Atticus Murphy

(the issue cover photo is not a bicolored striped sweat bee, but yay for it being a bee! 😀)

Landscape context affects both capture probability and abundance of solitary bees in cities It is intuitive to hypothesize that urban landscapes are broadly hostile to insects, but responses of wild bees to urbanization are inconsistent and often positive. Many people have interpreted this ...

Are urban flowers 'the only show in town' for bees? Karen Dooley, Elizabeth Crone, and I have a new paper out today using mark-recapture to ask how capture probabilities and abundance vary across an urban landscape, w/ bicolored striped sweat bees. esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Working with address data is always an adventure. There are inevitably weird one off conventions apparently used a single time in an entire city -- maybe just on the whim of some anonymous official ~100 years ago! (also, the absolutely classic Massachusetts move of one short street having 3 names)

What the data says about Americans’ views of climate change Two-thirds of Americans say the United States should prioritize developing renewable energy sources over expanding the production of fossil fuels.

(U.S. # from www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...)

one way context differs: 80+% of Hungarian public says climate change is a serious issue; comparable number is 54% for U.S. (and only 23% of Republicans in latest cycle)

Screenshot of quote from a paper reading as follows: We concentrate on one particular environmental practice: waste separation. Surprisingly, we find that districts with a higher left-wing vote share engage less in waste separation on average. This result, although surprising, is consistent with previous survey-based evidence. We provide suggestions on how to interpret and explain our findings.

Always interesting to see how group discourse can align and not align with actual behaviors...evidence from Hungary of right-wing neighborhoods recycling _better_ (nb social context is obv important and who knows if this exact result is transferable to U.S.) journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

Can you imagine??? 😳😱

Setting goals for pollinator gardens In recent years, declines in animal pollinators have stimulated tremendous interest in pollinator-friendly gardening. There is a widespread notion that pollinator gardens are beneficial, but the spec...

Pollinator gardens are having a moment, with good reason! But what can these gardens realistically achieve for conservation and for the people who make them? Led by Nick Dorian, we take a stab at these questions, out today in Conservation Biology: conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

I have spent the past few days desperately trying to remember the name of this band; yesterday I gave up, and of course immediately the answer appeared in front of me. Thank you!!

who knew! bad luck to pay money for your bees! (all the more reason to conserve our wild pollinators 😉). -- Lupton, 'A thousand notable things' 1748

if any journalists want to talk about this EO, let me know.

Ever-prescient Marshall McLuhan, 1969: "Under electric conditions there can be no privacy. The privacy invaders are the bulwark of the new knowledge industries, from the pollsters, to the insurance companies, and the credit ratings, ‘the eye in the sky,’ the age of the ‘snoop’."

As someone born after the Web's invention, there is something kind of sad about looking back at a time when we felt entitled to this amount of privacy. It would never have crossed my mind!

Fascinating to see people grapple with the Information Age when it was really starting to rev up -- what do we do with all this information? what should we be allowed to do? it all seems very quaint now, though I'm not sure we ever answered these questions...
(Bowker & Star 1999)

Ever-prescient Marshall McLuhan, 1969: "Under electric conditions there can be no privacy. The privacy invaders are the bulwark of the new knowledge industries, from the pollsters, to the insurance companies, and the credit ratings, ‘the eye in the sky,’ the age of the ‘snoop’."

As someone born after the Web's invention, there is something kind of sad about looking back at a time when we felt entitled to this amount of privacy. It would never have crossed my mind!

Add this to the pile of reasons why permitting denser #housing by law is a good idea. Current zoning restrictions (min. lot sizes + min. setbacks) create larger yards and thus more lawns (low diversity, high chemical and water inputs).

Pollinator gardening is constrained by income but not lot size in urban front yards Flower gardens can create valuable habitat for urban pollinators, but little is known about the existing spatial pattern of gardens on the landscape, …

Out now in Landscape and Urban Planning: the first pub from my dissertation! We used Google Street View to map urban pollinator gardens. Gardens were more common on small + wealthy lots. Suggests unexpected biodiversity benefits to denser housing development! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...