Matt Kerr

Ready to start your own lab? Interested in #GlobalChange,#Biodiversity and #Ecosystem#Resilience? Join us in Göttingen - we are looking for a (female) Junior Research Group Leader in #EcologicalNovelty.
Attractive conditions, see euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/415857 - please share widely if you can!

A digital CAPTCHA verification window titled "Select all squares with PIPES" against a plain white background. The window contains a 3×3 grid of numbered squares, mixing literal hardware, smoking pipes, and programming syntax.

These captchas just keep getting harder #rstats

...and eventually the most long awaited starter pack: the one to connect all those interested in molluscs! Please message me if you prefer to opt out or if you wish to suggest new members (just briefly add the reason) go.bsky.app/Eh4qpKr

SORTEE Webinar: On what makes good sharable and reproducible R code, how to do it, and why it’s good for science For this month's SORTEE webinar, Dr. Dax Kellie from the Atlas of Living Australia will present on good, sharable, and reproducible R code in science

Coming up in March! Join @sortee.bsky.social for a webinar with @daxkellie.bsky.social on good, shareable, and reproducible R code - register here: events.humanitix.com/sortee-webin...

Best practices for moving from correlation to causation in ecological research - Nature Communications Different scientific traditions offer seemingly disparate approaches to inferring causal relationships in ecological systems. This Perspective unifies the causal assumptions and methods from...

Excited to share our new paper in @natcomms.nature.com We synthesize causal discovery & inference approaches across traditions (regression adjustment, quasi-expts, SEMs, Granger causality, convergent cross-mapping, and more) into a unified workflow for ecologists. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

An excellent three-post take on one of the many facets of the recent Spinosaurus/Myhrvold/Epstein controversy. Science journalists, this story really needs covering! #scicomm #science #ethics #epstein

This is very unfortunate, because we are facing a big and largely unexplored issue in research ethics that goes way beyond the individual case. It could really do with being widely debated in public. We are used to thinking of research ethics mostly in terms of the research itself (no cheating, no

Revisiting Europe's temperate forests: Palaeoecological evidence for an herbivory-driven woodland-grassland mosaic biome Understanding the pre-Homo sapiens baseline of the temperate forest biome is crucial for interpreting present-day biodiversity patterns, ecosystem fun…

Super honoured to have contributed to this epic piece of work, lead masterfully by @szymon-czyzewski.bsky.social.

We review multiple lines of palaeoecological evidence to reassess vegetation structure over the last 23 million years:

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Thanks Steve!

Published!📖

The making of novel ecosystems: A process-based framework for measurement, analysis and application 🌍

🔎 Find out more:

A flyer for the next instalment of the Palaeoverse Lecture Series. The flyer features a cartoon laptop with a sticker of the Palaeoverse logo on the lid, alongside a picture of Natalie, wearing glasses and a white and green shirt.

🚨Palaeoverse Lecture Series🚨
🗓️26th February 2026, 15:00 UTC🗓️

Join us next week for our next instalment, given by Dr Natalie Cooper @nhcooper123.bsky.social from Natural History Museum, London, on “Hack-a-thons: what, why and how to run them” 💻

Register here: bit.ly/palaeoverse-...

BES Macro 2026 A British Ecological Society special interest group conference for researchers in macroecology and/or macroevolution at any academic career

Registration for BES Macro 2026 is now OPEN. This year will be 15-17 July, University of Reading, with a great series of plenaries/workshops lined up.

Register by April 17 if you'd like to present!

#BESMacro2026

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/bes-macro-...

Degradation of fish food webs in the Anthropocene The decrease in body size driven by the selective species turnover is widely altering fish food web topology and function.

New paper out examining fish food web degradation in the Anthropocene. We show the structure of aquatic food webs are changing-- even when species richness doesn’t. These signals are strongly associated with decreases in body size within fish communities. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🌐🐠🐡🦈🐟

🚨New dinosaur! The latest salvo in the Spinosaurus saga.

A Spinosaurus looking like Elvis, with an outrageous bony head crest. Discovered in the Sahara by my undergrad mentor Paul Sereno & his team.

Super cool! But I'm sure nobody on the internet will care about it... 😉

Identifying practitioner and researcher collaboration needs to improve ecosystem restoration in Canada - Socio-Ecological Practice Research Ecological restoration practitioners should have access to relevant science on which to base their plans, and restoration researchers should ground their science in real-world needs — but the gap betw...

New study: “Investigating Collaboration Needs in Ecological restoration.” Led by @timalamenciak.bsky.social with several @uvicenvi.bsky.social co-authors, we report on the importance of bridging the science-practice gap in restoration. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

From our Chinese New Year celebration at @econovoau.bsky.social today (a little early)

Thanks to my other coauthors @emmamarjakangas.bsky.social, @andrewabraham.bsky.social, Rob Buitenwerf, and Maciej Sykut for expanding the discussion and providing invaluable expertise. And to all members of ECONOVO @econovoau.bsky.social for daily discussions on ecological novelty.

This paper reflects many discussions on the measurement and analysis of novelty that @jcsvenning.bsky.social, @anordonez1.bsky.social, @felixthehauskat.bsky.social and I have had over the years - so I am happy it is out!

The framework distinguishes among four key dimensions of novelty; compositional, functional, abiotic, and social - aiming to incorporate novel ecosystem thinking into research and ecosystem planning across scales and biomes.

I am excited to start putting these ideas into practice!

The making of novel ecosystems: A process‐based framework for measurement, analysis and application Ecological novelty is emerging rapidly due to global change drivers such as climate shifts, species introductions, defaunation, and land-use transformation. These changes challenge how we assess, ...

Our new paper presents a framework for analysing the processes that generate novel ecosystems, discussing different conceptual and practical approaches across ecological disciplines. You can read it, open access, in @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social

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

The billion-dollar case for sustaining palaeontology’s digital databases - Nature Ecology & Evolution The authors survey community palaeontological databases, documenting their contributions to science as well as their vulnerabilities, and provide recommendations for the future of open science databas...

What do we want?
Fossil databases! 🐚🦕
When do we want them?
Forever! 🗓️
Nice new paper highlighting how academic funding systems and digital architecture need to change, to ensure we can protect and sustain our precious fossil data 📚
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨 For those with access to collections of bird specimens: we are looking for collaborators who can quickly measure bulbuls/greenbuls (Pycnonotidae) for a project on intraspecific trait variation. We need 100s specimens measured from common species in return for co-authorship. Anyone up for it? 🧪🌐🪶

dplyr 1.2.0 dplyr 1.2.0 fills in some important gaps in dplyr's API: we've added a new complement to `filter()` focused on dropping rows, and we've expanded the `case_when()` family with three new recoding and re...

dplyr 1.2.0 is out now and we are SO excited!

- `filter_out()` for dropping rows

- `recode_values()`, `replace_values()`, and `replace_when()` that join `case_when()` as a complete family of recoding/replacing tools

These are huge quality of life wins for #rstats!

tidyverse.org/blog/2026/02...

For #FossilFriday I’m pleased to announce our new paper on investigating the cranial performance and evolution of feeding behavior in tyrannosauroids and other theropods. Here’s a thread on some of our major findings. #Dinosaurs #Paleontology #Tyrannosaurus #Theropods

The Global Ecology feed is growing fast, now >30 posts/week on large-scale biodiversity, ecosystems & conservation science 🌍🧪🦤🦑🪴🍁

Join the convo, DM @global-ecology.bsky.social to join and be added to the list of contributors !

Let’s build a community together ✨🌈💚

👉 bsky.app/profile/nmou...

Life on New Earth: biodiversity change and humanity in a novel future Abstract. Accounting for ecological novelty, gains and past human experiences through social–ecological–technological systems (SETS) can help society navig

Are narratives of total biosphere collapse helpful?

Is ecological 'novelty' necessarily bad?

What can the past tell us about the human capacity to mould and adapt to future conditions?

Red more in our new paper out in @royalsocietypublishing.org Phil Trans B: doi.org/10.1098/rstb...

🌏🧪🌐

Revealing the hidden patterns of shark and ray diversity over the past 145 million years Gardiner et al. reconstruct the diversity of sharks and rays across the past 145 million years using deep learning and an extensive dataset. Their results unveil previously hidden patterns, including ...

Our new paper is online! We found that 1) today's shark & ray diversity was already reached ~100Ma; 2) that the K/Pg extinction was not catastrophic; 3) that the max diversity was reached ~50Ma; and 4) that today's diversity is depleted compared to the past.
www.cell.com/current-biol...

Our paper on the mysterious Devonian organism Prototaxites has now finally been published! See the paper here (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) and our explainer thread below!
Prototaxites reconstruction by Matt Humpage

Description Please note that job descriptions are not exhaustive, and you may be asked to take on additional duties that align with the key responsibilities ment...

We are recruiting a Postdoc in computational biology, together with @mariasecrier.bsky.social

4yr, fully funded by @cancerresearchuk.org, ideal for Postdocs wanting to develop their independence

Applications open now: www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs/search-...

My collaborator at University of Copenhagen, Anders Garm, is looking for a 3 year postdoc to work on bioluminescence, neurobiology and ecology of ctenophores. More information here:
candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationI...