Chris Catano

Community trajectories towards a restoration target (increase in zooplankton community diversity and abundance to regain ecosystem function, facilitated by invasive fish removal), where functional and taxonomic composition recover at different rates: In the disturbance phase, non-native fish introductions reduce the functional diversity of zooplankton communities; during active restoration, fish are removed from lakes, allowing communities to recover functions associated with naturally fishless systems; the assisted or unassisted recovery phase is characterized by the initial reassembly of functional structure via plasticity and dispersal followed by taxonomic recovery through additional dispersal. Traits are shown as univariate for illustrative purposes but can encompass multiple traits in practice.

Our review of #trait - based approaches to ecological restoration is finally out in @esajournals.bsky.social *Ecological Applications*, highlighting the value of functional traits for creating system-general restoration strategies. 🌐 🧮➕📏 urldefense.com/v3/__http://...

Accounting for the Influence of Community Turnover Along Environmental Gradients on Compositional Uniqueness Compositional uniqueness is commonly quantified using the Local Contribution to Beta Diversity (LCBD), which is typically regressed against environmental predictors. However, LCBD–environment relatio...

If you’re interested in modelling community turnover and/or community uniqueness (i.e. LCBD: local contribution to beta diversity), make sure you check it out.

Paper: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Super happy to share that my article on inferring the dynamics of selective constraints across complex ontogenies is now out in Royal Society Open Science. My experience with RSOS was great, and I’m happy to be part of the movement towards open science!

royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article...

That's frustrating!

Eww, gross. That is so fucked up

Early morning view of Riverside, CA to calm my nerves during this 5-3 powerplay. 🇺🇸 vs 🇨🇦 #GoldMedal #Hockey #Olympics

Snow-capped mountains in Southern California

Beautiful winter morning in Riverside, California.

5x5-m plot dominated by flowering annual forb in invaded grassland in Southern California

Clear differenecs in plant compostion emerging in 1st year of #DRAGnet experiment manipulating #disturbance & #nutrients in an annual grassland in Riverside, CA. This plot is dominated by native Amsinckia menziesii, with neighboring plot dominated by non-native Brassica tournefortii.

We're getting close! Only ~20 more signatures needed. Any current member of the Ecological Society of America (@ecologicalsociety.bsky.social) is eligible to sign this petition for a new ESA Section for Distributed Ecological Research Networks: esa.org/membership/p...

Blue eyes, cryptantha white flowers and yellow fiddlenecks

Red and Orange monkeyflowers in a rocky area

Fields with warehouses and mountains in the background.

Riverside in bloom #BloomScrolling

We’re #hiring a #postdoc @ucriverside.bsky.social 🌿
Work on cis-regulatory evolution, gene family diversification, and cell-type-specific climate responses using single-cell and comparative genomics - kenchanmanelab.com/research/

Deadline: Feb 5, 2026
Apply: aprecruit.ucr.edu/apply/JPF02058

The global extent of the grassland biome and implications for the terrestrial carbon sink - Nature Ecology & Evolution By combining satellite observations with ground-based data and expert validation, this analysis demonstrates considerable misestimation of grassland extent and thereby carbon stock estimates in previo...

⚠️ New paper out in Nature Ecology & Evolution 🌱
#Grasslands #SoilCarbon @natecoevo.nature.com

Purple white and yellow flowers

Riverside super bloom with desert wishbone, fiddlenecks and popcorn flowers #NativePlants

“The U.S. Department of the Interior announced on Friday that it is revoking seven grazing permits in Phillips County that American Prairie had been using to sustain its herd of bison.” 🧪🌐🌾

Please sign & share this petition to create a new ESA Section for Distributed Ecological Research Networks (DERNs): esa.org/membership/p...
Goals: promote and support participation in existing and new DERNs, facilitate sharing of knowledge, and encourage collaborations within and between networks.

Really important points, Rob!

Rain-out shelters in field experiment

Beautful day yesterday out at our pinyon flats experiment in southern California. We are testing how changing precipitation regimes in arid ecosystems alter the causal mechanisms linking soil biogeochemistry, plant community composition, and primary productivity.

Wild Riverside's best clips of 2025 YouTube video by Spasojevic Ecology Lab

youtu.be/r3wsnirQOXQ?...

Check out our highlights and subscribe to see what is wild in Riverside in 2026. We have partnered with city parks to add cameras to Sycamore Canyon and will be working with the county to start monitoring donkey populations across Riverside.

Also, walked in on Steven Tyler in the bathroom at a local restaurant in Brant Rock, MA a few years back

I once took John Cena's movie ticket while working at a movie theater in Tampa in undergrad

Congrats, Rob! I am excited to read this. I am mulling over developing a class covering many of these topics, and this will be super helpful as I think through ideas.

New paper out today in @royalsocietypublishing.org Biology Letters, led by undergrad superstar Laina Weiss! An experimental test of theory on the effects of temperature and resources on carrying capacity. So proud 🥹 tinyurl.com/yvmzmt9a @integrativebiology.bsky.social

Trait‐based island biogeography as a tool for studying future ecological communities Understanding the future of ecological communities under global change is among the most pressing challenges in plant ecology. Islands, with their reduced species diversity and clear boundaries, have...

My @newphyt.bsky.social Tansley Insight is now published in an issue:

Trait-based island biogeography as a tool for studying future ecological communities

I provide an overview of recent advances in integrating plant traits into island ecology and highlight key themes for future research.

How should the discipline of ecology and the community of ecologists respond to the ecological crisis? Is it time that these were put on something more akin to an emergency footing?
www.cell.com/action/showP...

Sometimes when an idea isn't working as expected, it's not failure, but an opportunity to realize something even more interesting is going on.

...maybe it's failure.

Meet the Editor I find that if the authors can explain why something works... those mechanisms might allow people working in other taxa or systems to transfer the findings. Jennifer Funk, Ecological Applications Associate Editor-in-Chief DISCOVER MORE NOW >

How do you ensure generalizability in Ecological Applications?

Jennifer L. Funk says explaining why something works allows others "to transfer the findings" across different taxa and systems.

Read the interview: https://ow.ly/B0Nr50XGZNk
ESA Journals #Ecology

3D figure showing how a family of unimodal, species-level thermal performance curves are collectively bounded by an exponential function across species, uniting predictions of growth rate at population and community levels. From Fig. S4.

Ecologists recognize the importance of integrating across scales, yet our models often target specific scales. Our new paper presents models of population growth that scale up to explain community-level patterns, including interactions of temperature, light & nutrients. doi.org/10.1002/ecm....

Spatial Ecology and Conservation Modeling This textbook provides a foundation for modern applied ecology. It follows a rapidly changing field with updates of concepts, methods, and code.

Really happy to share that the Second Edition of our book, "Spatial Ecology and Conservation Modeling", is now out and available online!

We provide a foundation for applied spatial ecology with a focus on learning-by-doing.

@camzoology.bsky.social @conservation.cam.ac.uk

The fall of a prolific science journal exposes the billion-dollar profits of scientific publishing One of the 15 publications that put out the most studies globally has been expelled from the indexing system for irregularities. Its publisher, Elsevier, has a 38% profit margin that reached $1.5 billion in 2024

Reining in large for-profit academic publishers and valuing researchers for quality over quantity must be central as we reimagine the future of scholarly publishing.

The Georgia Coastal Ecosystems Long-Term Ecological Research program is looking for a postdoc with expertise in wetlands and biogeochemistry. Please pass this along to likely candidates!