Ollie Wearn

~0.2 snow leopards over that area 😉

A landscape view of the rugged and barren Tost Mountains in the South Gobi, Mongolia. Taken using a drone at around sunset, the mountains have an orange-green hue, and the scene would not look out of place on Mars!

A drone’s-eye view of the South Gobi, Mongolia, at sunset. Home to our long-term study of snow leopards & the social-ecological system of ungulates, carnivores & livestock herders.

You might wonder if anything was living down there. But there are 20 snow leopards & 2000 ibex. Life finds a way! 🌏

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
– Upton Sinclair

I do over-share this quote, but it's just so apt for so many things wrong with the world (pretty timeless too).

A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.

A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

Hey everyone, is there a literature (can be grey) discussing the ethics of using #generativeAI in #conservation and-or #ecology? I have to persuade some folks to consider the “darker” side of it and some authoritative/academic sources would really help. Thanks for any links.

🌍#conservationscience

To unearth their past, Amazonian people turn to ‘a language white men understand’ A model partnership between archaeologists and the Kuikuro people has helped rewrite the history of early Amazonian societies

Enjoyed reading about this partnership between the Kuikuro and Brazilian/US archaeologists.

✅Trust built over decades
✅Shared research objectives
✅Indigenous data sovereignty
✅Credit sharing
✅Respect & humility (“I didn’t “discover” anything”)

#participatoryscience www.science.org/content/arti...

Created by and with the input of conservation practitioners with several decades of experience in conservation conflicts (+small contributions from me!)

Now live! www.ethicalconservation.org/toolkit/
-Offers a fresh perspective on “human-wildlife conflict”
-Suggests shifting the narrative from demonisation of wildlife towards an empathetic & nuanced approach to conflict, in partnership w/ local communities
#ethicalconservation #conservationscience🌍

Totally agree.

Although not a single policy maker will be able to read the paywalled article linked to, so what was the point in publishing it there? (I ask, very much rhetorically)

I find it’s helpful to always start from the premise:

“All models are wrong, but some are useful” (Box, 1979)

23mins running uphill to celebrate October 23rd, International Snow Leopard Day. #23for23

Because conservation often feels like an uphill battle.

But I guess you never know when the crest will suddenly appear and you’re on the downhill…

#SnowLeopardDay #MoveForSnowLeopards

We (Snow Leopard Trust) will have a consultancy available soon to do climate-smart protected area planning in Kyrgyzstan. Will involve #cameratrap data & Zonation. Suitable for PhD/post-doc level or a lab group. Get in touch if interested! Will post link once it’s live! 🧪🌍#conservationscience

Vested Interests has entered the chat

Important reflections on the power dynamics in large-scale syntheses of ecological data. Many of them perpetuate colonial structures.

An example that comes to mind is Google & Wildlife Insights, who used camera trap data to publish the SpeciesNet algorithm, with no credit given to field researchers

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Over on the Other Place I would occasionally put this thread together, most recently during lockdown, four years ago in fact, and I realised I'd not done it here. So, bear with, and feel free to mute as this is an epic (genuinely, I’m not sure we won’t reach hitherto non-invoked thread limits tbh).

Two B&W camera trap images of the same snow leopard 23 days apart, but showing a strikingly similar pose, with the animal bent down sniffing the same small patch of ground (likely a regular scrape). Image (c) Snow Leopard Conservation Foundation / Snow Leopard Trust.

*Seeing double*

Nope, these images are not the same, or even from the same image sequence! They were taken 23 days apart, with raging snow storms & high winds between them.

#Snowleopards are creatures of habit, regularly coming back to the same tiny patches of ground to see who's been around.

Next Thursday (11th), join us to discover how 300+ local community members & camera traps generate vital ecosystem data, transforming biodiversity monitoring in the Sanjiangyuan. 📸🌿 Learn about innovative incentive models for #conservation in #China.

👉 bit.ly/SLNBioMonitoring

Confused writing is usually a symptom of confused thinking. As we struggle to clarify writing, we clarify our thoughts. AI writing aids rob us of that struggle, leaving clean-looking text and thoughts still confused for lack of inspection. Writing is not just a product; it is a diagnostic tool.

Global distribution of forest landscapes covered by airborne LiDAR

Only a pre-print for now, but after 4 years of hard work I couldn't resist sharing this!

The Global Canopy Atlas: analysis-ready maps of 3D structure for the world's woody ecosystems

📜: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Huge team effort led by the brilliant Fabian Fischer!

In Indonesia’s Rainforest, a Mega-Farm Project Is Plowing Ahead The Indonesian government is fast-tracking a massive agricultural project that is turning 7 million acres of tropical forest into rice and sugarcane farms. Critics say it is the world’s largest defore...

History appears to be repeating itself, with a new "mega-rice" project underway in South Papua, a repeat of the social and ecological disaster that was Mega Rice I in Kalimantan in the late 1990s. The UN says that > 50,000 Indigenous people will be directly affected
e360.yale.edu/features/ind...

Headline: Brazil secures Amazon allies for $125 million global forest fund

Consider the first headline -- "Brazil secures Amazon allies for $125 billion global forest fund" -- against the backdrop of everything else Brazil is doing. The hypocrisy from the host of the COP30 climate conference is staggering.

Incredible graph, and pretty much sums it up.

Teeing off as the world burns.

Here’s me kind of hoping it doesn’t shut down Libgen though, a vital lifeline for many who don’t have fancy pantsy university journal access (= vast number of researchers in Global South, plus almost everyone in the NGO world)

From last week spotting the turtle doves in the Knepp rewilding project, to having the same species at our garden pond here in Ronda, Spain!

Can we all agree macroecology is also lawful evil 😈

Spot on for Conservation ecology

Interesting 🤔 Seems like a good way forward to ensure rigour and accuracy in work.

I suspect there is a grey area, though, in deciding when genAI is acting as an assistant (which is allowed under their rules) and when it has stepped over the line into creator (not allowed).

AI challenge to find lost Amazonian civilizations draws critics Scientists, ethicists, and officials worry the OpenAI-sponsored contest sidesteps archaeological norms

AI challenge to find lost Amazonian civilizations draws critics | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...

There are echoes here of how macroecologists mine satellite & other global data to make maps of conservation priorities, also often without consultation or validation on the ground.

Flying high for conservation: Opportunities and challenges of operating drones within the oldest National Park in the Alps Drawing on our seven-year experience flying drones in the Swiss National Park and its surroundings, we provided an overview of how innovative drone applications contribute to the goals and tasks of t....

Are drones fancy gadgets, or can they effectively guide management strategies and align with the overarching goals of protected areas?

Rossi & Wiesmann 2025 argue the latter 👌

besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

A surprisingly effective way to save the capercaillie: keep its predators well-fed – new research Evidence suggests this alternative to culling the bird’s predators is effective.

My first @uk.theconversation.com article with @jackantbam.bsky.social and @lambin-ecology.bsky.social and @kennyafc.bsky.social

"Surprisingly effective way to save the capercaillie: keep its predators well-fed"

theconversation.com/a-surprising...