Ehsan Moqanaki

Incorporating habitat selection does not account for nonrandom camera deployment in a design-based viewshed density estimator https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.22.671559v1

On a black and white game cam, three javelinas are browsing corn while a raccoon sits on one of their backs. The lighting produces laser-eyes in the raccoon, who is secretly one of the X-Men.

A raccoon knight on a javelina steed. "Onward, Pigasus! Let us show them the meaning of haste". Motion blurred, black and white game cam shot.

South Texas game cam catches a raccoon riding a javelina (Dicotyles tajacu).

The deer feeder corn attracts a lot of other species, but maybe we should worry about them all teaming up against us?

(📷: Jeff Davis, TAMU-Kingsville alumni forum)

Dive into our latest issue!🌊
www.cell.com/issue/S0960-...

On the cover:Yangtze porpoises in troubled waters🐬 by Yaoyao Zhang and colleagues www.cell.com/current-biol...

You've heard of the many analysts projects, right?

Scholars give the same dataset/question to a bunch of researchers & they still get different answers.

Why is that?

Data cleaning!

This is consistent with Gelman's "garden of forking paths." Small coding decisions often drive results.

Academic mentees thrive in big groups, but survive in small groups - Nature Human Behaviour Using longitudinal genealogical data on mentor–mentee relations and their publications, the authors find that mentees trained in larger groups tend to exhibit superior academic performance compared wi...

Lower survival rate among trainees in labs with highly productive mentors raises important concerns about what we value in academia. Many interesting things to stew over with this paper!

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

Environmental variability across space and time drives the recolonization pattern of a historically persecuted large carnivore | PNAS Wildlife populations are not static. Intrinsic and extrinsic factors affect individuals, which lead to spatiotemporal variation in population densi...

Moganaki: if you don't kill them, they will come. Wolverine in Scandinavia return to historical range, including what was thought to be suboptimal habitat. Meanwhile in Alberta you can now trap them with no quota... www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Scandinavian wolverine (Gulo gulo). CREDIT: Jon Martin Arnemo

Wolverines are bouncing back in Scandinavia, 50 years after they were reduced to a relict population in the snowy alpine. The brawny carnivore is moving into boreal forest, which was previously considered suboptimal habitat for wolverines. In PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

We present new evidence about the successful recolonization of wolverines + discuss challenges of their monitoring and management.

We analyzed 9 years of 🧬 monitoring of wolverines to quantify temporal trends in the relationships btw wolverine density and different environmental covariates as the population is expanding.

🚨 New paper @pnas.org looking at dynamics of wolverine density determinants across Norway and Sweden: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Extinction of experience among ecologists Fieldwork-based research and education in ecology are under multiple threats and are progressively declining. We call for greater attention to this ongoing loss of direct field experience within the ecology community, as it could have widespread consequences for science and education, ultimately hindering efforts to address the ongoing biodiversity crisis.

Where are all the field studies?

This ⬇️ important but rather depressing paper describes how conducting, & crucially initiating, field studies is becoming harder & rarer.

A short 🧵 (and a call for more fieldwork)
www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...

Fig 2 from Davidson et al. outlining proposed set of standards for bio-logging data.

New Perspective:

Establishing bio-logging data collections as dynamic archives of animal life on Earth rdcu.be/d5ril

Davidson et al discuss the importance of standardization, long-term archiving and sharing of bio-logging data, and outline a roadmap to achieve these goals.

It's been 10 yrs since Marius the giraffe was controversially culled by Copenhagen Zoo. So, what's happened since?

Many zoos limit reproduction to avoid surplus animals and public backlash. We argue this approach fails the conservation & education mandate of zoos 🧵: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

WithdrarXiv: A Large-Scale Dataset for Retraction Study Retractions play a vital role in maintaining scientific integrity, yet systematic studies of retractions in computer science and other STEM fields remain scarce. We present WithdrarXiv, the first larg...

😳 WithdrarXiv 🙏

- Dataset of 14K+ withdrawn arXiv papers
- associated retraction comments
- entire history through 09/24
- taxonomy of retraction reasons, from critical errors to policy violations
- WithdrarXiv-SciFy, enriched version w/ scripts for parsed full-text PDFs

arxiv.org/abs/2412.03775

We apologise for the AI-generated image on the cover of our November issue & are happy to confirm that we have taken steps to ensure this doesn't happen again!

Publishers are selling papers to train AIs — and making millions of dollars Generative-AI models require massive amounts of data — scholarly publishers are licensing their content to train them.

As if the crisis in scientific publishing couldn't get any worse... 🧪

Publishers are now selling papers to train AIs, making millions of dollars off of scientists' hard work.

EU proposal to adapt protection status of the wolf adopted by Bern Convention, paving the way to more flexibility in managing wolf populations Today, the Standing Committee of the Bern Convention voted in favour of the EU proposal to adapt the protection status of the wolf from ‘strictly protected' to ‘protected'.

As expected, the downlisting of the #wolf Canis lupus at the Bern Convention Standing Committee was approved. A thread on some ins and outs. 1/

ec.europa.eu/commission/p...

https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=uj2klZ8AAAAJ

#introduction