Iulian Gherghel

Third year alert! Our team is back in the Danube Delta for Year 3 of fieldwork—tracking climate change impacts on phenotype, phenology, and reproduction in two remarkable polymorphic snakes: the grass snake (​Natrix natrix​) and the dice snake (​Natrix tessellata​).

12.07.2025 10:59 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

25 new scholarships for US researchers Fonds Zukunft Österreich (FZÖ) is providing €10 million in funding for an academy program to bring postdocs from the USA to Austria ++ Faßmann: “The right signal in these turbulent times”

Are you from the US and would like to work as a postdoc in Austria, maybe in our lab? 25 new fellowships will be available in July from the @oeaw.bsky.social: www.oeaw.ac.at/en/news/25-n...

If you are interested; get in touch!

29.06.2025 13:28 — 👍 55    🔁 40    💬 1    📌 2

a figure from the linked paper, showing size global maps and lots of strong geographic gradients

Ecology and Biogeography of Sexual Size Dimorphism in Squamates, Liang et al., GEB

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

30.06.2025 11:02 — 👍 2    🔁 2    💬 0    📌 0

Springer Nature Discovers MDPI – The Strain on Scientific Publishing Home page for the paper ‘The Strain on Scientific Publishing’ by Mark A Hanson, Dan Brockington, Paolo Crosetto and Pablo Gomez Barreiro

Has someone found a good way of getting money out of research? Don't stop it.

Copy it.

APC charges cost billions. MDPI leads with over $1.7bn (est. 2015-2023). Springer-Nature ‘only’ got $1.1bn and so what do they do?

They copy MDPI.

the-strain-on-scientific-publishing.github.io/website/post...

18.06.2025 12:05 — 👍 36    🔁 21    💬 3    📌 0

beaver in a stream

Ecosystem engineers are animals that shape their environment to enhance survival🦫

Harvey et al. reviewed >8,000 articles and identified ~500 papers on species with geomorphological activities🌱and estimated the biomass of these species was 200,000 tons of carbon! 🤯

🔗 gbif.link/data-use-e...

05.06.2025 07:30 — 👍 5    🔁 2    💬 0    📌 1

Skilled immigration on the chopping block? Effects of eliminating "Optional Practical Training" in the US The White House has taken numerous steps to sharply reduce the number of immigrant workers, with or without legal status, in the US economy. These policies, so far, typically target immigrants with le...

They're terminating OPT.

Today the nominee to head USCIS stated directly: he will end Optional Practical Training, the single largest channel for high-skill immigrants to work in the US.

6 weeks ago I warned about this & summarized the research on impacts of this drastic action—> @piie.com

21.05.2025 21:04 — 👍 640    🔁 363    💬 2    📌 125

Niche Differentiation and Spatial Segregation of Melanistic and Non‐Melanistic Colour Morphs in a Widespread Palearctic Reptile Aim This study investigates the spatial distribution and climatic niche differentiation between melanistic and non-melanistic colour morphs of the common adder (Vipera berus) across the species rang...

New paper

Niche Differentiation and Spatial Segregation of Melanistic and Non-Melanistic Colour Morphs in a Widespread Palearctic Reptile

doi.org/10.1111/jbi....

30.04.2025 04:19 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

PNAS Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

new paper from my CU Denver lab in PNAS! We use Nearctic dragonflies to how a trait related to MATING can expand ecological niches and buffer species against global change in exactly the same way as traits related to SURVIVAL 🧪

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

26.02.2024 20:28 — 👍 10    🔁 6    💬 1    📌 0