Alex Courtiol 🐘🦇🦅👨💻
Quantitative wildlife biologist based at IZW Berlin 🇩🇪 / datazoogang.de / #wildlife #ecology #demography #conservation #evolution #rstats #linux
- Reposted by Alex Courtiol 🐘🦇🦅👨💻Led by Viktoriia Radchuk, an international collaboration shows phenological shifts in response to changing temperatures allow populations to remain stable or even increase in numbers. Support from #sDiv @idiv-research.bsky.social
- Enjoying my low carbon footprint form of travel toward #ecobhvr2025, I am re-reading some accounts of environmental/societal destruction caused by the extraction of rare natural products that dazzle most of us... My selection of illustrated stories: - 1. mammoth ivory: www.rferl.org/a/the-mammot...
- - 3. gold: publicdelivery.org/sebastiao-sa... Feel free to link to others!!
- Just boarded a train with my bike in Berlin. If all goes smoothly I should reach Montpellier within 21 hours, with plenty of time before the launch of #ecobhvr2025. Only one change in Paris... So, time to unpack the laptop and check my slides (perhaps after an episode of Wednesday #2...).
- It turns out that since the 2 legs (Berlin -> Paris and Paris -> Montpellier) had not been purchased together, the SNCF could not put me up in an hotel at their own cost. They did, after a smile, gave me a free 1st class ticket for the next day, so I am now in a fast train towards Montpellier 🛤️
- I have just read the Anti-Autocracy Handbook and I think everyone else should too: sks.to/autocracy Thanks to @lewan.bsky.social and others for putting this together!!
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- We are delighted to introduce the first three keynote speakers Emmanuelle Porcher cesco.mnhn.fr/fr/annuaire/... Alexandre Courtiol www.izw-berlin.de/en/alex-cour... Emily Shepard www.swansea.ac.uk/staff/e.l.c.... ➡️For more details on their research ecobhvr2025.sciencesconf.org?lang=en More to come!
- I just wrote a tutorial about how to use #Rstats & RStudio using a container system (podman): gist.github.com/courtiol/ce0... I did this for myself (a linux user), but it may be useful to others too. Let me know what you think of it.
- Do Spix's macaws really behave as they do in the animated films Rio? To find out, read our new preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2025...
- Our paper on how climate change impacts bat hibernation is out🎉 It was a long journey paved with many desk rejections despite a huge amount of work put in collecting and analysing the data, but we are proud of the result and very happy with the one journal that did review it: doi.org/10.1111/ele....
- Working in or with Marine Protected Areas?🌊 We need your help! In this video, Christine Ward-Paige, introduces our workforce survey: youtu.be/M3Nm5KuyN_Q?... This is an effort involving Blue Nature Alliance, MCI, IUCN, @rewildorg.bsky.social, Leibniz-IZW and others. Please share!!
- The survey link: workforce-survey.marine-conservation.org/who-protects...
- Our paper on ducks in the city is out! Using 16 yrs of data (>1000 breeding events) collected by NABU Berlin (berlin.nabu.de), we looked at why many ducks nest on buildings. The landscape doesn't matter much, it's more an individual choice and the appeal of the breeding site: doi.org/10.1093/jue/...
- Anonymizing an #rstats 📦 for a submission to Methods in Eco Evo, I replaced names in DESCRIPTION, README, vignettes, doc... But calling packageDescription("pkg.tar.gz") revealed that the computer name is used as metadata 🤨 Solution: build your tar.gz in a terminal using R CMD build --user=anonymous
- Landed in Budapest. About to spend a week with the Finnish national team of horseback archery! 🏹🐴🇫🇮
- Why a growing population is not necessary a sign of its environment getting better? Check out our latest preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2024... -> huge amount of work from former postdoc Liam Bailey, now data wizard for WWF. It is also the result of the amazing data collected by hyena-project.com
- I've just created a feed called "wildlife photography". It catches posts with pictures that are about wildlife through a collection of hashtags that I will continuously refine to improve the feed. It was easy thanks to skyfeed.app Please pin/save and let me know what you think. #wildlifephotography
- Reposted by Alex Courtiol 🐘🦇🦅👨💻I took that photo in Tokyo (Higashi-Yukigaya 2002). The birds sometimes install such nests on power lines of Japan Railways and need to be removed in order to avoid power outages.
- IsoriX v0.9.2 -- an #rstats 📦 for building isoscapes using mixed models and inferring the geographic origin of samples based on their isotopic ratios -- is now on CRAN. The main change between v0.9.1/v0.9.2 and earlier versions is that it no longer imports {raster} & {sp}, but {terra}. More 👇
- I thought that the transition would be trivial, but it turned out not to be. Without {sp}, IsoriX initially lost the ability to plot oceans, which are polygons with holes (i.e. polypaths). So we had to add this feature in #rstats 📦 {lattice} and {rasterVis}, which IsoriX uses. More 👇
- If people wonder why {terra} and not {stars}. My main answer would be that all plotting functionalities of the #rstats 📦 IsoriX are based on {lattice} via {rasterVis}. The latter 📦 now handles {terra} objects very well. Had I switched to {stars}, all plotting functions would have had to be recoded.
- Reposted by Alex Courtiol 🐘🦇🦅👨💻R? In the browser? What?! #WebR makes it possible to run #RStats code in the browser without the need for an R server to execute the code: the R interpreter runs directly on the user’s machine. George Stagg shares an overview of the 0.2.0 release on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mpq9...
- Just discovered the root of a #rstats bug emerging only every 100,000 iterations 👇... (coercing is always dangerous, but I had not seen that one coming)
- A more simple illustration of the same #rstats coercion oddity 👇
- Visiting the website of Even Rouault (a core developer behind GDAL and other spatial libraries used by many packages in #rstats, #python...), I bumped into this mini opinion about "Fighting misconceptions about Open source": www.spatialys.com/en/opinions/
- I just rediscovered that `lintr::lint_package()` is a great solution to check #rstats code in your package. lintr.r-lib.org
- Tempted to measure how the correlation between 2 variables varies over time? If the answer is YES, you may find my #rstats 📦 **timevarcorr** (newly on CRAN) useful: courtiol.github.io/timevarcorr/ I implemented the method described in this paper: link.springer.com/article/10.1... Enjoy!
- Reposted by Alex Courtiol 🐘🦇🦅👨💻pak 0.6.0 blog post about the new (more) automatic system requirements installation: www.tidyverse.org/blog/2023/09... Change log: github.com/r-lib/pak/re... Installation: pak.r-lib.org/reference/in... #rstats
- Reposted by Alex Courtiol 🐘🦇🦅👨💻The new evercran project (github.com/r-hub/evercr...) helps you run old (or ancient) versions of R, together with old (or ancient) snapshots of CRAN. #RStats
- Reposted by Alex Courtiol 🐘🦇🦅👨💻We are excited to announce that Wes McKinney has joined Posit! When we changed our name to Posit our goal was to unify efforts around creating great tools for data science, regardless of language, and working with Wes is a huge step forward in realizing that dream.
- If you develop #rstats 📦 and don't know about r-universe.dev , give it a try, it is really good! For example, r-universe.dev/search/ allows you to identify the #rstats 📦 you contributed to. They have even created a page for every maintainer listed by CRAN, e.g. for me: courtiol.r-universe.dev
- After using GitHub for years, I just got around to create a profile page: github.com/courtiol I just wanted to create an organized list of my repos. I find it helpful already as it helped me do some cleaning. It alleviates the cost of storing all one's repos at the root, which everyone seems to do.
- Must seen: amazing Escaped Sapiens Podcast with @shanefarnsworth.bsky.social and Olivia Judson about the co-transformation of #Life and #Earth over time: www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgN5...
