Lisa Nicvert

Very happy to share our new paper published in Current Biology !

We show that the “big bad wolf” actually fears humans for good reason.
It’s the first-ever playback experiment on wild wolves in Europe 🇵🇱🌲.

Our International Postdoc Forum is a virtual seminar series for early career researchers to share their work w/commentary by MCPS community members. Excited to welcome @rosetrappes.bsky.social (University of Bergen, Norway) at 1215 CT Wed 24 Sept. Sign up for Zoom link. buff.ly/MSAXLgY

brown and blue graphic with white text and logos overlaying. Text reads why countries need the global biodiversity information facility: lessons from belgium

🌍 Why countries need GBIF: lessons from Belgium

A recently published policy brief provides details how Belgium has leveraged GBIF to support sustainable development, conservation and innovation for effective #biodiversity governance.

🔗 doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

Title and author list for the synthesis paper titled "Understanding and Predicting Population Response to Anthropogenic Disturbance: Current Approaches and Novel Opportunities" published in Ecology Letters.

The latest paper from the DISCAR synthesis group is out at Ecology Letters! We discuss the key approaches to predicting human impacts on wildlife populations, highlighting avenues for incorporating indirect effects, such as energetic modelling. doi.org/10.1111/ele....

It was a pleasure to attend and speak at this great conference! @ecobhvr2025.bsky.social

Disability in ecology and evolution In this TrendsTalk series 'Disability in ecology and evolution' in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, we will be hearing from people about their experiences being disabled in ecology and evolution. We a...

Huge thank you @aeastephens.bsky.social‬ for initiating the TrendsTalk series 'Disability in ecology and evolution' in T.R.E.E. providing visibility for disabled researchers in #Ecology & #Evolution to make our field more #inclusive www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...

Also, you can read this post which describes our findings! bsky.app/profile/lisa...

Our article is now out in Peer Community Journal! If you are interested in network ecology, trait matching or multivariate methods, read it here (in open access) ⬇️
🌐

So nice to talk about science together!

Many thanks to PCI (@peercommunityin.bsky.social) Ecology for a smooth revision process, and to the reviewers @ibartomeus.bsky.social and Pedro Henrique Pereira Braga. Read the full article here: doi.org/10.1101/2024... (to be published in Peer Community Journal soon) (6/6)

Of course, a latent approach means that the results can sometimes be difficult to interpret, and conflate different characteristics of species which are not generally considered as "traits". But I still think CA and reciprocal scaling are interesting approaches to analyze interaction networks. (5/6)

Figure 7 from the article: Correlation circle measured a posteriori between species measured and latent traits. Bird traits are shown in solid red lines and plant traits in dashed blue lines. Axis 1 shows a size effect while axis 2 is defined by the matching between plant height and Kipp’s index.

We also find out that the axes are fairly related to some species' traits thought to be related to trait matching: beak width and fruit diameter, body mass and crop mass, and Kipp's index and plant height. This suggests that this latent trait approach captures known trait matching patterns! (4/6)

Figure 5 from the article. Reciprocal scaling of the birds-plants interaction network. Points correspond to the interaction scores h_k(i, j) in the first 2 dimensions, grouped by bird (a) or plant species (b). Species label are placed at the reciprocal scaling mean, and ellipses correspond to the bivariate normal distribution with variances and covariances given by reciprocal scaling (with a scaling factor of 1.5, i.e. the ellipse axes lengths are equal to 1.5*sqrt(λk) on axis k, corresponding to around 67% of the points contained in the ellipse). Ellipses are colored according to the rank of their centroid on the first axis. The correspondence between species’ codes and names is given in Appendix D.

We use a simulation approach to test the method, and illustrate it on a bird-plant frugivory network. Below are species' niches in the multivariate space for birds and plant species interacting in this network. (3/6)

Figure 1 from our article: Visualization of the interaction niche in a 2-dimensional space. The niche is depicted by an ellipse whose center represents niche optima and semi-axes represent niche breadths. The angle of the ellipse represents the covariance between niche axes. Points represent interaction scores.

In this article, we relate the interaction niche to trait matching. For that, we use reciprocal scaling, a method related to correspondence analysis, which allows to represent species' niches in the multivariate space and where the multivariate axes can be interpreted as latent traits. (2/6)

Is it possible to infer trait matching in ecological networks, even when no trait information is available? In our new article, just recommended by Timothée Poisot (@ctrlalttim.com) for PCI Ecology, we suggest that it is possible! Read the recommendation here: doi.org/10.24072/pci... 🌐 (1/6)

Cover of my presentation of the DRAGON project

Me in the field!

This weekend, I took part in the odonatological meeting of the Opie! I presented the DRAGON project I'm working on, and learned how to identify dragonflies in the field. It was an amazing weekend of sharing scientific and naturalist knowledge, while meeting great and passionate people!

Our Dragon consortium brainstorming at Cesab

Last week was our Dragon project workshop at Cesab! This was a great week of collaborative work to discuss dragonfiles, occupancy models and a lot more! Time to get those models running now 👩‍💻

🥁 Reminder: Our next PCI webinar is on March 20, 2025, at 4 PM CET. Sabina Leonelli from the Technical University of Munich will discuss "When Open Publishing Is Not Fair." For more details and registration, visit: buff.ly/49QXV0R

We #StandUpForScience

100 years with the Lotka-Volterra equation... let's celebrate!

This week, I visited collaborators for my postdoc project in @cesco-lab.bsky.social. I also presented some work published during my PhD at CESCO’s lab seminar and attended a meeting on the National Action Plan for Dragonflies. A great science-packed week with lots of nice and knowledgeable people!

During this meeting, I presented the Dragon project (for which I am a postdoc) and gathered the input and ideas from people in the room. Very helpful before starting data analysis 👩‍💻

Logo of the National Action Plan

Today I was invited to a meeting gathering actors from the French National Action Plan for Dragonflies, held in Paris. I learned a great deal about odonates conservation in France at the national and regional scales. I also had the chance to meet a lot of knowledgeable and very nice people!

Congratulations for this great defense 🥳

Every year around now, I start to see grad students on social media bemoan that they’re going home for the holidays to a family that doesn’t understand their research, or what they do in general, and it breaks my heart. 🧵 🧪 #SciComm

Ecosystems: new study questions common assumption about biodiversity | iDiv Plant species can fulfil different functions within an ecosystem, even if they are closely related to each other.

Interested to hear your opinions (beyond "all unmeasured traits" & teacher like textbook answers🧐):

What does Phylogenetic diversity represents?

See new study www.idiv.de/ecosystems-n...