Neil Pederson

Neil Pederson

@yellowbuckeye.bsky.social

I study old-growth forests and climate change from trees to regions and seasons to centuries. A colleague termed it RetroEcology - https://broadleafpapers.wordpress.com/ Love music in 3/4, 6/8, 5/4, 11, & other offbeat signatures (no real pun intended)

2,230 Followers 2,063 Following 228 Posts Joined Oct 2023
5 days ago

I get yelled at for saying this but for many hundreds of years people went to university not to get diplomas or be employable but because immersion in the humanities was considered foundational to a good life, and school must return to its original purpose: the joy of learning.

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4 days ago

"Sunlight travels 93 million miles to reach the earth. None of them through the Strait of Hormuz."

—Bill McKibben

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6 days ago
Job Opening: Data Scientist – Grant Witness Grant Witness seeks a data scientist for a full-time position on our team tracking changes to U.S. federal grantmaking. We are also hiring for part-time/contract positions. Join us!

Grant Witness is hiring! We're seeking a full-time data scientist to join our team building data resources to support journalism, litigation, and activism protecting science, public health, and the rule of law. grant-witness.us/apply.html #rstats

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5 days ago
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100 Years of Women Who Changed History (Gift Article) Revisiting the obituaries of a century of notable women to show how they were remembered — and what history may have left unsaid.

Most men who changed history also had women who enabled them.

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5 days ago
Stand Up For Science Founder and CEO Colette Delawalla speaking at the Washington D.C. Take Back Our Science Rally!

Stand Up For Science Founder & CEO Colette Delawalla states three demands:

1. Remove RFK Jr.

2. Reinstate the American Dream of Science.

3. Science should be driven by scientists not political appointees.

Join the fight!
standupforscience.net/march7

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6 days ago

Wearing my @skypeascientist.bsky.social swag for today's @standupforscience.bsky.social NYC rally!

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6 days ago
"War is mankind's most tragic and stupid folly; to seek or advise its deliberate provocation is a black crime against all men. Though you follow the trade of the warrior, you do so in the spirit of Washington -- not of Genghis Khan. For Americans, only threat to our way of life justifies resort to conflict."
Graduation Exercises at the United States
Military Academy, 6/3/47
"Possibly my hatred of war blinds me so that I cannot comprehend the arguments they adduce. But, in my opinion, there is no such thing as a preventive war.
Although this suggestion is repeatedly made, none has yet explained how war prevents war. Worse than this, no one has been able to explain away the fact that war creates the conditions that beget war."
Remarks at Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 10/19/50 [DDE's Pre-Presidential Papers, Principal File, Box

Was browsing the Eisenhower Library site this morning trying to find a quote I remembered.

President Eisenhower, WW2 military hero:

“In my opinion, there is no such thing as a preventive war… none has yet explained how war prevents war.”

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6 days ago

PlugShare and a Better Route Planner are great apps to make the long trips pretty easy

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6 days ago

We have 2 EVs (both Kia EV6) and live in MetroWestBoston. I've taken them various long trips in all season in the NE US. No real problems. Range anxiety is surveyed to be the highest just before purchase and then rapidly dissipates once one is an owner

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1 week ago
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“Trans children are perfect.”

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1 week ago
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Tree Rings Reveal Origins of Some of the World’s Best Violins

'A study of the tree rings in Stradivarius violins, published in the journal Dendrochronologia, revealed the most likely origin of the violins: wood from high elevation trees in northern Italy.'

Free gift article from The NYTimes www.nytimes.com/2026/03/04/s...

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1 week ago

Gah! Such a bummer. We have two EV6’s, but I know my partner wanted something a bit smaller

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1 week ago

If I remember correctly, I think the Kia plant in GA was to produce these, or maybe it was the EV3? They were investing in the plant to bring an affordable, small EV to the U.S.

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1 week ago

How ‘mass timber’ is reshaping housing in downtown Tupper Lake
https://www.adirondackexplorer.org/housing/how-mass-timber-is-reshaping-housing-in-downtown-tupper-lake/

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1 week ago
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Fundraiser by John Bowey | Help Ukrainian climate scientist's community in this freezing winter John Bowey Needs Your Help | Can you help climate scientist Svitlana and her community keep warm in this brutal Ukraine winter? Dr Svitlana Krakovska is Ukraine’s pre-eminent climate sci...

In our news magazine series Climate Repair Café, we feature the courageous Dr Svitlana Krakovska, top Ukrainian climate scientist, as she drives her hard work during a brutal, exhausting war.

Yet she always thinks of her neighbors' freezing flat first.
Can you help? whydonate.com/fundraising/...

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1 week ago
Images of conversants and book cover with details described in post

Hello #BookSky! I’m sharing details for my first two book tour stops, one of which has a virtual option 🤩

On April 6 @ 7 pm I will be in Washington, DC talking with Camonghne Felix at an event jointly put on by Lost City Books and @loyaltybooks.bsky.social!

lostcitybookstore.com/event/2026-0...

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1 week ago
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For the first time, we now know how many Black-owned bookstores exist in the U.S. The National Association of Black Bookstores has released the “first comprehensive national report” on the state of America’s Black-owned bookstores.

There has never been an official, comprehensive record of Black-owned bookstores across the United States — until now

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1 week ago
Black Oak trees glazed in ice being lit up by the rising Sun Black Oak trees glazed in ice being lit up by the rising Sun A snow covered and ice-glazed landscape in a tree-filled suburb of MetroWest Boston
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1 week ago
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How bamboo recruits underground allies to conquer forests Yaoxing Wu, Zhiying Tang, Jiahuan Guo, Lizheng Fang, Huilin Shu, Lin Yu, Gong Zhang, Jun Deng, Lianghua Qi This is a plain language summary of a Functional Ecology research article which can be fou…

📰Published📰How bamboo recruits underground allies to conquer forests🌳

buff.ly/i94hbII

🧪🌍️

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1 week ago
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The West has been in a 32-year drought. But it may be worse than that A drought has a beginning and an end. What's happening in the West doesn't seem to have an end, so what is it?

“Droughts, by definition, have beginnings and ends,” said Michael Crimmins, a climatologist at the University of Arizona. “Aridification is a systematic shift that doesn’t necessarily have an end to it.”

www.azcentral.com/story/news/l...

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1 week ago

"2021–2023: Extreme Years of Global Drought in the Context of Long- and Short-Term Hydroclimate Trends"

New work, led by LDEO PhD student Aandishah Samara (w/ JE Smerdon, R Seager):

journals.ametsoc.org/view/journal...

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1 week ago
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Large-scale patterns of tropical forest embolism resistance mapped across space and angiosperm phylogeny.

Combining measurements across the Amazon with 100s of floristic samples, Julia Tavares & colleagues report remarkable variation in vulnerability to drought.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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1 week ago
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Just resharing this.

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1 week ago
A line graph showing NSF grant awards made through 2/27/26 for fiscal year 2026 compared with grant awards for fiscal years 2021-2025.

NSF Update (Awards through 2/27/26)

Directorates to follow

1/10

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2 weeks ago

Being pro-trans makes you gain votes, not lose them.

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2 weeks ago
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The Trump Administration Can’t Kill Black History Month We don’t need permission from the government to commemorate a complex past.

Last week, my mother took me and my kids to see the school where, 60 years ago, she was among the first wave of Black students to integrate a previously all-White school. We wanted to remind my kids that Black history is not just famous people in textbooks, it is often the people right next to you.

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2 weeks ago
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NSF Intent to Restructure Critical Weather Infrastructure

The US NSF has put out a "dear colleagues" letter that is essentially a yard sale list for @ncar-ucar.bsky.social

It asks questions such as, who'd like to take over some of NCAR's programs? Is anyone interested in commercial use of the Mesa Lab?

If you have thoughts, send them to NSF_NCAR@nsf.gov

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2 weeks ago
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Joint probabilistic estimates of temperature and precipitation from tree ring-based reconstructions of the last millennium Abstract. An understanding of Earth's past climate can help put current and future changes into historical context. Widely used tree ring-based drought atlases generally target the Palmer Drought Seve...

This is very cool - @drkatemarvel.bsky.social et al. 'Joint probabilistic estimates of temperature and precipitation from tree ring-based reconstructions of the last millennium' ascmo.copernicus.org/articles/12/...

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2 weeks ago
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New #causalinference paper just dropped! As an ecologist, I was trained to ask: "What do the data tell me?"

This paper: there are only specific instances when this question is appropriate—when you lack domain knowledge, which we often have!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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2 weeks ago

The only way you can think AI does lit reviews better is if you’re not interested in making an intellectual argument or building theory … which uh, is pretty key to the advancement of knowledge

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