Dr. Sara L Middleton

A photo of a black bean (Lathyrus niger) with withered looking pods against a grassy backdrop.

Plant mood: the emotionally withered looking black bean

Peeps waiting for an email/peer review/work from me thanks for your patience, there's a lot going on right now. I will respond when I can. I’m also taking time away from here for a bit. Like this perennial black bean, I will resurface again 🖤

A dark grey paving slabs with a jumble of light grey fossil crinoid stems deposited at various orientations.

Lovely assemblage of early carboniferous crinoids seen on the paving slabs in Leuven train station in Belgium 🤩

#FossilFriday

Improving university policies and risk assessment to support inclusive fieldwork in environmental sciences Among 90 UK higher education institutions, there was patchy mention of protected and other identity-related characteristics in fieldwork policy and risk assessments, and very limited consideration of....

🏞️𝐅𝐢𝐞𝐥𝐝𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐛𝐞 𝐬𝐚𝐟𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐥𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐞, 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐝𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐞𝐧𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡?
Our new study looked at fieldwork policies and risk assessments from 90 UK universities offering environmental science courses.
The results are eye-opening:
besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Publication alert 🚨 doi.org/10.1111/mec.... Our new study in Molecular Ecology shows dwarf birch genetic diversity has been shaped by shifting ice sheets and climate transitions over the last 2.6 million years. This history may hold clues to how tundra shrubs face today’s rapid climate change ❄️🌱🧬🌡️

Digital painting of a beige and brown snail crawling on a sandy seabed with sea weed in the background.

#InvertFest Neverita duplicata as requested by @joxter.bsky.social it was difficult to find a good picture of the live animal.
See pinned comment if you want to request a critter for the August Invert Fest

Y'all tell me why I'm seeing toothpaste costing 24 great british pounds in the supermarkets!?

Prices are out of hand 😱

Woooo go Vigdis 👏🏾

Alt text for quoted image: screen shot of the IPCC website showing the page for the seventh assessment report. The background shows a nighttime city scape of skyscrapers enveloped in cloud/smog.

Mauve and purple flowers against an orange background.

Devil’s-bit scabious and Common knapweed, Kilmory, Arran. #WildflowerHour

Equity, Diversity and Inclusion: Making conferences in the plant sciences more inclusive through community recommendations The ROOT & SHOOT project in the plant sciences has produced guidelines to help scientific societies organize conferences that are more inclusive and offer more supportive environments to all attendees...

We are incredibly excited & proud: our first publication is out in eLIFE!
"Making conferences in the plant sciences more inclusive through community recommendations"
elifesciences.org/articles/106...
This project was a team effort involving contributors from seven professional societies. #PlantSci

🌍 Glad to see our paper out!
How researchers in developing countries & other resource-constrained contexts (can) practice #OpenScience, with free tools, training, success stories, & more.

🔓 doi.org/10.1177/2515...
🛠 osf.io/gu7v4

More in this thread by @hcp4715.bsky.social 👇 #AcademicSky #PsychSky

Conceptualization of the citational justice toolkit, organized around the research cycle. In the top right quadrant of the cycle, we start with Planning, which includes the Ideas and Funding stages of research. This section contains two practices: citational politics training module and the Academic Wheel of Privilege, and one tool: the citational transparency browser extension. In the bottom right quadrant of the cycle, we have the Project, which includes Research and Journal Selection stages of research. This section contains one practice: diversify your reading. In the bottom left quadrant of the cycle, we have the Paper, which includes Paper writing and Submission stages of research. This section contains three practices: citing R packages and other tools, annotated citations lists and the citational diversity statement, and nine tools: Genderize, the Gray test, the citation audit survey, Mirya Holman’s pre-submission checklist, GBAT, the citational diversity codebook, a template for citing Indigenous peoples, the inwardness metric and GCBI-alyzer. In the top left quadrant of the cycle, we have Publication, which includes the Peer Review and Publication stages of research. This section contains one practice, the Academic Wheel of Privilege.

Regular reminder to authors to please acknowledge and cite people who have contributed to your work. Yet again I find a paper that I collected data for and I’m not acknowledged. 🧪

Also see our recent paper that provides a toolkit for more just and equitable citation practices👇🏽

🔗 osf.io/qjecy_v3

Science friends, life is difficult now, but please still try to peer review papers if you can.

I'm the editor handling a paper that just had it's 43rd person decline to review. We may have to reject it because no one is willing to review it, which sucks for the authors.

Do you want to be a paleontologist? Join the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's Application Preparation Group! This series of free Zoom workshops will: Tell you how the field of paleontology works, guide you through the graduate school application process, connect you with other applicants, and give you feedback on your application. Anyone is welcome!

Do you want to go to grad school in #paleontology 🦖, #geology ⚒️, or #biology🧪?

Join the @societyofvertpaleo.bsky.social Graduate School Application Prep Group! We’ll walk you through the application process in weekly workshops.

Sign up with this form! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Yeah me neither 😔

GitHub just got less independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation GitHub will be part of Microsoft’s AI engineering team

Open Science peeps, we need to have a conversation about the platforms we use in relation to socially responsible research given the sort of power dynamics and equity issues we see playing out.

See recent news about GitHub 👇🏽
www.theverge.com/news/757461/...

This looks awesome, thanks for sharing!

I feel ya. It comes in waves for me the grief and rage. For me what helps is spending less time on social media and more time with community members working on various environmental-social justice projects. Also having hobbies that don't require a screen (e.g swimming, crocheting and jigsaw puzzles)

Figure 1. Mechanisms of power and privilege operating in citational practice and their effects on six individuals with different intersecting identities.

“This paper unpacks the concept of citation politics and its role in sustaining epistemic hierarchies within scholarly communities.”

osf.io/qjecy_v2

A fossil fern leaf on a rock

Happy #FossilFriday and #FernFriday ! This beautiful fossil leaf belongs to a #fern that was growing in what is now southern France during the late Carboniferous, about 300 million years ago 🌿⛏️
#paleobotany #fossil #botany

Peer review is broken, and pedagogical research has a fix The lessons of decades of research into assessment and feedback haven’t tracked across into the practice of peer review. Madeleine Pownall wonders why not The lessons of decades of research into asses...

I can never understand why efforts to improve peer review don’t learn from the decades of educational research about how to do good, robust, constructive assessment and feedback.

What would happen if we treated peer review as pedagogy?

New in @wonkhe.bsky.social

wonkhe.com/blogs/peer-r...

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

A concrete bench painted with rainbow stripes. On the end are painted several realistic cactus species in clay pots.

Appreciating this intersection between botany and pride in Palm Springs--pride for prickly plant people, perhaps? That would fit me.

#Botany2025 #PrideInSTEM

William Gearty presents some advanced topics when using GitHub

Lewis Jones discusses different approaches for dealing with missing data

Harriet Drage feeds back suggestions from the group, written on post-its, on the opportunities and difficulties of archiving data and code

A group picture of the workshop leaders and participants in front of a fresco at the University of Zurich

Yesterday we led a workshop at @cpeg-cpb25.bsky.social on “Building open data science skills in paleobiology and ecology”. Huge thanks to everyone involved for making the workshop so successful and fun! 🤩

So many cat croissants 🥹. I was expecting to see more black cats but most of the cats were ginger!

Thanks for sharing!

Hello plant functional trait peeps 👋🏽 🧪 🌱

See this opportunity to submit to special feature in Journal of Ecology

besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/hub/journal/...

Cute ginger cat snoozing in a grey cat bed in front of a fiddle leaf fig plant.

A small ginger cat curled up sleeping on a top of a cushion.

Two ginger cats sleeping curled up on opposite sides of a square cat bed. One cat is curled up like a bagel the other more like a croissant.

A black cat on a chair snoozing with their head upside down and with one paw slightly raised, the other stretched out. The cat's eyes are slightly open.

Visited a cat cafe this weekend. 12/10 would recommend.

A teeny teasel growing from a crack in the side walk.

Honestly a mood given current state of things.

Trying to blossom in less than ideal growing conditions.

Found a teeny teasel growing out of a crack in the side walk 💜💚

Hana wearing a black tshirt which says badass science lady, a rainbow pencil necklace, traditional Indian earrings and a brightly patterned skirt in oranges and blues The royal institution logo and motto is above her

Leaving my 10th BIG Event as the incoming Chair of @big-stem-network.bsky.social

Not bad for someone who was told SciComm was probably ‘too competitive a career for someone like you’ 15 years ago.

Here’s to the next year of BIG!

Are you a PI in a biology field looking for postdocs? Here is a Starter Pack of early career biologists currently seeking postdoctoral positions! (Also if you are searching for a postdoc, let me know if you want to be added!) go.bsky.app/8zZNEGV