Scott F. Jones, PhD

Large crowd marching with signs towards the Main Street Bridge in Jacksonville, Florida, USA

Nice day for a stroll

ecoevojobs.net 2025-26

UPDATE: The 2025-2026 list of faculty and postdoc positions in ecology and evolutionary biology is out! Be sure to check out this active and helpful community run resources! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

ecoevojobs.net 2025-26

The 2025-26 Eco-Evo job list is out. Good luck to those applying!

docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Just to give the TL;DR on this one:

*The* main purpose of the EO is to move funding priorities and decisions away from experts and career professionals over to political appointees. With the ultimate power held by Vought / OMB.

New executive order puts all grants under political control All new funding on hold until Trump administration can cancel any previously funded grants.

“This appears to be the administration's response to Congress: An attempt to place a major roadblock to any new funding and establish the structure that will formally exert the ideological control that it wants.”

Great reporting from @jtimmer.bsky.social

arstechnica.com/science/2025...

Steal this (updated) syllabus for Scientific Writing I’ve just finished the 3rd go-around of my Scientific Writing course.  When I first signed up to teach it, I was very scared, but now that I’ve been through it a few times, I’m quite pleased with h…

If you're teaching Scientific Writing this fall (especially if it's new to you!) and are getting worried about just how close the fall is getting: reminder that I share my syllabus and all my course materials. Here: scientistseessquirre...

A student stands in front of their poster at a symposium, smiling

And another since I could only upload 4 pictures

A student stands in front of their poster at a symposium, smiling

A student stands in front of their poster at a symposium, smiling

Two students stand in front of their poster at a symposium, smiling

Two students stand in front of their poster at a symposium, smiling

So proud of students in the WE ~ ECO lab, who presented their work last week at the ARISE symposium at UNF!

Very lucky to work with such kind, hard-working students.

Motherfucking wind farms…

While I have everyone's attention, the genocide happening in Palestine -- in Gaza AND the West Bank -- is a crime against humanity.

Please raise your voice in defense of Palestinian lives. They are depending on us to remind those with power that they have a right to live.

a cartoon dog wearing a purple hat is sitting in front of a fire . ALT: a cartoon dog wearing a purple hat is sitting in front of a fire .

How disruptive are stateside/federal funding cuts/freezes, you ask? It's July 10th, and half my lab hasn't been paid and they're behind on rent and at risk of eviction. That's how disruptive. F this nonsense.

Trump Hires Scientists Who Doubt the Consensus on Climate Change

A thermometer doesn't give a different number if you're red, blue--or green. Nor does a hurricane knock on your door and ask who you voted for in the last election before it destroys your home.

Experts agree: it's real, it's us, it's serious and there are solutions. We just need to implement them!

Sea Grant, a program of NOAA which funds coastal research, education, and community outreach - is unfortunately a target for the current administration's draconian reductions in science funding. Sign a letter of support for Sea Grant here: sga.seagrant.org/letters-of-s...

I spoke to @ninalakhani.bsky.social for this article and reading it was still a gut punch. The US’s gold-standard scientific funding system has been completely demolished. I genuinely don’t know what to do with what remains.

And it’s going to get even worse under the new budget.

This is fucking insane. Closing these NOAA labs would obliterate our ability to observe, understand, and forecast the Earth System, from weather systems tomorrow to sea levels 50 years from now.

Commerce's budget justification for NOAA is up on its site now, if you want to infuriated

www.commerce.gov/sites/defaul...

A bar graph depicting temperature change globally from 1850 to 2024, relative to the average from 1961-2010. The graph shows fluctuations in temperature before the 1980s, with colors ranging from deep blue (cooler temperatures) to red (warmer temperatures), with a rapid increase in temperature in the last 40 years. #ShowYourStripes https://showyourstripes.info/

When I started grad school three decades ago, we thought climate change was a future problem. Now it’s clear that the future is here.

Even if people don’t care that those who’ve contributed the least to causing climate change suffer the most from it, they should care about fixing it for themselves.

it’s even more demoralizing when the history you’re repeating is history you were around for the first time

Court invalidates NSF 15% indirect cost cap. Strong ruling. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

NSF, NASA and NIH budgets per year, inflation adjusted from 2000-2025 along with the proposed cuts. NSF includes research component only. Massive cuts across all sectors, well below support spanning 25 years.

The President's Budget request as released yesterday will gut scientific research. Why should you care?
1) Science is fundamentally a jobs program. Many 100,000s are employed to do science and work for you, the US taxpayer.

Four smiling people standing behind a newly installed porewater well made of PVC pipe

Even got another porewater well installed and continuous water sensor deployed, so we can track water levels and salinity over time. What a great UNF crew!

Photo of a black and yellow colored swallowtail butterfly feeding on a white spherical buttonbush flower, with green leaves and sky as the background

Photo of a flowering buttonbush shrub, with three spherical white inflorescences with large green leaves as the background

Quite dry in NE Florida lately, but the Buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis) is going off! Lovely to see these shrubs loaded with swallowtails and other butterflies while doing freshwater wetlands fieldwork on a salinity intrusion project at the Guana-Tolomato-Matanzas NERR

Do this today, please!

Silenced Science Stories Explore the people and groundbreaking science research affected by federal firings, budget cuts, and grant terminations. Featuring scientists via art.

The U.S. is facing an unprecedented dismantling of science, research, and higher education.

As scientists are fired + research is frozen, so too are all the resources and outcomes that would have benefited society.

In their own words, the stories of scientists whose work has been abruptly ended:

Exclusive: NSF faces radical shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions Changes seen as a response to presidential directives on what research to fund

RIP American science: NSF faces radical shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions, layoff staff, and terminate more funded grants.

Because no one spends as much on science as the US does, destroying NIH, NSF, NOAA, NASA, EPA, USDA, USGS, etc. is leading to a brain drain, but it's not to other countries but rather from science. This senseless destruction of US science will hurt the US and the world for a very long time.

These mangroves at the #ecotone surprise us at every turn and we learn something new nearly every trip out!

Grateful to be working with NPS and GA DNR (and others!) on these endearing little shrubs.

White mangrove resprouting from base after freeze damage

And white mangrove in Florida (for now!) at a spot closer to the border than we thought just a year ago...

Freeze impacted red mangrove stem with new buds forming from node

Red and black mangroves still hanging on in Georgia after January freeze- reds still doing weird stuff we don't understand (yet)

Red mangrove in a salt marsh with two people in background

Fieldwork brings me joy and a mental break from <waves hands>

Checked up on the northern most black, red, and white #mangroves in US yesterday and was reminded how little we know and how many folks are doing good work to explore our world!