r/ecology

Early this field season for my forest Inventory sites I encountered lots and lots of wood nettle. Some being 6+ feet tall and some patches being knee height. As you can imagine it was pretty frustrating but endurable. Later in the field season at other forest inventory sites I encountered lots of rice cutgrass, often with sandbar willows. The cuts and itches from both during field work were so infuriating I wanted to know what everyone generally thought was more frustrating between the two lol. My personal vote has to be rice cutgrass, especially when I was walking through willows and would be completely wrapped up in it on a day too hot for long sleeves. What’s everyone’s thoughts!?

Nuttall's white-crowned sparrow is the non-migratory subspecies that occupies the San Francisco Bay Area, and it has been recorded more thoroughly than almost any songbird population on earth. Luis Baptista started systematically mapping its dialects out of the California Academy of Sciences in the 1970s. Elizabeth Derryberry's lab has carried the recording program since the mid-2000s. The archive now runs to tens of thousands of individual songs.

The song is about two seconds: an opening sequence of clear whistles, then a trill. The whistle portion is broadly conserved across the subspecies. The trill is where the variation lives — pitch trajectory, syllable count, syllable structure, frequency modulation. That's the part that differs between the Presidio and Lake Merced and the Marin Headlands and Golden Gate Park and the Berkeley hills, and by the late 1970s a trained ear could assign an individual bird to a neighborhood from a single decent recording.

Some of those dialect boundaries are only a few hundred metres apart, across territory lines, with no geographic obstacle of any kind between them.

The 2024 paper

Luo, Lipshutz, Phillips, Brumfield and Derryberry ran three analyses on the same birds and published in PLOS One in May 2024.

Acoustic: 175 songs from 82 male sparrows recorded 2010-2022, trill structure quantified and clustered into 18 dialect categories.

Genetic: the same individuals genotyped with SNP markers to test whether dialect zones correspond to genetically distinguishable populations.

Playback: females from each zone exposed to their local dialect versus an adjacent zone's dialect, to test whether dialect functions as a mate-recognition cue rather than a passive geographic marker.

All three converged. Females responded preferentially to local dialect even where the adjacent zone was a few hundred metres away. And sparrows in a given dialect zone showed measurable genetic differentiation from sparrows in neighbouring zones — inside a contiguous range with no physical barrier and continuous opportunity for gene flow.

The proposed mechanism is that the culturally transmitted mate-choice preference is doing the isolating work that geography does in the standard allopatric model. The dialect is learned, not inherited. It determines which males a neighbourhood's females preferentially breed with. And the genetic consequences are accumulating on a timescale short enough that a single human research lineage has watched it happen.

Why the dialects don't blur

Marler established the learning mechanism in the 1960s and 70s: white-crowned sparrows acquire song from adult tutors during a critical period roughly 10 to 50 days post-hatching, followed by a sensorimotor phase to around 200 days where the juvenile shapes its own output toward the memorised template using auditory feedback. Birds deprived of tutors during the sensory phase produce abnormal isolate song. Birds deafened after crystallisation keep singing what they already learned, which means the template is stored neurally and doesn't need ongoing feedback.

Add natal philopatry — juveniles tend to settle in or adjacent to the territory they hatched in — and the tutor pool available during the critical period is statistically dominated by adult males singing the local trill. Juveniles typically learn from several tutors and end up producing something like a composite that sits inside the local structural envelope.

The result is a cultural lineage that has outlived every individual carrying it many times over. White-crowned sparrows live two to five years. The Presidio dialect Baptista recorded in the late 1970s is still the Presidio dialect, roughly fifteen to twenty generations later.

COVID separated inheritance from performance

Derryberry's lab had a 2012 finding that Bay Area sparrows had shifted song minimum frequency upward by around 200 Hz across three decades of rising traffic noise — an adaptation that preserved transmission range in a noisier soundscape but carried a cost, since lower-frequency songs are harder to produce and appear to be the ones females rate more highly. The urban birds had made themselves audible at the expense of being attractive.

Then in March 2020 the shutdown dropped Golden Gate Bridge traffic to levels last seen around 1954, and Jennifer Phillips went out on a bike with a recorder rig to the same sites the lab had baselined in 2015 and 2016.

Urban song amplitude fell about 30 percent. Minimum frequency dropped about 35 Hz. Transmission distance more than doubled. Performance measures relevant to female assessment improved. The rural controls at Point Reyes, where there had been little traffic noise to begin with, showed no equivalent shift.

What did not change was the dialect. The Presidio dialect stayed the Presidio dialect. Amplitude, frequency and range are delivery parameters, plastic on a scale of weeks. The trill structure is the cultural inheritance, stable across generations. The 2020 paper measured the first. The 2024 paper measured the second. Traffic has since recovered and so have the delivery parameters, with no lasting mark on the dialect structure.

Full write-up on Baptista's mapping, the Derryberry long-term record, the 2020 shutdown study, and the 2024 genetic finding:

https://unteachablecourses.com/white-crowned-sparrows-san-francisco-dialects/

The question I'd genuinely like an answer to is about the causal claim, because philopatry is a confound that could produce both patterns on its own. If juveniles settle near where they hatched, you get dialect stability and spatial genetic structure without the dialect necessarily doing any isolating work — limited dispersal alone generates isolation-by-distance. The playback result is the evidence that's supposed to break the tie, but preference in a playback trial isn't the same thing as realised assortative mating in the field, and 175 songs from 82 birds across 18 categories is roughly four or five individuals per dialect. Is there work that actually separates these — dispersal-distance data allowing an isolation-by-distance null, or parentage assignment showing females who do disperse across a boundary preferentially pairing with males singing their natal dialect rather than their new local one? That second design seems like the decisive test and I can't tell whether anyone has run it.

Every tire on the road is dosed with a preservative called 6PPD, added to keep the rubber from drying out and cracking as it flexes...Tiny flecks of rubber rub off onto the pavement, and the 6PPD in them meets ozone in the air and changes into a brand new compound, 6PPD quinone. That transformation product, not the raw tire, is what proves deadly to a coho...It takes only a fraction of a part per billion of the quinone to be fatal to a coho, a concentration a single storm easily clears.

On Miller Creek, monitoring across three straight spring storms found about four in five of the young coho gone within a day each time.

Hey guys, hope you are well. I have a bachelor's in ecology (graduated in 2018) and currently work in retail banking. I'm thinking to pursue work with the government in the ecological field though want to get advice from people already in the field.

Thank you in advance.

I was curious to know how much funding is deployed to conservation efforts near me. I started by pulling a list of organizations using conservation-related tax codes, and cross referencing with the Land Trust Alliance and a few other sources. Financial records for 501(c)3 non-profit organizations in the U.S. are publicly accessible. So, once I had a list of organizations, I was able to fetch recent financial records for all organizations. I then plotted all funding values on the map using the organization's location.

The largest organizations are active all over the world, so their values should be excluded from any sort of local analysis. The area near DC, for example, shows billions in funding due to organizations such as the Nature Conservancy.

Curious to hear what y'all glean from this. Is there anything you'd like to see included in the map?

The UK is entering its fifth heatwave of 2026 and, among other things, it's making Himalayan Balsam suffer.

In this episode we give Balsam the one-two punch and meet Alex and Silvia from. Yorkshire Wildlife Trust to learn more about their rust fungus trial - a natural solution to the spread of Himalayan Balsam.

High school junior has been interested in fish biology for years, attended two short natural resources career camps at a state university and now it’s time to start exploring college. He went back and forth about ecology based engineering but is likely headed towards fishery biology. Wants to do field work, and is taking zoology and AP stats this year which will help determine whether he enjoys that more or less than physics/calc. Any recommendations for schools we should check out? He’s more freshwater focused and we are in the Midwest and prefer not to be too far from home.

LOTS of waterhemp and horse weed. Should we be worried? Our ecologists say we're on track, but curious what you all think!

See also: The study as it was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

I want to throw this out there because it’s becoming a huge problem in our field. Field Maps is an amazing and highly useful tool, but the overmapping has gotten completely out of hand. People can't seem to help themselves—it honestly feels like we're playing Pokémon Go instead of doing ecology.

We don’t need to map absolutely EVERYTHING.

Sometimes, using our brains and actual words to describe an issue is still a perfectly valid approach. I'm sick of staring at a screen in the field just to fill out endless, repetitive forms. You nerds have gotta cool it.

As someone who has extensively used and designed these maps: simple is key. Design for as few clicks as possible. We need to keep our crews looking up and actually aware of their environment like real ecologists.

I’m a developer and a nature enthusiast. Like many of you, I’ve been a long-time user of iNaturalist. It’s an incredible tool for species identification and data collection. However, I believe there’s room for more tools in this space, specifically focusing on different aspects of our interaction with nature.

I am currently developing a new ecology/environmental protection app. While it will have species identification capabilities, I don’t want it to be just another ID tool. I want to build something that complements the existing ecosystem.

My question to this community is: Beyond snapping a photo and getting an ID, what do you feel is missing in current nature apps?

For example:

• Is it better data visualization (e.g., tracking local biodiversity changes over time)?
• Is it offline functionality for deep forest areas?
• Is it a focus on invasive species reporting?
• Or perhaps more social/community features to organize local clean-ups or planting events?

I want to build something that is truly useful for both researchers and casual nature lovers. Any feedback, wild ideas, or features you’ve always wished for would be massively appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Hi everyone,

I'm finishing my Bachelor's in Environmental Science this September and starting a Master's in Research (MRes) in Environmental Science right after. I'm reaching out because I'd like to collaborate with researchers on publications, ideally as a way to build real co-authorship experience early on.

My main research interests are invasive species, entomology, and dendrochronology/dendroclimatology. I did an internship at a Forest Institute contributing to research on bark-eating beetles, led an independent (unpublished) study on the impact of an invasive gall wasp on chestnut leaf physiology, and my thesis is a dendroclimatological study of Mediterranean pines. I've presented posters at 3 conferences, including IUFRO Division 7 in Lisbon.

That said, I'm not narrowly limiting myself to that niche as I'm comfortable with R for statistical analysis and data wrangling more broadly (mixed models, community ecology stats, time series), so if you or someone you know has ecological data that needs analysis, cleaning, or modelling help and could use an extra set of hands, I'd genuinely welcome that conversation too.

I don't know if this is a slightly unusual ask on this sub, but I'd rather be upfront: if anyone here is working on something in this space and could use analytical help in exchange for co-authorship or just the experience, I'd love to hear from you. I'm equally happy to just hear general thoughts on how early-career people (pre-PhD) typically find their way into these collaborations.

(I've kept some details vague here for anonymity, but I'm happy to share a portfolio or examples of my data analysis work directly if that would help anyone evaluate whether it's a fit.)

Thanks for reading.