Dynamic Ecology

Also this week: mourning the dying art of coding, the history of text-based computer games, against the Luddites, and more. Behavioral ecologist Peter Klopfer passed away on June 5 at the age of 95. He made major impacts as a … Continue reading →

Robert Ricklefs, a giant of ecology, passed away on Sunday. It is hard to overstate the extensive impact Bob had on the field. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in the US, he won top … Continue reading →

Welcome to our latest author interview post! Today, I’m talking with frequent Dynamic Ecology guest poster Peter Adler about Adler et al. (2026), “What have we learned from empirical applications of modern coexistence theory?”, out now in Ecology Letters.* Modern … Continue reading →

There’s a big feature article in the latest issue of Science on how AI is changing astrophysics. It includes a trenchant question from an astrophysicist that I bet a lot of scientists are grappling with right now: what if finding … Continue reading →

Writing in the latest issue of Methods in Ecology and Evolution, Gould et al. propose ‘adaptive preregistration.’ Quoting from their paper: We propose a methodology for implementing an expanded view of preregistration called ‘Adaptive Preregistration’ (sensu Srivastava, 2018), which captures decision … Continue reading →

This week: the costs of author-pays open access publication, we have to go back (SAT edition), the politics of unrealistic numbers, bird names ranked, why everyone should root for Scotland in the World Cup, and more. Including a preview of … Continue reading →

Not really the right time of year for this post, but I happened to be thinking about it just now and I’m procrastinating on other work, so I decided to just bash it out. People seeking TT jobs in ecology … Continue reading →

I’m old enough to remember when the intermediate disturbance hypothesis (IDH) was a thing in ecology–a big thing. I first made my name as a blogger by attacking it.* I eventually turned those attacks into a well-cited 2013 TREE paper … Continue reading →

This week: the history of social science at NSF, and more. Commenter Andrew Krause sends us to this very thoughtful and interesting blog post on that ChatGPT proof we’ve been talking about. This is the best link of the week. … Continue reading →

Intro from Meghan: It’s baseball season, and, because I am a sports fan and have various sports fans in the lab, I end up discussing sports with lab folks fairly regularly. What follows is the first of what will hopefully … Continue reading →

This week: 2026 ASN award winners announced, ChatGPT vs. mathematics, the single most important rigor-enhancing practice in all of science, and more. Congratulations to the 2026 ASN award winners! The registration deadline for the 11th evolutionary demography conference June 18-26 … Continue reading →

There’s a lot of discussion right now in ecology about replicability/reproducibility (call it what you will). See for instance this recent (and awesome!) interview with Kate Laskowski. One question is whether, or to what extent, we should expect ecological field … Continue reading →

Tao et al. 2024, on microbially-mediated interactions between native and non-native plants, has just been retracted by Ecology Letters. And…wow. I’ve never seen a retraction notice like this in ecology. According to the notice, an EcoLetts editor identified “unusual repetitive … Continue reading →

Welcome to our latest author interview! Recently I interviewed Scott Peacor on Peacor et al. (2025 Ecology), “Ecological meta-analyses often produce unwarranted results”. It shows that ecological meta-analyses frequently fail to correct for non-independence of effect sizes reported in the … Continue reading →

This week: Alejandro Arteaga profile, choose your own adventure replication metric, the first nature photographer, and more. This week’s Science has a profile of prominent–and controversial–Ecuadoran herpetologist Alejandro Arteaga. Evolutionary ecologist Shikhara Bhat maintains a useful list of readings that … Continue reading →

When I was a new grad student, I was feeling pretty dejected after receiving multiple rejections in short order.* In a conversation with my advisor, he told me something that I still think of often, and that I’ve said to … Continue reading →

Tyler Cowen asks a good question about papers in microeconomics and macroeconomics, that generalizes to ecology papers: Imagine adding [a] button, to either micro or macro papers “Please rerun these results using what the AI thinks might be five other … Continue reading →

This week: 2026 ESA award winners, a retraction from Journal of Ecology, life lessons from mathematicians, the Amish, and Ethiopian distance runners, HyperCard vs. ChatGPT, game theory vs. airlines, tell me again what caused the Challenger disaster, the best version … Continue reading →

I recently had a conversation with someone during which that person indicated an area in which they felt they were lacking knowledge. This sort of introspection is helpful — it’s definitely important to recognize gaps in our knowledge and think … Continue reading →

This week: Peter Raven passes away, overestimating (one source of) biodiversity loss, LLMs vs. peer review, zombie ideas are cringe, the Trump administration vs. science, proof that I’m old, and more. Botanist Peter Raven passed away on April 25 at … Continue reading →