surveys begin 30 minutes before local sunrise and take approximately 5 hours to complete. Routes are sampled once per year, with the total number of routes sampled per year growing over time; just over 500 routes were sampled in 1966, while in recent decades approximately 3000 routes have been sampled annually. No data are provided for 2020. BBS field activities were cancelled in 2020 because of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) global pandemic and observers were directed to not sample routes. In addition to avian count data, this dataset also contains survey date, survey start and end times, start and end weather conditions, a unique observer identification number, route identification information, and route location information including country, state, and BCR, as well as geographic coordinates of route start point, and an indicator of run data quality.

The 2022 release is here, in case others need it web.archive.org/web/20220705...

It looks like Breeding Bird Survey data has disappeared from ScienceBase. I've found a copy of the 2022 version on the Internet Archive, but I'm curious if anyone downloaded the most up to date data before the administration change?

Blitz the Gap 2025

One week until Blitz the Gap (www.blitzthegap.org) starts - a Canada-wide event to fill biodiversity data gaps with iNaturalist! @laura-pollock.bsky.social

There were no new ways to understand the world, only new days to set our understanding against.

🐾 #CSEE2025 Workshop Highlight 🐾

"Interpretable machine learning for species distribution modelling"

💻 Discover how to use reproducible ML tools to tackle diverse ecological questions!

🔗 Register here: event.fourwaves.com/scee2025/reg...

What kind of animal
Needs to smoke a cigarette?
Grass in the pasture
Is sharper than a bayonette

Sometimes a pony
Sometimes a pony
Sometimes a pony gets depressed

Boy wants a car from his dad
Dad says, "First, you got to cut that hair"
Boy says, "Hey, Dad, Jesus had long hair"
And Dad says, "That's right, son, Jesus walked everywhere"

only if the title is: okay, this is epic

People gotta synchronize to animal time

i should get this guy to write my NSERC grants for me

A LinkedIn comment with text: "We celebrate Christ who MAY HAVE actually been quantum too. He dissappear for 3 days but some scholars think he just shrank down VERY SMALL until he able to find growth ray or pill or liquid (unknown). It a test of our faith to believe in that which we cannot see like molecules or ants. MORE STUDY"

learning interesting things on LinkedIn

All our hardships were just yardsticks then, you know

Bartender says, "Hey, we don't serve robots"
And the robot says, "Oh, but someday you will"

calmly staring out the window, imagining a world where market manipulation is illegal

word for math typesetting as an indicator of quality simply does not miss

at least i don't have to care about my us credit score anymore. and at the end of the day, isn't that what counts?

really feel like domain researchers have latched on to the concept of "AI" right as the bubble starts to pop

New paper! (arxiv.org/abs/2503.14093) I haven’t been this excited about one in a while, and I think the theory @mhab.bsky.social develops here will be a big step forward for the field. Why? Let me explain 🧵...

New preprint: a toolkit for species distribution modelling, in #JuliaLang. The result of many years of work with fantastic people including @gabdans.bsky.social and @mdcatchen.bsky.social - a quick thread 🧪🌏

ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

Some postdoc work up now up as a preprint! ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v... Choosing sites for monitoring biodiversity is critical for robust inference - so which algorithm should you use to pick sites? We found similar performance for algos and outline the features that might influence your decision.

One thing about me is that I will fight Nazis until I’m six feet in the ground.

Exciting opportunity - Last minute call for nominations for experts and fellows for the #IPBES methodological assessment of integrated biodiversity-inclusive spatial planning and ecological connectivity

Fellows:
www.ipbes.net/spatial-plan...
Experts:
www.ipbes.net/spatial-plan...

But what if the Pentagon announces Hamas was under Greenland this whole time?

Free Curve to the Point - Accompanying Sound of Geometric Curves (rotated), by Wassily Kandinsky, 1925, 📸 by @redwingdgr

Sampling and analysis frameworks for inference in ecology Reliable statistical inference is central to ecological research, much of which seeks to estimate population attributes and their interactions. The issue of sampling design and its relationship to...

Specifically for eco/evo dx.doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.13279, also Thompson's 2012 book Sampling is very thorough

fun annual reminder: ESA publishes a journal called Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, which is a real journal that is not affiliated with any other "Frontiers in" journal or the Frontiers publishing group. It just has an unfortunate name