Couldn't agree more! Descolonicemos los curricula (materias/disciplinas) de nuestrxs alumnxs y presentemos una visión más amplia de nuestra disciplina
Chicana ecologist and poet. Bilingüe. Biodiversidad y cambio climático. Associate Professor. Fulbright CSIC. Geopoetics. biodiversityresearchlab.com
1,671 followers 184 following 112 posts
view profile on Bluesky
Couldn't agree more! Descolonicemos los curricula (materias/disciplinas) de nuestrxs alumnxs y presentemos una visión más amplia de nuestra disciplina
I ditched Ecology textbooks for this reason. Now I use a free OER and build my own 'Scientist Spotlights' featuring the incredible diversity of our discipline. Because if students don't see themselves in a career, how can they be themselves in that career?
A perfect day: writing, moving, (well time managed) meetings #AcademicChatter
👀 Any plans to post the activity prompt? Hoping for an assignment bank where we post ideas that can't be done with AI. Love it.
Window washing? Brilliant!
👀👀 thanks! These are 🔥.
So pro!
Bonus points for poles that are good for tall tropical trees. 🙏🏼
Thanks I'll check out what they got!
Botanists! I'm in the market for a new pole pruner (from vendors Grainger, Amazon or Forestry Suppliers)...easy to use for someone who is 5' (not too heavy, single pole not too tall). Any recommendations??? Gracias!
In this work, the animator Nelson Armstrong adapts images painted onto pottery by Western Arrarnta artists from the centre of Australia into lush moving visuals capturing life in this remote, beauteous landscape
Art makes us human. The ICA @ VCU never disappoints. Another incredible exhibit featuring Caribbean diaspora.
Available now ahead of print: Lizard Thermal Physiology Drives Abundance Peaks along Climate Gradients but Only Weakly Predicts Distributional Limits by Lange et al. Read here! www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
Sapindales: bit.ly/PD_Sapindales Myrtaceae: bit.ly/PD_Myrtaceae
Haterz gonna hate. I love and admire what you are doing, we are gonna support you wherever you are! Keep doing it. You've become a beacon of hope and guidance and leadership at a time when most are going quiet. Signed, your #1 fan. ❤️
Some really great resources here like communicating working group results and using AI for literature review.
I started with Everlane and Naadam. Good minimalist wardrobe entry point.
Perla with our new assistant measuring adult and sapling plant traits in tropical dry and wet forests. He's more into bugs but plants will do. #CostaRica #fieldwork
Celebrating the incredible life and legacy de mi abuelita. ¡Que le vaya bonito Abuela! 1929-2025.
4 U.S. citizen children, with their mother, held in a detention facility for 2 WEEKS. Denied access to lawyers and even communication with family. Disappeared. Held Incommunicado. No charges have been filed.
I wrote my first blog about why I felt that writing about my family's experiences with the mass deportation of people of Mexican descent during the Great Depression was more important than the National Science Foundation grant I was writing last summer. communities.springernature.com/posts/i-m-a-...
Welcome to VA!
Sometimes fieldwork is teaching your grad student how to get unstuck. #success Fotos from Perla (who got out of the rut easy peasy!). Way to go Perla! #CostaRica
We are studying adult trees, saplings, and seedling composition in tropical dry forests, rainforests and the dry-wet ecotone in ACG Costa Rica to understand the future of these hyper diverse forests. #CostaRica @gdfcf.bsky.social
For those into photography I post some of my work on insta. Always working those angles. www.instagram.com/catherinehul...
If you think we're not comparing numbers and seats of courses among colleagues, you'd be wrong. Female faculty teach bigger and more lower level courses. Oh, we know. We've counted.
Beginning about 2011 there was a new trait metric every month (and its R package). Most went unused and packages now defunct. There is no one metric to rule them all for e.g. biodiversity credits. Instead, focus on accumulation curves. Universal power laws have easy to compare slopes and intercepts.
We have placards of "disappeared" people just like in South America during the dictatorships in the 60's and 70's. Think about that...
Bauhinia or pata de vaca #Oaxaca #Mexico
"NSF is being asked to make science racist again – which contradicts evidence that shows that diversity of ideas is good for science and good for innovation. We are missing things when only white males do science". www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
Ahora con poesía ecfrástica. La palabra ecfrástica proviene del griego y significa declaración. #ATBC2025
Practicando la poesía de borrado. Practicing blackout poetry #ATBC2025
Red de ecología funcional de bosques secos #latam Gracias a Roy González por organizar esta lluvia de ideas. #ATBC2025
I propose carrying capacity (and deviations from) as gold standard biodiversity metric. It can be expressed as a power law which is beautifully ubiquitous and an emergent property of systems. #ATBC2025 #tropicalbiology #biodiversityCredits
Language diversity mirrors biodiversity. Most of the world's languages are spoken in the tropics. Let's use this at the next ATBC conference. #ATBC2025
Mole chicatana. Atta mexicana. #ATBC2025
Perla proudly presents her work showing tropical dry forest and rainforest species have similar drought and thermal tolerances when coexisting in the ecotone. #ATBC2025 Great job Perla 🎉.
Does cultural systems (music) overlap with socioecological systems? If we were to map the geography of mariachi, banda, norteño, ranchera, corridos, cumbia, grupera, merengue, bachata, salsa...would these map onto paths of crop domestication (b/c when we play music we eat!) #ATBC2025
Maíces mexicanos #ATBC2025
Hurricane forecasters rely on weather data collected and processed by Department of Defense satellites. That data will no longer be available as of Monday, June 30. By @rhersher.bsky.social
¡Buen viaje a todes! #ATBC25
“No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates.” –Justice Sonia Sotomayor. One of the most chilling sentences I have ever read.
Bueno, bonito y barato!
Even in the Age of AI, I still find it easier/better to edit manuscripts by hand. Call me old school.
Territoriality comes from a scarcity mindset. Which makes an abundance mindset even more important. Even now. Especially now. Plus, you can't take your data with you when you die.
Really enjoyed think piece by @martin-nunez.bsky.social on how knowledge of global ecology comes from just a few sites and how articles from Global South countries that have never published in ecology journals often rejected due to lack of novelty (even though these are where the known unknowns are)
The fantastic first image released by @esa.int Biomass satellite. In glorious false colour to represent its P-band radar imaging, capable of penetrating even the highest biomass forests in the Amazon and Congo.
Grit vs. Quit. #AcademicChatter #freakonomicsRadio podcastaddict.com/freakonomics... via @PodcastAddict
it's always an artist who challenges our frameworks :)
Just heard an art-biology faculty refer to native plants as 'long-adapted' plants because they didn't want to use "a political term to describe a biological phenomenon" and it just felt right. What's in a name? Everything.
"The way universities are structured doesn't meet the needs of the challenges that are emerging" The Centre for Unusual Collaborations youtu.be/fr5KhV5ipuo?...
Really excited about this new collaboration with the group of a great colleague @hulshof.bsky.social. What a nice opportunity for the interns @sunyesf.bsky.social to learn about the @nybg.bsky.social herbarium collections, dry tropical forests 🌳 🌴, & seed 🫘 traits!
Pablo will be testing 'old theories with new data' by comparing seed traits and dispersal across continental and Caribbean dry forests. #NSFfunded
Exciting day @ The Steere Herbarium @nybg.bsky.social with interns from @sunyesf.bsky.social. The interns will spend the summer at the herbarium assisting with the study of seed traits of neotropical dry forest trees 🌳 🌴 lead by @pablolopezbust.bsky.social from Virginia Commonwealth University 🌎🧪
I’ve decided to pursue my LLC full time after my postdoc ends July 2026! If you need a #dataanalyst for anything related to #statisics, #wildlife or #ecology, keep me in mind. Fast results and years of stats experience all for reasonable rates and the knowledge you’re helping a small business!
Art is my antidote to the news. Carhop. #collage
Don't know what ekphrastic poetry is? Join me for the Canopy to Cosmos workshop #ATBC2025 one of several techniques we will explore.
How bad will it be? Catastrophic. Proposed cuts to #NSF, #NIH, and #NASA will set the US R&D landscape back 25 yrs+, cause economic and job loss now, and undermine innovations to come. But, this is the WH's *proposed* budget. Speak up now before it is too late. (inflation adjusted $-s below)
Our institutions were never going to save us; they’ve just expanded the demographics of who they’re failing. I’m seeing a lot of people radicalized for the first time as the scales fall from their eyes. The key is not to become cynical, but to use that energy to liberate one another.
Territorial behaviour in ecology and conservation damages careers and impedes progress in the field. 🌏🧪🌐
We are excited to launch our working group VERDE to broaden the century-old and geographically biased ‘temperate phenology paradigm’ by identifying past, present, and future determinants of tropical phenological variation. #ESIIL #NSFfunded #TropicalEcology #macroecology
#ATBC2025 From canopy to cosmos: a poetry workshop. www.atbc2025.org/workshops-co...
👀👀👀👀
In our most recent episode we talk with Bill Zamer and Sam Scheiner, two former BIO program officers at the NSF, about the recently proposed 56% budget cut to the NSF. 🎙️Listen now: bigbiology.substack.com/p/savensf-ep... #scicomm #science #sciencecommunication #SaveNSF #NSF
Just like free stock images, pick your videos wisely otherwise you risk being too 'stock-image' cringe. I'm sure @echorivera.com has more to say/tips and much more elegantly too!
Deadline extended for submitting public comments on proposed rule to take away protections for civil servants, enabling them to be fired at will #SaveNSF They'll come for tenure at public universities next. www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...
Honored to share my publication on how rainforest moth communities in Puerto Rico responded to back-to-back hurricanes Irma and María. I began this project eight years ago, and it’s incredibly exciting to finally see it out in the world! 🦋 🔗 go.uvm.edu/waf2l #MothEcology #Biodiversity #PuertoRico
Now updated with another brand-new source of LLM carbon footprint estimates! Guess what: same story (no matter how badly that source wants you to draw the opposite conclusion). Bottom line: I wonder if people *don't actually want to know* that LLM carbon footprints are actually very low?
Anyone know of agencies helping U.S. scientists apply to E.U. opportunities? I'm finding it hard to navigate ERC and MSCA Choose Europe funding...does individual or institution apply? Webinars? Where should one start?
And...disrupt the impact factor obsession by publishing in society journals. As a grad student, I was told I can't publish everything in Biotropica...now with tenure...why not? A la Janzen 1970s.
Introducing our 2nd cohort of Working Groups! Visit our website to learn more about what each of our 5 new groups are working on! esiil.org/working-groups
Don't feed the birds. A little #collage art for the woes.
Female is the new F-word www.forbes.com/sites/brucel...
As grant money starts drying up, it's more important than ever not to waste it on paying publishers' open access "article processing fees" when we can host PDFs for free. Tom Morgan and I wrote a paper on this, forthcoming at Science and Public Policy. Accepted draft here: osf.io/preprints/os...
Can't find the right ending for this piece #poetry
The universe gave me a green eyed boy. #poetry
Like it or not, we will all need to scale back (and raise hell when we can). This book is a good place to start. Subtraction as an intentional way to challenge our evolutionary obsession with more.
El primer aguacero del invierno siempre es una experiencia increíble entre tanto calor y humedad. The first aguacero of the season is always an incredible experience of built up heat and humidity. #ACGuanacaste
“How might the narrative about senior women be challenged or changed in order to respect these women who have achieved enough success to earn promotion? How do we stop this generational cycle so that women's wings aren't clipped as soon as they approach the power to soar.”
Pensando en mi abuelita quien cumple 96 añitos mañana. #poesia
journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...
Sometimes field work is forgetting your lunch in the fridge but then being saved by the crushed airplane snack in your backpack. Un suspiro. The irony doesn't fall short either. Here's to some little suspiros wherever you can find them today!
Chomp chomp little one. #CostaRica #Automeris
La cordillera #CostaRica
Around the world and through ancient time, poetry has been a key tool for resistance. Poets become keepers of memory amidst erasure. I'm posting some poems on my website, should I make this a space for more? biodiversityresearchlab.com/poesia #poetry #poesia #geopoetics #ecopoetics
"Relying on a single mentor to meet every need isn’t just outdated—it’s ineffective." From NCFDD's Beyond the Guru: Rethinking what Mentorship Looks Like in Higher Ed
Tighter phenotypic integration in more stressful environments suggests there is a greater energetic/fitness cost of being functionally different from the mean
Simple guidelines can go a long way in crafting a strong narrative, like this one from @britishecologicalsociety.org 'There are at least 4 types of discussion that let an otherwise good paper down: saga, whodunit, report, fairy tale.' besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/hub/journal/...
For all those wonderfully nerdy field ecologists out there who are overly excited about duct tape too. @nytwirecutter.bsky.social
Love the collages here. Digitization of museum specimens is both a science, technology, and art.
Misty mountain forest re-census #Virginia
TL;DR: The 5 most common mistakes researchers make in their papers 1: Neglecting tension 2: Ignoring the broader perspective 3: Too brief (or non-existent) discussion 4: Not mentioning the purpose of your experiments 5: Using over-complicated language
Mapquest lets you "Name Your Own Gulf" boingboing.net/2025/02/20/m...
The committee on Science, Space, and Technology are collecting testimony of Federal employees fired in the past days. Please share with your colleagues and friends. The more testimony, the better we can argue against this injustice.
Anyone have a Data Management and Sharing Plan (NSF style) example for meteorological station data with lots of sensors? Thanks for any leads, worried about level of detail.
Weekend read. Another great one. On the finitude of life.
Just submitted my ATBC workshop proposal. From Canopy to Cosmos: Mapping the Anthropocene through Poetry
Third annual census of forest monitoring plots in ACG #CostaRica is complete!! From sea to summit. Whew. Kicked my butt.
