Isabella A. Oleksy, Ph.D.

striking! is this atypical for this lake or a usual occurrence in the summer?

Air pollution and warming are changing Colorado’s remote alpine lakes The Oleksy lab has taken over a 42-year-old monitoring project in Rocky Mountain National Park. Their investigations reveal how remote alpine watersheds are

Isabella Oleksy's Mountain Limnology Lab has taken over a 42-year-old monitoring project in Rocky Mountain National Park. Their investigations reveal how remote alpine watersheds are changing in the Anthropocene www.colorado.edu/instaar/2025...

@isabellaoleksy.bsky.social & @jbaron4.bsky.social

Petition for Action As provided under the Lloyd-La Follette Act (5 U.S.C. 7211), the signatories respectfully petition the Committee to: 1. Ensure that NSF employees are shielded from politically motivated firings and protected under merit-based personnel systems. 2. End illegal impoundments of monies appropriated to NSF. 3. Defend the agency from further interference in its peer review process. 4. Demand transparency from OMB, DOGE, and NSF leadership regarding internal employment policies and future agency relocations. 5. Reaffirm NSF’s scientific independence and support for world-class research that advances national prosperity and security. NSF employees are committed to serving the American people through research, education, and innovation. But they cannot do so under fear, censorship, and institutional sabotage. Without immediate oversight and corrective action from Congress, one of our nation’s greatest engines for scientific and technological advancement faces irreversible long-term damage. Put simply, America will forfeit its scientific leadership position to China and other rival nations.

NSF staff release their appeal—slightly different format than the declarations of dissent from EPA/NIH/NASA; a more formal petition to Congress to redress attacks on the agency and its employees. 149 signatories (48 named)
democrats-science.house.gov/imo/media/do...

YouTube video by Andrew Burgess L&O: The Power of Pack Mules - Fig. 1

Why was a remote alpine lake in Colorado's Weminuche Wilderness turning green? And how do pack mules help?

@isabellaoleksy.bsky.social's Mountain Limnology Lab features in this unique & collaborative story:
Read it at doi.org/10.1002/lob....
Video clips www.youtube.com/watch?v=31lb...

Ros has such a wealth of knowledge on forest ecology. It's been a joy getting to know her and learn from her!

The Power of Pack Mules: Harnessing Partnerships With Land Stewards for Remote Ecosystem Research Click on the article title to read more.

I am proud of this piece that my lab wrote about the collaboration we began last summer with the US Forest Service in CO-- an effort to understand why remote, high elevation lakes in the Wilderness are greening. We need publicly funded science now more than ever: doi.org/10.1002/lob....
@aslo.org

The World’s Most Urgent Scientific Question https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/wmo-confirms-2024-warmest-year-record-about-155degc-above-pre-industrial-level There is no question more urgent than the one indicated by that red arrow in the graph...

Global average temperatures are spiking, rising faster than climate models seem able to explain, and in a sane world, every country would be united in a full-scale effort to figure this out & respond. Instead the US is dismantling its scientific infrastructure.

🧪 Though a doubling of NSF's budget might seem far-fetched, that's exactly what Congress said what's needed to maintain national competitiveness in science & tech.

From the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act of 2022:

👏🏽 Congrats to the faculty supporting @colorado.edu undergrads on UROP research projects, incl INSTAARs
👤 @isabellaoleksy.bsky.social: Mountain lakes & carbon cycling
👤 Katharine Suding: Grassland ecosystems, alpine fungi & plants
👤 @drscottataylor.bsky.social: Songbird breeding, adaptation, & memory

Choose France for Science: launch of the dedicated platform for applications to host international researchers As the international context creates the conditions for an unprecedented wave of mobility among researchers around the world, France aims to position itself as a host country for those wishing to cont...

France opens its doors to science researchers and scholars, including those fleeing the United States.

anr.fr/en/latest-ne...

NSF grant termination tracker: airtable.com/appGKlSVeXni... The sick irony? One of the 10 grants cancelled at CU Boulder is a CAREER award about combatting censorship on the internet.

Article title: Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion and Voting Article Abstract How do stigmatized minorities advance agendas when confronted with hostile majorities? Elite theories of influence posit marginal groups exert little power. I propose the concept of agenda seeding to describe how activists use methods like disruption to capture the attention of media and overcome political asymmetries. Further, I hypothesize protest tactics influence how news organizations frame demands. Evaluating black-led protests between 1960 and 1972, I find nonviolent activism, particularly when met with state or vigilante repression, drove media coverage, framing, congressional speech, and public opinion on civil rights. Counties proximate to nonviolent protests saw presidential Democratic vote share increase 1.6–2.5%. Protester-initiated violence, by contrast, helped move news agendas, frames, elite discourse, and public concern toward “social control.” In 1968, using rainfall as an instrument, I find violent protests likely caused a 1.5–7.9% shift among whites toward Republicans and tipped the election. Elites may dominate political communication but hold no monopoly.

I’ve been studying civil rights protests for 20 years. With new mobilization against Trump’s agenda, I’m sharing a thread summarizing my research on how nonviolent & violent actions by 1960s activists and police influenced media, elites, public opinion & voters. 1/ www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Finland invests in research excellence – new funding call by Research Council of Finland to support recruitment of international talents The Research Council of Finland (RCF) has launched a funding call to improve universities’ ability to recruit international experts to Finland. In line with the RCF’s strategy, the call wi...

Are you a professor or assistant professor level researcher in the US or elsewhere outside of Finland? Looking for new opportunities in an inspiring and well-connected research environment? Finland might be just the place for you.

Reach out to Finnish universities to explore what’s possible.

A nationwide study of risk factors for long COVID and its economic and mental health consequences in the United States - Communications Medicine Kim identifies risk factors for long COVID and links long COVID to higher instances of job loss, financial hardship, and anxiety and depressive symptoms. Lost earnings due to long COVID among working-...

Boston researchers analyzed data from over 375,000 US adults and found that nearly 1 in 7 reported long COVID by late 2023.

Those affected faced higher risks of unemployment, hardship, anxiety, and $218B in lost wages.

www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Poster for the 19th Annual Hydrologic Sciences Student Symposium, April 10-11 2025 at CU Boulder. Keynote speakers: Suzanne Pierce and Diane McKnight. Invited speakers: Laura Sunberg, Katie Spahr, Isabella Oleksy, and Eliana Rodriguez.

🚨 HYDROLOGIC SCIENCES STUDENT SYMPOSIUM
• Thu-Fri, April 10-11
• @colorado.edu SEEC S372 & online
• Register by April 9
• For grads & undergrads, researchers, & faculty. Non-CU folks too!
www.colorado.edu/program/hydr...
Speakers incl INSTAARs D. McKnight, L. Sunberg, & @isabellaoleksy.bsky.social

The NIH-funded Haskell-KU Bridges Program was terminated. It was one of the longest running programs of its kind, placing >130 Native American students into STEM labs over the last ~25 years. So many alums spoke of this program as being the entry point to their interest, and later, careers in STEM.

A LETTER TO HARVARD LAW SCHOOL STUDENTS March 29, 2025 To our students: We are privileged to teach and learn the law with you. We write to you today—in our individual capacities-because we believe that American legal precepts and the institutions designed to uphold them are being severely tested, and many of you have expressed to us your concerns and fears about the present moment. Each of us brings different, sometimes irreconcilable, perspectives to what the law is and should be. Diverse viewpoints are a credit to our school. But we share, and take seriously, a commitment to the rule of law: for people to be equal before it, and for its administration to be impartial. That commitment is foundational to the whole legal profession, and to the special role that lawyers play in our society. As the Model Rules of Professional Conduct provide: "A lawyer is ... an officer of the legal system and a public citizen having special responsibility for the quality of justice." The rule of law is imperiled when government leaders: • single out lawyers and law firms for retribution based on their lawful and ethical representation of clients disfavored by the government, undermining the Sixth Amendment; • threaten law firms and legal clinics for their lawyers' pro bono work or prior government service; • relent on those arbitrary threats based on public acts of submission and outlays of funds for favored causes; and • punish people for lawfully speaking out on matters of public concern. While reasonable people can disagree about the characterization of particular incidents, we are all acutely concerned that severe challenges to the rule of law are taking place, and we strongly condemn any effort to undermine the basic norms we have described. On our own campus and at many other universities, international students have reported fear of imprisonment or deportation for lawful speech and political activism. Whatever we might each think about particular conduct under particular facts,…

From 91 professors at Harvard Law School: a letter to our students.

tinyurl.com/letter-to-ou...

Liber Ero Fellowship Program

Looking for a postdoc in 🇨🇦?

Liber Ero Fellowship
liberero.ca

* Applied conservation science
* Leadership training
* Open to int’l applicants
* Due Nov 1

🌎🧪🦤

Good to be back in the great state of Michigan! 🌊

Diagram depicting wildlife’s contributions to people (WCP) and their connection to nature’s contributions to people (NCP). Wildlife plays critical roles through actions like predation, herbivory, scavenging, and ecosystem engineering, directly and indirectly by supporting services such as habitat creation, climate regulation, pollination, food production, and cultural identity, while maintaining ecosystem balance. Designed by Sylvia Heredia.

Wildlife contributes to human well-being and values in visible and invisible ways that are under-recognized or dominated by conflict narratives. We review these critical contributions and what research and policy is needed to protect them: www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Nine people, many holding butterfly nets, stand shoulder to shoulder in a grassy summer meadow surrounded by conifer trees. Accompanying text says CU Boulder Mountain Research Station summer field courses

Poster for the Summer 2025 field courses at the CU Mountain Research Station. Images of mountains, alpine flowers, birds, tundra, forests, and streams. Interested in taking a field course? Join us in the mountains next summer (near Nederland CO about 1 hour from Boulder). Housing and food are included in tuition. Classes are Field methods in vegetation ecology, Field ornithology, Bioinformatics in the mountains, Microbial ecology, Forest and fire ecology, and Lake and stream ecology

UNDERGRAD SUMMER FIELD COURSES at CU Boulder's Mountain Research Station
🌱 Vegetation
🦅 Birds
🧬 Bioinformatics
🦠 Microbes
🚣‍♀️ Lakes+streams
🌲 Forests+fire
Each 2-3 wks, 3 transferable credits, 15 students/class, lodging&food included w tuition

ENROLLMENT STARTS 10 MAR
www.colorado.edu/mrs/student-...

Scott Taylor

🏆 Congrats to SCOTT TAYLOR for receiving a 2025 CU Boulder Faculty Excellence Award!

He is recognized for Excellence in Leadership & Service by the Boulder Faculty Assembly & will receive a monetary prize + more. Thx for your hard work @drscottataylor.bsky.social 🙏🏽

www.colorado.edu/bfa/excellen...

48 Scientific Societies Representing Almost 100,000 Scientists Ask Congress to Protect the Future of Science 48 scientific societies representing almost 100,000 scientists signed on to a letter asking Congress to protect the future of science

Today, a broad coalition of scientific professional societies who represent over 92,000 scientists are speaking out against the politicization and demonization of Federally funded science and government scientist jobs.

It was an honor to help the Union of Concerned Scientists with this! 🧪🌎

Are you a scientist or student heading to a @standupforscience.bsky.social ‬rally this Friday?

We want to hear from you. Tell us about yourself and why you’re going, how far you’re traveling, why you’re fired up, and whether there will be car snacks. Call or text us at (646) 767-6532.

Learning from a large-scale calibration effort of multiple lake temperature models Abstract. Process-based lake temperature models, formulated on hydrodynamic principles, are commonly used to simulate water temperature, enabling one to test different scenarios and draw conclusions a...

Your model is your hypothesis. So, why not use multiple of them? Championed by Feldbauer & Mesman, in our fresh-off-the-press paper we highlight the performance of temperature models across the globe, and discuss the path forward to get better projections!

hess.copernicus.org/articles/29/...

Map of Stand Up for Science events, with official SUFS events in Red and solidarity events in Blue

WHERE WILL YOU BE ON MARCH 7TH!?

Head to www.standupforscience2025.org/local-event-information/ or the link in our bio to find your closest event—or add one if you're hosting one!

#standupforscience2025

Congress has just released a list of federal DOI offices to be closed under the ongoing massacre of our natural resource agencies -- it's extensive and includes many important NPS, BLM, USGS and USFWS facilities across the country. Truly horrific. democrats-naturalresources.house.gov/imo/media/do...

Are you affected by the @noaa.gov layoffs?

I'm a longtime environment reporter interested in NOAA, EPA and USGS.

Send me tips: lisasong.42 on Signal

Here's what I cover and some examples of my work: www.propublica.org/people/lisa-...

Natural Resource Professional Societies Issue Joint Statement on the Impacts of Federal Workforce Reduction - American Fisheries Society Amidst the continued termination of the nations’ federal workforce, the American Fisheries Society (AFS) joined forces with the Society of American Foresters

American Fisheries Society, Society of American Foresters, Society for Range Management, and The Wildlife Society issue a public statement against the cuts to the federal workforce and how this will impact natural resource conservation in the USA. fisheries.org/2025/02/natu...