Becca Ralston

Thank you!

A bright yellow bird with steel blue wings in a person's hand

New paper out now at @consbiog.bsky.social !

eBird data reveals that nonbreeding conditions can affect prothonotary warbler spring arrival timing at broad scales, and spatial patterns suggest that eastern populations are more vulnerable to climate change

doi.org/10.1111/ddi....

Bird migration is changing. What does this reveal about our planet? – visualised Bird migrations rank as one of nature’s greatest spectacles. Thanks to GPS tracking, scientists are uncovering extraordinary insights into ancient and mysterious journeys – and new threats that are reshaping them.

Bird migration is changing. What does this reveal about our planet? – visualised

The Secret to Song Sparrows' Extraordinary Success Lies in Their Genome This ordinary-seeming songbird species is teeming with subtle genetic diversity, which allows local populations to respond in various ways to a changing world.

A thing I've been working on is out now: I wrote the cover story for the summer issue of Living Bird! Scientists have sequenced the genomes of almost all 25 (!) song sparrow subspecies AND connected their genes to how they're each likely to fare under climate change.

A rare Archaeopteryx fossil was kept from scientists for decades. Its first-ever analysis reveals how the ‘first bird’ took flight | CNN Scientists were finally given access to a remarkable Archaeopteryx fossil that’s allowed them to better understand exactly how the earliest known bird could fly.

An absolute stunner of an Archaeopteryx fossil preserves SO MUCH soft tissue, including scales on its toe pads and a group of flight feathers never seen before in Archaeopteryx. Known as tertials, they lie between the elbow and the body, and play a key role in powered flight for modern birds 🧪

My painting TIDAL WETLANDS

A view from a forested hilltop with several prominent dead trees and smaller living conifers under a mostly blue sky. Buildings along the horizon peek through the trees.

A forest of conifers growing amid large rocks covered with a thin yellow-green moss

It's so exciting to see the places I've been visiting since January fill with birdsong

Illustration of a singing female American Redstart on a bright sunny spring day. Her head is tipped back, beak open, while she is perched on a mottled brown branch. She is overall grayish on the body but has a patch of bright yellow at the side of the breast, and a black and yellow tail. Behind her are pale pastel well-lit dogwood flowers and soft green leaves.

I'm delighted to be able to share my latest artwork for the @songbirding.com podcast and audiobook series! Singing female American Redstart, because female birds definitely do sing and we're finally starting to pay attention. 🎨🪶 #SciArt #BirdArt 🧪

two of my favorites are Light From Uncommon Stars and The Thirty Names of Night! the latter heavily involves birds, too, and even though the fantasy elements aren't super major in it, it really feels magical

“A new review of 50 recent studies finds that protests tend to sway media coverage and public opinion toward the climate cause, without appearing to backfire, even when disruptive tactics are used”.

climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications...

only a few geese in Pärnu today

Factors underlying migratory timing of a seasonally migrating bird | www.nature.com/artic... | Scientific Reports | #ornithology 🪶

A picture taken at the edge of a rocky coastline before a glassy calm sea. The setting sun reflects yellow in the water and turns the haze on the horizon a deep blue

I had a really great birding trip today, where I got my FOY eiders and oystercatchers, as well as one of the coolest new birds I've seen here so far: a eurasian eagle owl!

What appears to be a massive flock of birds in red, purple and blue colours in a pale blue sky. Each "bird" represents a bird species, and their colour represents their conservation status from the IUCN Red List. Around one third of species appear to be near threatened, endangered or extinct

This dataviz is absolutely amazing 😍 Global bird species' conservation status displayed as a massive flock!

By Andrea Garrec, longlisted for the 2024 Information Is Beautiful Awards

www.informationisbeautifulawards.com/showcase/731...

#dataviz 📊🌏🧪🐦🦉🦆🦅

Exclusive: NIH to terminate hundreds of active research grants Studies that touch on LGBT+ health, gender identity and DEI in the biomedical workforce could be terminated, according to documents obtained by Nature.

“It’s extremely alarming that grants that have been vetted by the scientific community and deemed important and impactful to understand the world are now being cancelled because of political ideology,” says @lkfazio.bsky.social.

“This is direct censorship of scientific research.”

Potential for bird–insect phenological mismatch in a tri‐trophic system | doi.org/10.1111/1365... | @animalecology.bsky.social | #ornithology 🪶

"The diversity of sexual phenotypes across species is vast and spectacular" & so is this delightful story. Thanks to @professormaney.bsky.social for showing how white-throated sparrows are more proof that we shouldn't "flatten nature’s wondrous diversity into two categories, male and female." 🧪

NASA to wipe mentions of women, Indigenous people from websites NASA employees told to remove mentions of women, indigenous people, and environmental justice from websites.

On International Day of Women and Girls in Science, a reminder to not close your eyes and turn away from what is happening in the US right now. Fascism is an assault on scientific integrity, knowledge, and innovation.

www.chron.com/news/space/a...

Happy International Day for Women and Girls in Science!
Fantastic women scientist are working in the my research group @nathist.bsky.social @helsinki.fi!
Please have a look at what kind of research topics they have:
youtu.be/ugiyHy86taw
It is a privilege to work with you!
#womeninscience #minätutkin

Wild Clocks – David Farrier Attentive to the loss of age-old ecological relationships as “wild clocks” fall out of synchronization with each other, David Farrier imagines an opportunity to renew the rhythms by which we live and ...

"In every living thing there ticks a clock...": @david-farrier.bsky.social superb & unsettling on how "wild clocks"––spruce saplings, oyster colonies, reindeer herds––are falling out of synchronization as the Earth transforms.
It’s becoming harder to keep time.
emergencemagazine.org/essay/wild-c...

Email text: [EXT] Grants.gov Opportunities Update External Email The following grant opportunities were created, updated, or deleted on Grants.gov: NSF National Science Foundation 25-504 - Organismal Response to Climate Change Deletion Comments: Opportunity deleted

The dismantling of American Science continues. The Organismal Response to Climate Change grant call has been cancelled. The NSF Director is a disgrace

two goldcrest putting on a show

A very round Eurasian Bullfinch in the snow

I've had less opportunity to watch birds in the snow since coming to Finland than I expected but I did manage to see this very round bullfinch the other day

Migrating Birds Sing to Team Up with Other Species Songbirds may socialize across species during nighttime migrations

This is incredibly cool research, even more so because it was done using nocturnal flight call recordings! 🪶 www.scientificamerican.com/article/migr...

New paper published today in Movement Ecology! We show North American birds that migrate in flocks have greater long-term non-breeding range shifts, particularly if flocks are mixed-age.

We link this to social learning in novel migration route development.

rdcu.be/d57Mw

1/10

#ornithology

The web-pages of our research group @hkilabornithology.bsky.social @nathist.bsky.social @helsinkiuni.bsky.social have been updated, incl. a video about our work. Please have a look!

www.helsinki.fi/en/researchg...

youtu.be/ugiyHy86taw

Chart showing rapidly rising temperatures with 2024 the worst

2024 daily temperatures compared to past years. A frightening graphic from the BBC. #ClimateEmergency

ALA Labs frontpage & text logo. ALA LABS text is in white, formatted as off-centre stacked text. Underneath is smaller text, "Experiments in code, data analysis & visualisation from the Atlas of Living Australia." The background is green grass with a Southern Brown Tree Frog in the middle, hanging onto the grass. It has a darker brown top and lighter brown underside. The frog's eye is a rich dark yellow, with a black pupil in the shape of an oval, stretching from the left to right side of the eye

An animated scroll through an ALA Labs post, showing code, text and visuals to make a data visualisation in R. The article is on how to make a hexagon map of Australia, where each hexagon is an area of Australia, and each point in the hexagon is positioned and coloured to represent a species.

Examples of dataviz that ALA Labs posts show how to make in R. They are colourful and fun. One of them is even 3D!

✅ Do you use R or Python?
✅ Are you an ecologist/biologist?

Then you might find our website ALA Labs useful!

ALA Labs is full of how-to articles to visualise or analyse biodiversity data. Some are for beginners, others are advanced/experimental 😀

labs.ala.org.au

🧪🌏 #rstats #python #quartopub

The front of the Finnish Museum of Natural History

A snowy forest with a path leading through it

A new year & a new start for me as a PhD student studying avian responses to climate change at the University of Helsinki and the Finnish Museum of Natural History!