Have you used the CAST R package?
We’re running a short survey on use cases, challenges, and feature needs.
Your input will guide CAST priorities during developer days in Mar 2026.
🔗 uni-muenster.sciebo.de/apps/forms/2...
#RStats #RSpatial #OpenSource
☀️Hotter and drier conditions under ongoing climate change are causing tree mortality events and altering forest dynamics worldwide.
🧑💻Learn more in the webinar:
☀️Limits and opportunities in predicting drought-induced forest mortality
🗓️24 March 2026; 🕓4:00 pm CET
🔗 zoom.us/meeting/regi...
🌲 A huge thank you to everyone who joined us for the NASA’s new PACE mission: introduction to PACE’s hyperspectral, near daily observations of the world’s forest ecosystems Workshop!🌲
Registration for ForestSAT 2026 is now open: carlos-alberto-silva.github.io/silvalab/For...
Save the date!
48th New Phytologist Symposium: Forest interactions
📅 13–16 October 2026
📍 Leysin, Switzerland
www.newphytologist.org/events/48-nps
#PlantScience
🚨 GAMs have moved on—so it’s time for an update.
On March 3, 2026 (17:00–19:00 CET) I’ll be livestreaming an updated introduction to Generalized Additive Models in R
📺 YouTube livestream link: youtube.com/live/A9U8e1K...
#RStats #mgcv #GAMs #gratia #statistics 🧪
We just extended the talk/poster abstract submission deadline for the next international microclimate conference! You can now register until March 1st at meb-network.com/meb-2026/
Thank you for your great contributions so far! 🌅
Examples of how to use the new futurize package
Oooh love this. Easiest way to parallelise anything in #rstats. Just add futurize() to your favourite function call
www.jottr.org/2026/01/22/f...
Thanks @henrikbengtsson.bsky.social HT @rstats.blaze.email
🗺️ fastfocal: fast moving-window and point extraction for rasters in R, optimized for large windows and common focal stats via FFT. Built on terra.
https://cran.r-project.org/package=fastfocal
#RStats #GIScience #RSpatial
New on the Belowground blog: How old do herbs live? plantlifebelowground.wordpress.com/2026/01/21/h...
21.01.2026 07:14 — 👍 11 🔁 4 💬 1 📌 0Hi Kryštof, Congratulation!!! What is next? :)
20.01.2026 10:19 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Back from holiday and it's finally time to post about this. I am taking on a section editor role for the new diamond open access journal Biogeography, put together by @biogeographyjfab.bsky.social. That means that it's free to publish and free to read. (thread)
biog.journals.sup.org/index.php/bi...
Forests in Šumava and Bavarian Forest NP are getting wild - describing their structure with #LiDAR was very helpful for #microclimate modelling.
Here are a just few pics from the #fieldwork:
We paired #microclimate with #LiDAR to create 5m resolution temperature grids for the #BohemianForestEcosystem (NP Šumava and NP Bavarian Forest)🍁
Beside large microclimatic variability, our data reveals also systematic differences from #SoilTemp, #ForestTemp and #ERA5-Land
doi.org/10.1038/s415...
Introducing the NASA Earthdata Plugin for QGIS!
With the NASA Earthdata plugin, you can search, filter, preview, and download NASA datasets directly inside QGIS, no programming needed. It’s designed for anyone who wants fast, seamless access to NASA data within their existing GIS workflow.
wow, Pekka - ecohydrology? Congratulation anyway :))
06.01.2026 11:47 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Hi, we (labgis.ibot.cas.cz) combine different technologies to monitor biodiversity and vegetation change. For examples of using different RS techniques in ecology, see e.g. doi.org/10.1016/j.rs... or
iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...
🚀 Exploring COGs (Cloud‑Optimized GeoTIFFs) in R with the terra package (e.g., visualizing the internal tile structure).
See: guide.cloudnativegeo.org/cloud-optimi...
#RStats #RSpatial #Geospatial #CloudNativeGeo #GISchat
Side-by-side comparison of two multi-panel bubble charts faceted by world region. The left column shows the default facet labels placed above each panel (“Africa”, “Americas”, “Asia”, “Europe”, “Oceania”). The right column shows the same charts, but the facet labels are moved inside each panel at the top-left using a negative margin. In the center, there is a title reading “Want to place your facet labels inside each panel?” with an arrow pointing right, followed by a short ggplot2 theme code snippet demonstrating how to move strip text inside the panel.
I ignored the strip.clip argument in #ggplot2 for way too long 😲
Combined with a small negative margin tweak, you can place facet labels inside each panel. A tiny trick that makes small multiples feel so much cleaner.
🔵 no manual coordinates
🔵 inherits theme styling
🔵 scales nicely when resizing
A growing list of 2026 geospatial conferences is live 🌍
URL: github.com/Nowosad/conf...
If you know of additional GIS or remote-sensing events, please contribute. PRs and suggestions are welcome.
#GISchat #Geospatial #SpatialData #Conferences2026
{collinear} 3.0 is now on CRAN (yay! 🥳)
This #rstats package automates multicollinearity management to improve model robustness and interpretability.
You can learn more at blasbenito.github.io/collinear/, but here's a summary of the most exciting new features: 🧵 1/5
Nice to have such a motivated excursion to our #microclimate research plot! @spacetimeeco.bsky.social
04.12.2025 14:40 — 👍 3 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0wow. Science of the Total Environment is no longer indexed in Web of Science. Be aware when deciding where to submit your papers...
03.12.2025 13:05 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Cover slide
🌍 How trustworthy are your spatial predictions?
In my talk for the Rome R Users Group, I showed practical ways to evaluate where spatial predictions are trustworthy, and where they aren't.
Slides: jakubnowosad.com/rome2025
Video: youtu.be/uZe7thh80MI
#RSpatial #RStats #GISchat #SpatialModelling
Congratulation, Jonathan!
Happy to be also a very very small part of that ride:)
tmap or ggplot2 for maps? 🗺️
David O’Sullivan breaks down the trade-offs in a blog post.
URL: dosull.github.io/posts/2024-1...
#RStats #RSpatial #Maps #tmap #ggplot2
Model is: b3 <- scasm( y ~ s(x0, bs = "bs", k= k) + s(x1, bs = "sc", xt = "m+", k = k) + s(x2, bs = "bs", k = k) + s(x3, bs = "bs", k = k), family=poisson, bs=200 ) The second smooth `s(x1) is a shape constrained smooth with a positive monotonicity constraint (xt = "m+"). The `bs = 200` arguments uses 200 boostrap samples, which generates bootstrap distributions for each coefficient in the model. These bootstrap samples respect the shape constraints, while the usual +/- 2 SE credible intervals may not. The uncertainty in the partial effects is shown by two credible interval bands; a dark blue central band is a 68% Bayesian credible interval, while the lighter blue outer interval is a 95% Bayesian credible interval. The background of each panel is light grey with white grid lines, in a similar style to ggplot2's default theme.
A new release of the mgcv #RStats 📦 is out on CRAN and Simon Wood (U Edinburgh) has added some significant new features despite the small bump in version number:
🌟 scasm() for estimating GAMs with shape constrained smooths. Can be used with any family & smoothness selection is via the EFS method
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.
A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:
a 🧵 1/n
Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Graphical abstract of the paper shoving spatial variability in atmospheric vapor pressure deficit driven by the interplay between temperature-driven patterns in saturated water vapor pressure and actual water vapor pressure across topographically diverse landscape of the National Park Bohemian Switzerland in the Czech Republic.
Atmospheric #VaporPressureDeficit structures #forest #bryophyte communities across #landscape
our new #microclimate research in @egubg.bsky.social #Biogeosciences journal
BIG congratulation to the very first paper from our #bryophyte lover Anna Růžičková!
doi.org/10.5194/bg-2...
#ForestSoils are more than dirt beneath our feet: they regulate water, store carbon, & support #biodiversity 🌱
On 18 November, the #HoliSoils Webinar Series continues with a session dedicated to understanding & mapping forest soils across Europe!
Sign up now ➡️ holisoils.eu/holisoils-we...
