Excited to share this paper led by @rdinnager.bsky.social. It is truly years of team effort to get to this point. We are currently finalizing the data, which will be included in PhenoBase and will be open early next year. @er1ngrady.bsky.social besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
🚀 New paper led by Dr Becks Spake!
We make the case for precision ecology—using big data & predictive tools to tailor conservation actions to local contexts.
Can ecology learn from medicine & marketing to boost impact? We think so.
Read it here: rdcu.be/eoaR4
#Conservation #Ecology #BigData
NicheFlow learns an underlying numerical representation of species' niches, letting you do neat things like interpolating between two species, generating hypothetical niches of non-existent species. This animation also shows how the model treats environmental and geographic space separately.
I am currently training NicheFlow 2.0 on several hundreds of thousands of species' range maps and will be releasing it publicly in the coming months.
Join me at the #ESA2025 meeting in August to learn more about it. Stay tuned for an announcement of my #ESA2025 short course on foundation models.
The magic? NicheFlow uses generative AI to:
🌍 Share knowledge across species
🧬 Capture complex environmental relationships
📊 Work with limited data
🔮 Predict distributions for rare species
Preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.10.15.618541v1
P.S. 'It's not magic.'
Excited to share my latest preprint: NicheFlow - which aims to be one of the first true foundation models for ecology! 🎉
It's like having an AI ecologist that learns from millions of species observations to predict where ANY species might live.
Ask me about it and its applications at #Evol2025! 🧵👇
For more details on graduate opportunities in my lab see: rdinnager.github.io/dinnage_lab_...
Hey everybody! A few months ago @americanbeetles.bsky.social had the idea to do a Schoolhouse Rock-style video about the important work insect taxonomists do, so I wrote a song and she illustrated it. Please share as widely as you can!
youtu.be/yYSIhzb14QI
I am also actively recruiting graduate student for my new Assistant Professor role starting in July at the University of Alberta.
If you will be at #Evol2025 and are looking for opportunities to study at the intersection of AI/ML and biology (especially evolution), let's talk in Athens!
What if we could teach machines to think in the logic of evolution? 🌱🤖
That's what I'll be discussing at #Evol2025 in Athens, Georgia - showing how AI reveals that evolution moves along curved paths, not straight lines.
June 24, 12:15pm, Computational Biology session. See you there? 🧵👇
Currently funded by NSF to develop AI that learns ecological principles from species distributions. Looking forward to connecting with the computational biology community here!
Lab: rdinnager.github.io/dinnage_lab_website/
Code: github.com/rdinnager
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Recent highlights:
📚 NicheFlow: First foundation model for species distributions
🌸 PhenoVision: AI analyzing 53M field photos (98.5% accuracy!)
📦 Open-source R packages: slimr, ENMTools, phyr
I believe in democratizing computational methods for all biologists.
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New to Bluesky! I'm Russell Dinnage, developing AI foundation models for organismal biology @FIU (moving to @UAlberta July 2025)
My mission: Create AI systems that understand life from molecules to ecosystems, bridging computational innovation with biological insight 🧬🤖
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