Brian Rolek

Well, it's official. After our paper last year (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....), the Slender-billed Curlew is officially declared Extinct today.

Scientists dream of describing new species, not writing their obituary and epitaph, knowing that they are gone forever #ornithology

A preview of my upcoming talk at Raptor Research Foundation. Evaluating management of Ridgway's Hawk using IPMs and PVAs. Press play and watch the Population Viability Analysis go!

So many people have made personal sacrifices working every day to improve living standards for all of us. They are heroes that often go unrecognized and deserve better. I'm thinking about you all today.

Demographic trends for the Boreal Owl, Aegolius funereus, using standardized migration monitoring data in eastern North America Many boreal species have declined during recent decades in North America. Various indexes suggest that populations of the Boreal Owl Aegolius funereus are declining across North America, but very f...

Check out our latest where we look at long-term trends of Boreal Owl captures, juvenile captures, body condition, and cycles. Great work Justine Le Vaillant! A collab with @hawkmountain.bsky.social
www.tandfonline.com/eprint/EZU6Z...

Someone please do this with Grasshopper Sparrows. It would be pretty wild because their early successional habitat can result from fires, agriculture, or mechanical manipulation. Cool study!

As of today, I'm officially an Elective Member of the American Ornithological Society (AOS)! 🎉🎈🎊 I always need to remind myself to stop and celebrate these things.

Alliances among vast organizations including states, cities, academic institutions, unions, etc leading to a general strike and the creation of alternative institutions.

Or the opposite side of the coin. Maybe you all could talk about how excluding people from the economy damages the economy for everyone.

Let's pretend the economy is a pie. Does inclusion and diversity in the economy slice the pie into smaller pieces or does the pie just get bigger? (I strongly suspect the latter but it would be great to hear from experts).

😂 you're a tough customer. I'm just glad that I know to avoid those models for now.

Comparison of Bayesian Models to Estimate Survival From Dead‐Recovery Alone and Together With Live‐Encounter Data: Challenges and Opportunities Different models in the Bayesian framework for analyzing dead-recovery data, either alone or together with live-encounter data to estimate survival, are presented and compared. Although all but one o...

Here's an extremely useful study for those using survival models that compares different implementations. Just my luck, guess which model I had been using for a not-yet-published study. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

I'm finding as I make more complex models I seem to need to use the noncentered param more to get adequate sampling. Any chance you've had a similar experience?

okay I probably wouldn't have used it then. Still that team is always adding nice features.

Honestly I think one of your previous posts brought this to my attention, so thanks! I was not aware that nimble had a built-in noncentered sampler. I probably should be using that.

And obviously this won't rescue a poor dataset, but it might rescue some poorly behaved MCMCs.

Just sending this out to the BlueSky-iverse in case any of you Bayesians are struggling with convergence out there.

Using non-centered parameterizations of the normal and multivariate normal distributions has absolutely rescued a couple of complex models for several projects. It served me well when models become intractible or take too long to run.

Please, please, please-submit to good journals (society + reputed publishers), respect peer review, and do your reviews with integrity. So important. Thanks to all of you who do. @steve-carpenter.bsky.social @esajournals.bsky.social #Ecosystems

Latest achievement, I made my model indices spell s,c,a,t. Thats sex, captivity, age, and time. Sadly, my study has nothing to do with actual scat.

Wildlifers who have traveled/lived in Costa Rica, what should i check out after a conference in October?

Generative Al is being marketed as a tool designed to reduce or eliminate the need for developed, cognitive skillsets. It uses the work of others to simulate human output, except that it lacks grasp of nuance, contains grievous errors, and ultimately serves the goal of human beings being neurologically weaker due to the promise of the machine being better equipped than the humans using it would ever exert the effort to be. The people that use generative Al for art have no interest in being an artist; they simply want product to consume and forget about when the next piece of product goes by their eyes. The people that use generative Al to make music have no interest in being a musician; they simply want a machine to make them something to listen to until they get bored and want the machine to make some other disposable slop for them to pass the time with. The people that use generative Al to write things for them have no interest in writing. The people that use generative Al to find factoids have no interest in actual facts. The people that use generative Al to socialize have no interest in actual socialization. In every case, they've handed over the cognitive load of developing a necessary, creative human skillset to a machine that promises to ease the sweat equity cost of struggle. Using generative Al is like asking a machine to lift weights on your behalf and then calling yourself a bodybuilder when it's done with the reps. You build nothing in terms of muscle, you are not stronger, you are not faster, you are not in better shape. You're just deluding yourself while experiencing a slow decline due to self-inflicted atrophy.

re: generative AI

I have finally fully and accurately explained my problem with how it’s marketed and used.

And now, you can use it, too.

New Book: State of the World's Raptors 📖 https://bit.ly/SotWR

The new book, led by Executive V.P. of Science and Conservation Dr. Christopher McClure provides an original approach to setting regional priorities for the conservation of raptors across the globe. 

Chris with book 📷 Anne Dixon

Our Madagascar Program Director, Dr. Lily-Arison Rene de Roland, has been named the 2025 Indianapolis Prize winner! Congratulations, Lily!

Read more about Lily's accomplishments and the Indianapolis Prize at https://bit.ly/4klk1Od

📷 John Mittermeier  
#RaptorResearch #birds #raptors

Are you a US researcher who has recently moved to Canada because of the Trump disruption to science (or are you in the process of doing so)? I want to talk to you for a story in @nature.com 🧪

Extended closing date of 30 May 2025.

Post-doc position available if you're interested in "movement ecology, animal tracking, conservation and sustainability science, environmental planning, human–wildlife coexistence, project management and/or consortium-style, big-data research." www.vacancies.st-andrews.ac.uk/Vacancies/I/...

USGS Bee Lab at the Eastern Ecological Science Center The USGS Bee Lab supports research on native bees. As part of that program we and our co-located USFWS partners develop identification tools and keys for native bee species, take public access hi reso...

The legendary USGS Bee Lab is being shut down. The 2026 budget proposal defunds the Ecosystem Mission Area, which supported the lab. If their science helped your work, there’s still time to make your voice heard. Read below. (1/4)
🧪 #pollinators #Pollinators #USGS #Entomology #Hymenoptera 🪲🪳

Getting that new model running just before the weekend 😙🤌

Portraits of dismissed scientists personalize US government cuts to science A hurricane researcher. An invasive-insect entomologist. An e-cigarette toxicologist. A biomedical librarian. Those are some of the people included in Silenced Science Stories, a visual storytelling p...

A science communicator launched an effort to pair artists with scientists whose jobs were eliminated or whose research funding was halted by the Trump administration. The result? Powerful portraits of researchers and their work. ⚛️🧪
doi.org/10.1063/pt.f...

Honoured to receive the 2024 Robert May prize !! 😊 🎉 Many thanks to the @britishecologicalsociety.org
& @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social