Martin Bulla

Mitochondrial genomes of Middle Pleistocene horses from the open-air site complex of Schöningen - Nature Ecology & Evolution Mitochondrial DNA from horses at the Middle Pleistocene archaeological site of Schöningen reveals insight into the evolutionary history of horses and advances techniques for the analysis of ancient DNA retrieved from highly degraded samples.

Mitochondrial DNA from horses at the Middle Pleistocene archaeological site of Schöningen reveals insight into the evolutionary history of horses, and advances techniques for the analysis of ancient DNA retrieved from highly degraded samples 🧪🐴 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Are our 95% CIs only worth 45% confidence? When multiple studies on the same research question, or multiple analyses of the same dataset are summarized in a meta-analysis, our confidence intervals (CIs) are put to a relentless test of reliabil...

Are our 95% CIs only worth 45% confidence? New preprint authors argue that's too pessimistic and outline extended CIs beyond sampling error. doi.org/10.1101/2025...

#statistics #OpenScience #Reproducibility
cc @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social
@sortee.bsky.social

"Ungeneralizable generalizations? A meta-meta-analysis of the influence of taxonomic bias on the study of behavior." - doi.org/10.32942/X2X...

Tiny hands, tiny birds, big curiosity. 🐦‍⬛✨
We took local grammar school kids bird ringing—and they loved it.

From gently holding a warbler to learning why birds wear “bracelets,” they got a front-row seat to real science.
🔍📏💍 = ❤️

🔗 martinbulla.github.io//bullab/gall...
#ornithology #scienceoutreach

Coming soon! A mid-summer special BOW Discovery Webinar on AVILIST - the world's first unified global checklist of birds. Does this sound good? Would you like to join us?

Stay tuned for more info. Target is late July. We'll do our best to make this during a globally friendly timeslot.

The deadline for the job application is today.

Jury Theorems for Peer Review Marcus Arvan, Liam Kofi Bright, and Remco Heesen Abstract: Peer review is often taken to be the main form of quality control on academic research. Usually journals carry this out. However, parts of maths and physics appear to have a parallel, crowd-sourced model of peer review, where articles are posted on the arXiv to be publicly discussed. In this article we argue that crowd-sourced peer review is likely to do better than journal-solicited peer review at sorting articles by quality. Our argument rests on two key claims. First, crowd-sourced peer review will lead on average to more reviewers per article than journal-solicited peer review. Second, due to the wisdom of the crowds, more reviewers will tend to make better judgements than fewer reviewers will. We make the second claim precise by looking at the Condorcet jury theorem as well as two related jury theorems developed specifically to apply to peer review.

Paper is finally up and open access (www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...), it's a sequel to an earlier paper where we'd argued that there's not good evidence that pre-publication peer review is a net benefit (www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1093/...). So in this one we suggest an alternative.

When performing multiple imputation of missing data, it is essential to evaluate how the imputed values compare to the observed data.

The attached image was created with the bwplot() function.

More: eepurl.com/gH6myT

#rstats #bigdata #businessanalyst #datavisualization

Thresholds of functional trait diversity driven by land use intensification - Nature Ecology & Evolution Land use intensification is a major driver of biodiversity change and ecosystem functioning. Here the authors identify thresholds of grassland plant community structure and stability in response to la...

Land use intensification is a major driver of biodiversity change and ecosystem functioning. Here Bagousse-Pinguet et al. identify thresholds of grassland plant community structure and stability in response to land use intensification www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨Some required reading for anyone dabbling in trait-based ecology & ecosystem science.

The impact of human dispersals and local interactions on the genetic diversity of coastal Papua New Guinea over the past 2,500 years - Nature Ecology & Evolution New archaeological and ancient genomic data from humans in Papua New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago shed light on regional human admixture and genetic isolation over the past 2,500 years.

New archaeological and ancient genomic data from humans in Papua New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago shed light on regional human admixture and genetic isolation over the past 2,500 years www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Scatterplot showing positive correlation between avian wing bone length and temperature across ~1500 bird species, along with diagrams comparing wing bones with low versus high proportional length

Another unexpected angle on bird wing evolution: skeletal measurements suggest that wing bone length is shaped not only by aerodynamics of flight but also by thermoregulation (1/4)
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
#macroecology #ornithology 🧪🌎🌐🪶

Now published!!!! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Drivers and impacts of global seed disperser decline Nature Reviews Biodiversity - Many plants rely on animals to disperse their seeds, but some groups of these seed-dispersing animals are facing severe declines. This Review summarizes evidence of...

Pollinator decline has captured global attention, but another plant-animal mutualism is quietly unraveling.

Our new Nature Reviews Biodiversity article synthesizes global evidence on seed disperser decline and what it means for plant biodiversity, ecosystem recovery, and climate adaptation. 🧵

Unsolicited listicle: My list of the most criminally underused/underappreciated phylogenetic comparative methods. Note, I am not involved in ANY of these methods; but I see them as things people are often asking of comparative data but have been surprised at how infrequently they have been cited.

Supplemental Feeding as a Driver of Population Expansion and Morphological Change in Anna's Hummingbirds Bird beaks are highly adaptable, with the potential to undergo rapid morphological shifts in response to environmental change such as climatic variation or food availability. Anna's Hummingbirds (Cal...

🚨New paper alert!🚨
We show that hummingbird beaks have changed in shape & size since around WWII, driven by the rise of commercialized feeders! 🧵
📄 Paper: dx.doi.org/10.1111/gcb....
#ornithology #evolution #GlobalChangeBiology

POSTDOCTORAL DATA SCIENTIST IN MACROECOLOGY AND MACROEVOLUTION (2+ YEARS IN PRAGUE) at Czech University of Life Sciences Prague in Prague, CZECHIA May 12, 2025 | We invite applications for a full-time, two-year data scientist postdoctoralposition (with potential for an extension) spanning large-scale... | NEW JOB

We’re hiring a postdoc (2+ years) in macroecology and macroevolution in my new lab at CZU Prague: www.researchgate.net/job/1021667_...