Chris Catano

Purple white and yellow flowers

Riverside super bloom with desert wishbone, fiddlenecks and popcorn flowers #NativePlants

“The U.S. Department of the Interior announced on Friday that it is revoking seven grazing permits in Phillips County that American Prairie had been using to sustain its herd of bison.” 🧪🌐🌾

Please sign & share this petition to create a new ESA Section for Distributed Ecological Research Networks (DERNs): esa.org/membership/p...
Goals: promote and support participation in existing and new DERNs, facilitate sharing of knowledge, and encourage collaborations within and between networks.

Really important points, Rob!

Rain-out shelters in field experiment

Beautful day yesterday out at our pinyon flats experiment in southern California. We are testing how changing precipitation regimes in arid ecosystems alter the causal mechanisms linking soil biogeochemistry, plant community composition, and primary productivity.

YouTube video by Spasojevic Ecology Lab Wild Riverside's best clips of 2025

youtu.be/r3wsnirQOXQ?...

Check out our highlights and subscribe to see what is wild in Riverside in 2026. We have partnered with city parks to add cameras to Sycamore Canyon and will be working with the county to start monitoring donkey populations across Riverside.

Also, walked in on Steven Tyler in the bathroom at a local restaurant in Brant Rock, MA a few years back

I once took John Cena's movie ticket while working at a movie theater in Tampa in undergrad

Congrats, Rob! I am excited to read this. I am mulling over developing a class covering many of these topics, and this will be super helpful as I think through ideas.

New paper out today in @royalsocietypublishing.org Biology Letters, led by undergrad superstar Laina Weiss! An experimental test of theory on the effects of temperature and resources on carrying capacity. So proud 🥹 tinyurl.com/yvmzmt9a @integrativebiology.bsky.social

Trait‐based island biogeography as a tool for studying future ecological communities Understanding the future of ecological communities under global change is among the most pressing challenges in plant ecology. Islands, with their reduced species diversity and clear boundaries, have...

My @newphyt.bsky.social Tansley Insight is now published in an issue:

Trait-based island biogeography as a tool for studying future ecological communities

I provide an overview of recent advances in integrating plant traits into island ecology and highlight key themes for future research.

How should the discipline of ecology and the community of ecologists respond to the ecological crisis? Is it time that these were put on something more akin to an emergency footing?
www.cell.com/action/showP...

Sometimes when an idea isn't working as expected, it's not failure, but an opportunity to realize something even more interesting is going on.

...maybe it's failure.

Meet the Editor I find that if the authors can explain why something works... those mechanisms might allow people working in other taxa or systems to transfer the findings. Jennifer Funk, Ecological Applications Associate Editor-in-Chief DISCOVER MORE NOW >

How do you ensure generalizability in Ecological Applications?

Jennifer L. Funk says explaining why something works allows others "to transfer the findings" across different taxa and systems.

Read the interview: https://ow.ly/B0Nr50XGZNk
ESA Journals #Ecology

3D figure showing how a family of unimodal, species-level thermal performance curves are collectively bounded by an exponential function across species, uniting predictions of growth rate at population and community levels. From Fig. S4.

Ecologists recognize the importance of integrating across scales, yet our models often target specific scales. Our new paper presents models of population growth that scale up to explain community-level patterns, including interactions of temperature, light & nutrients. doi.org/10.1002/ecm....

Spatial Ecology and Conservation Modeling This textbook provides a foundation for modern applied ecology. It follows a rapidly changing field with updates of concepts, methods, and code.

Really happy to share that the Second Edition of our book, "Spatial Ecology and Conservation Modeling", is now out and available online!

We provide a foundation for applied spatial ecology with a focus on learning-by-doing.

@camzoology.bsky.social @conservation.cam.ac.uk

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/...