Chris Catano

The fall of a prolific science journal exposes the billion-dollar profits of scientific publishing One of the 15 publications that put out the most studies globally has been expelled from the indexing system for irregularities. Its publisher, Elsevier, has a 38% profit margin that reached $1.5 billion in 2024

Reining in large for-profit academic publishers and valuing researchers for quality over quantity must be central as we reimagine the future of scholarly publishing.

The Georgia Coastal Ecosystems Long-Term Ecological Research program is looking for a postdoc with expertise in wetlands and biogeochemistry. Please pass this along to likely candidates!

a man is sitting in a car with the words just give it some time above him ALT: a man is sitting in a car with the words just give it some time above him

We are entering that time of year when it’s good to remember that, the editors & reviewers of your favorite society journals are your peers, so they’re also overwhelmed by end of the semester stuff & would like to spend time with family during holidays.

Exciting new 🧪 work by Kai Huang on #soil N emissions after warming a forest for 6 years @pnas.org www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Thanks Joe. It was great chatting with you!

Had an amazing time the last two days visiting and giving a seminar at UC Davis! Such great conversations, especially with students, and got to meet people who I've been inspired by since I was a student. Thank you Susan Harrison for hosting me, and to everyone else for your hospitality!

This is a reminder that @asn-amnat.bsky.social publishes abstracts in both English and your native language, using your native alphabet. You can see and read those online. Here is a screenshot of a great example. Love seeing this in my favorite journal.

View of plots, some with soil disturbance and some without, on the hillside of a dry grassland.

Causing soil disturbance in a dry grassland experiment

First year disturbance treatments are done in our new #DRAGNet site in Riverside, California! Yes, we were crazy enough to do it by hand ... literally blood, sweat, and tears went into this today.

Schematic illustrating how species interactions can depend on neighborhood density and identity.

🆕 in "Ecological Monographs": Static models miss the mark—adding nonlinear, density-based facilitation helps predict coexistence, persistence, and realistic community dynamics

📄Neighbor density-dependent facilitation promotes coexistence and internal oscillation
doi.org/10.1002/ecm....

Thanks for this contribution to "Ecology"!

I appreciate the kind words!

Specialized flower visitation in montane butterflies is associated with positive population trajectories over time Insect biodiversity is under threat from multiple stressors, including climate change and extreme weather. For butterflies, nectar resource use is an understudied trait in relation to population traj....

Another amazing paper from Tara Christensen - with a surprising result that nectar generalists (butterflies) are declining more than specialists. esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Experimental Immigration Mediates Ecological Selection and Drift in Monarch Microbiome Assembly The distribution of biodiversity depends on processes operating across scales, yet multiscale paradigms have struggled to permeate host-microbiome research. By integrating multi-scale ecological theo...

Caterpillar guts are like grasslands: immigration and selection determine gut microbial communities. Thanks @chriscatano.bsky.social for leading this exciting project, and for showing that niche selection is important in caterpillar microbial ecology!

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Experimental Immigration Mediates Ecological Selection and Drift in Monarch Microbiome Assembly The distribution of biodiversity depends on processes operating across scales, yet multiscale paradigms have struggled to permeate host-microbiome research. By integrating multi-scale ecological theo...

New paper showing how immigration alters the ecological processes structuring the assembly and variation in #Monarch caterpillar gut #microbiomes.

w/ @jaapderoode.bsky.social, @gabe-dubose.bsky.social, Joselyne Chavez, Lydia Fuller-Hall

Ecology Letters onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

I use both your book and Schimel's. Curious, what do you think has changed or is most in need of an update from his book since it was published?

This is great! I will have to incorporate this into my grad design & analysis course I am developing at UC Riverside.

Modelling Like an Experimentalist Dahlin et al. (2024) apply experimental thinking to a model of mosquito-borne disease transmissions.

Modelling Like an Experimentalist - Drake - 2025 - Ecology Letters - Wiley Online Library share.google/bxJ75avX2ky4...

Congrats! This is such a great paper

Did you know "Ecology" publishes Statistical Innovations papers?

These articles spotlight cutting-edge methods that tackle pressing ecological questions and advance data analysis in the field. Learn more in our author guidelines: esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/hub/journal/...

This looks like an important one! Nice work all!

Drawing of a researcher looking out thoughtfully at mountains, grasslands and intertidal study systems

New paper out today in Ecology Letters! In this synthesis we dive into the equilibrium assumption in ecology - why it's everywhere in ecological theory, the evidence for it in nature, when meeting the assumption is important, how to achieve it in empirical research, and more! tinyurl.com/yh6kyysm

University of California faculty push back against Big Brother cybersecurity mandate School officials defend software as bulwark against ransomware, but professors fear potential surveillance of their devices

www.science.org/content/arti...

Less is more: academic publishing needs ‘radical change,’ Cambridge press report concludes Academic publishing needs “renewed focus and collective action” to embrace new approaches and ensure the future of the industry, concludes a report from Cambridge University Press, released last we…

“We fundamentally believe that publishing less – but better – is essential for the health of the entire research system worldwide,” the authors of the report state.

Interested in resource competition theory, mutualism, spatial patterns or temporal dynamics? I'll be giving a talk in the IITE online seminar series tomorrow summarizing our recent work on microbial cross-feeding that includes all these ingredients.

Three people standing in southern california grassland with snow-capped mountains in the background.

Our lab's first trip together to the field in SoCal! So fun to explore and talk remote sensing, plants, pollinators, and ecosystem restoration with my new grad students.

A graph showing how prairie plant responses to seeding density treatments vary along a soil water holding capacity gradient

New paper led by former post-bac researcher Isabelle Turner, with @chriscatano.bsky.social:

Seeding density alters the role of soil moisture in structuring plant abundance during prairie restoration

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

These look great. Thank you for sharing!

If they took out the Oxford commas then Im not interrested 😜

Great suggestions all around, thanks!

Thanks, this looks really useful!