Joe Atkinson

A group of 30 people stand in a tilled field surrounded by auger holes with seedlings ready to plant

A great day out yesteday planting a diverse mix of tubestock with a bunch of other keen volunteers for the BioR planting festival at Frahns Farm! We were lucky to get a beautiful day, as the cold and rain arrives this week. Good luck little seedlings!

Very much enjoy the "so-and-so (a botanist)"

Rainforest with buttressed trees, palms and a strangler fig in a shaded understory.

Congratulations to @jradford-smith.bsky.social for making the cover of @ecography.bsky.social with his stunning photo of subtropical #rainforest at Mt Glorious, less than an hour from Brisbane in beautiful Queensland (1 of 2).

Super inspiring paper and nice pic! I can feel the leeches on my ankles just looking at it 😂

The rapid assessments accurately identified species as threatened in 84% of cases despite much less time and data per species. Importantly they were accurate in identifying Critically Endangered species (67%) and Endangered species (54%). 2/4

New paper out! After the 2019-2020 #fires in Australia our team undertook #IUCN Red List assessments of fire affected #plant species, to handle the volume we undertook paired rapid and full assessments and compared their accuracy 1/4

doi.org/10.1016/j.bi...

Please share. We are hiring domestic/international #PhD students to work on citizen science, insect migration/conservation at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. If interested, please email me. You can find more about our research interests here. shawanchowdhury.com.

Do trait–growth relationships vary with plant age in fire‐prone heathland shrubs? We demonstrate that key functional traits undergo shifts in their relationship with growth as plants mature. Therefore, it will be valuable to shift our understanding of plant strategies away from th...

📢 New publication 'Do trait–growth relationships vary with plant age in fire-prone heathland #shrubs?' by Lily Dun, Elizabeth Wenk, Daniel Falster, Mark Westoby and Ian Wright in Journal of Ecology 🧪

doi.org/10.1111/1365...

Rooting for the little guy: Below‐ground traits predict juvenile grass demography in microsites Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

🌱 New paper in @funecology.bsky.social examines how roots drive the growth of juvenile grasses in response to manipulated soil moisture doi.org/10.1111/1365...

Led by SAM AHLER (INSTAAR+EBIO), the team's results improve understanding of grass population dynamics & help guide grassland restoration

Thanks Caroline! Looking forward to catching up in June

Earless Dragon Tympanocryptis tetraporophora on red clay

Two quadrats sit on bare red clay

Another quadrat sits on bare red clay with scattered dying plants

An open vista of a semi arid chenopod shrubland/grassland mosaic with blue sky and scattered clouds

Had a great week before our at the Fowlers Gap Arid Zone Research Station doing the annual sampling of our (me and @loveyouleafyou.bsky.social) DRAGNet experimental site. Pretty crispy this year with some pretty fast cover estimates... A lot of bare ground...

Three storey red brick and sandstone building with sign "school of botany" with Joe standing on steps in main entrance

Selfie in front of entranceway

Red brick and sandstone building with a green lawn in foreground and a bright blue sky

Over the moon to say today is my first day as a Lecturer in Botany at the University of Adelaide. I am character limited so will just be brief other than to say how grateful I am for the amazing support and encouragement I have received from mentors and collaborators. Can't wait to get started!

Regional databases demonstrate macroecological patterns less clearly than systematically collected field data The analysis of macroecological patterns has necessitated the use of large, composite datasets recording local-scale species occurrences distributed across the globe. These datasets, however, have va....

The third part of my PhD work is now out on Early View in @ecography.bsky.social, available #OpenAccess. 🌐🐚

We were interested in how macroecological patterns recreated from OBIS data might differ from those seen in the field and across methods -

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

Very happy to also say that New Scientist covered our paper last week too - www.newscientist.com/article/2472...

With some nice comments from overseas colleagues too 🌐🌿🦬🌍

The #biosphere is changing: Check our global mapping of ecological novelty in wild #ecosystems (due to #climatechange, #defaunation & floristic disruption) - just out in @natureecoevo.bsky.social ♨️🐘🌿🌐 Big thx to @mattkerr.bsky.social for the huge effort! #novelecosystems #invasivespecies #megafauna

Read our new study on mapping ecologically novel conditions - out now in Nature Ecology and Evolution 🌍🦬🌿

Headline finding is that 58% of the biosphere is experiencing highly novel conditions, but nowhere was low - we really are living in a novel world.

Widespread ecological novelty across the terrestrial biosphere - Nature Ecology & Evolution Even outside urban and agricultural areas, ecosystems are vastly transformed as a result of human activities. Here the authors map patterns in climate change, defaunation and floristic disruption to q...

1/6 Paper Alert📢📢📢
New publication from #ECONOVO on the widespread ecological novelty across the terrestrial biosphere🌱

Read the article here:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Key take homes below👇

Interesting paper on the potential complex impacts of varroa mites on Australian plants. Honey bees can promote fragmented populations of river red gums (Eucalyptus camaldulensis), one example of a +ve interaction potentially threatened. Check out Tom's thread and get involved in the iNat project!

Do trait–growth relationships vary with plant age in fire‐prone heathland shrubs? We demonstrate that key functional traits undergo shifts in their relationship with growth as plants mature. Therefore, it will be valuable to shift our understanding of plant strategies away from th...

New paper! How does age affect plant trait-growth relationship? Does how you measure growth matter? 🌱📏Big thank you to @ianjwright.bsky.social for giving me the opportunity to lead this when I was just a research assistant. doi.org/10.1111/1365...

#ECONOVOStories 🌍✨

@joe-atkinson.bsky.social, @mattkerr.bsky.social, @cmlmagneville.bsky.social, and @seh-pang.bsky.social attended the BES Annual Meeting 2024, sharing insights on from their research at ECONOVO!
#ECONOVO #Ecology #Biodiversity #AarhusUniversity #BritishEcologicalSociety

Wow, what a beauty!

Who does all the lovely drawings for the journal? E.g. the poster and the other callout posts

The EcoEvo Many Analysts project is out! Was great to be a part of this project expertly led by a cracking team. Really important results, showing how variable analytical decisions drastically affect study outcomes, the flow on to perceived quality during peer-review, and more!

rdcu.be/d8V4L

This Registered Report masterpiece just dropped at BMC Biology, brilliantly led by a great team with the help of 300+ analysts & reviewers

Same question, same data: go figure!

tl;dr: Substantial heterogeneity among results comes from differences among analytical choices

🔗 doi.org/10.1186/s129...

The first many-analysts study in ecology is finally published! 🥳🙌

300+ coauthors and 5+ years, this was a massive effort by @elliotgould.bsky.social Hannah Fraser Tim Parker and co.

Open access 👉 bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

I don't know why that one has passed me by, I will give it a spin now!

Village Green, Arthur and the Decline, Lola vs Powerman, then Muswell Hillbillies is one of the most mind-boggling and amazing run of albums I can think of (at a rate of one a year!), the range across those albums is incredible

Sweden begins wolf hunt as it aims to halve endangered animal’s population Five entire families can be killed, totalling 30 wolves, in move campaigners say is illegal under EU law

Embarrassing :( Sweden begins wolf hunt as it aims to halve endangered animal’s population 🐺 www.theguardian.com/environment/... 🐺 #wolf #unsustainablehunting #carnivore

Non-White scientists appear on fewer editorial boards, spend more time under review, and receive fewer citations | PNAS Disparities continue to pose major challenges in various aspects of science. One such aspect is editorial board composition, which has been shown t...

Non-White scientists appear on fewer editorial boards, spend more time under review, and receive fewer citations. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

A Functional Basis for the Assembly of Australian Subtropical Rainforest Tree Communities We surveyed rainforest tree communities across the Australian subtropics (spanning 600 to 2500 mm rainfall year−1) and measured functional traits on 285 (91%) of all recorded species. Hydraulic strat....

🔥 in Ecology Letters 🔥
#Traits describing hydraulic strategies and deciduousness explain the occurrence trends of almost 300 #rainforest #tree species across a steep rainfall gradient in Australia. #FunctionalTraits
dx.doi.org/10.1111/ele....