Brian J. Enquist

Trump order gives political appointees vast powers over research grants Researchers are alarmed that the move might upend a long-standing tradition of peer-review for grants.

Trump's new executive order "looks like an explicit attempt to destroy peer review for federal science grants,” a physicist in Texas tells @dangaristo.bsky.social. 🧪

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

E.P.A. to Stop Updating Popular Database After Lead Scientist Criticized Trump

E.P.A. to Stop Updating Popular Database After Lead Scientist Criticized Trump www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/c...

Contrasting biological production trends over land and ocean - Nature Climate Change The authors jointly assess the changes in land and ocean net primary production from 2003 to 2021. They show contrasting trends, with overall planetary increases (0.11 ± 0.13 PgC yr−1) driven by terre...

🌍 Green gains, blue losses

From 2003–2021, plants on land grew more, but ocean productivity declined, likely due to climate warming.

Land is boosting Earth’s carbon uptake, but oceans are showing signs of stress.

🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#ClimateCrisis #SciComm 🧪

Analysis: The US government has declared war on the very idea of climate change | CNN Politics Americans are used to whiplash in their climate policy. The US has been in and out and in and out again of the key Paris climate agreement over the past four presidencies.

“In his second administration, President Donald Trump is not just approaching climate science with skepticism. Instead, his administration is moving to destroy the methods by which his or any future administration can respond to climate change.“

The suspensions landed perhaps most heavily in math. NSF suspended a $25 million grant for the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM), an international center at UCLA that hosts about 2000 visiting researchers every year for workshops and other programs. One of its stars, Terence Tao, a Fields Medal winner frequently named as one of the greatest living mathematicians, also had his only NSF grant suspended. The $750,000 award was in its first year and supported Tao’s own research and a handful of graduate students in developing tools to tell whether a set of numbers is structured or random. Tao says he now cannot offer research assistant opportunities during the academic year, and he calls the cuts to IPAM “quite disastrous.”

NSF and NIH cut off almost 300 grants to UCLA. Story by @dangaristo.bsky.social www.science.org/content/arti...

Applications are open for SFI's 2026 Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships

If you’ve recently earned a Ph.D. in any scientific field and want to pursue independent, transdisciplinary research, consider applying.

Deadline: October 1, 2025
Apply here: santafe.edu/sfifellowship

Tropical Tree-ring Network Website Visit the post for more.

Where did we get the data? Where can you find them?

150 scientists contributed 1000s tree-ring data through Tropical Tree-Ring Network. This network unites tree-ring scientists & data. To fill tropical data gap all data are uploaded to International Tree-ring Databank.
tropicaltreeringnetwork.org

Pantropical tree rings show small effects of drought on stem growth Increasing drought pressure under anthropogenic climate change may jeopardize the potential of tropical forests to capture carbon in woody biomass and act as a long-term carbon dioxide sink. To evalua...

How do tropical #trees deal with droughts? The answer is published today in @science.org

Our pantropical #treering analysis revealed 2.5% growth reduction during #drought years. Yet, growth declined by >10% in 1/4 of 500 study sites, and in hotter & drier regions.

doi.org/10.1126/scie...
🌍🍁🌐
(1/4)

Pantropical tree rings show small effects of drought on stem growth Increasing drought pressure under anthropogenic climate change may jeopardize the potential of tropical forests to capture carbon in woody biomass and act as a long-term carbon dioxide sink. To evalua...

Yes, many tropical trees have annual rings! Great to contribute to this global synthesis led by @pieterzuidema.bsky.social, indicating stronger droughts w climate change may shift observed more resilient responses toward more widespread decreases in productivity www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧪🌾🌐

North American bird declines are driven by reductions in common species Declines in North American birds are driven not by rare species vanishing but by sharp losses among formerly common species.

🚨 First PhD chapter is out! My work thus far, with @andy2dobson.bsky.social

We found that formerly common species have declined the fastest, on average.

📄 North American bird declines are driven by reductions in common species | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Arborealization?

Suspect that the repeated convergent evolution of the tree growth habit 🌴🌲🌳across the land plants may even exceed these numbers 🌾🧪

ONE Lectureship in genomics + TWO in ecology are advertised right now in my 'hood. Applications close 7th August. It'd be brilliant to have these filled with plant people. #PlantSciJobs #MonashBiol #plantecology #plantgenomics 🪴🧪🌱🌿🌾 This links to both : www.ecolsoc.org.au/opportunitie...

Adaptive diversification of growth allometry in the plant Arabidopsis thaliana | PNAS Seed plants vary tremendously in size and morphology; however, variation and covariation in plant traits may be governed, at least in part, by univ...

www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Assessing trait‐based scaling theory in tropical forests spanning a broad temperature gradient Aim Tropical elevation gradients are natural laboratories to assess how changing climate can influence tropical forests. However, there is a need for theory and integrated data collection to scale f...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Both of these viewpoints can (and should) be integrated. The biophysical and darwinian are not separated but instead tightly linked. Two of our recent papers exploring their integration are attached...

This looks really intriguing Tom! One quibble though - the framing of explanations as being dichotomous as either Newtonian or Darwinian is not correct. Galzier set them up as being opposing, but that is a very diminished view of the literature. They are not mutually exclusive

#Scaling In #Branch Thickness And The #Fractal #Aesthetic Of #Trees [In #Art From #DaVinci To #Mondrian]
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alturl.com/9tfjm
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#spatial #maths #mathematics #painting #representation #α #biology #artwork #radiusscalingexponent #branches #branching #nature #naturalpatterns #proportions #physiology

Scaling of Extinction Time With Habitat Size in Experimental Populations Theory predicts that extinction time scales with carrying capacity as either an exponential or power law. Extinction time in 35 laboratory populations was more consistent with a power law than expone....

New in #EcologyLetters: How does extinction time scale with habitat size? An experiment with #Daphnia found strong support for power law—not exponential—scaling. A rare test of a big theoretical question.

Link: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
#Ecology #Extinction #Scaling #Microcosms

🤩How can I buy one??

Wishing you a speedy recovery!

A young Black woman in red and blue academic gown celebrating inferring of an old yellow brown ornate building.

Congratulations Dr Middleton. I'm very proud of bae. There were many hurdles during her PhD, but she beat them all. @saralilplants.bsky.social

If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us.

- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

#FunctionalTraits 🧪🌐

Frontiers | Energy costs of communicating with AI This study presents a comprehensive evaluation of the environmental cost of large language models (LLMs) by analyzing their performance, token usage, and CO2...

“While larger and reasoning-enabled models achieve higher accuracy, up to 84.9%, they also incur substantially higher emissions… abstract domains such as Abstract Algebra consistently demand more computation and yield lower accuracy” www.frontiersin.org/journals/com... 🧪

Why don’t people trust experts? Understanding vs. knowledge

People’s trust in experts is decreasing. Why?

— Steven Hales offers a perfect-if-true answer: because the people don’t know even know what expertise is open.substack.com/pub/hilarius... #expertise #PhilSky #PhilSci

Looking up a plant name a while back led me to Sarah Plummer Lemmon. How many people have multiple plants AND a mountain named in their honor?

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sara_Pl...

Employees’ protests against Trump science policies spread to NSF Letter to key House Democrat follows declarations by scientists at NIH, EPA, and NASA

Employees’ protests against Trump science policies spread to NSF | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti... 🧪

Seventh Workshop on Trait-based Approaches to Ocean Life The 7th Workshop on Trait-based Approaches to Ocean Life will bring together scientists to discuss how functional traits shape marine ecosystems, using experimental, statistical, and modeling approach...

Trying to develop predictive theory for how biology works in the ocean? Interested in unifying traits? Keen to hang out in a beautiful place with amazing people? Consider joining us in a couple of weeks at the 7th #TraitBasedApproaches workshop in Asilomar! carnegiescience.edu/seventh-trai...