Happy 6th birthday to us!

Image source: https://i.imgur.com/sJLzs3u.jpg

A slightly belated happy birthday to ourselves! 🙂

I think of Dynamic Ecology as sort of a respectable middle aged man blog at this point. Our “vital signs” (traffic, etc.) are all pretty much the same as last year. We’re just glad that’s still fine with you–thank you for reading everyone!

Here are some posts that were highlights of our blogging year for me:

My poll on controversial ideas in ecology. Best post idea I’ve had for yonks. So interesting!

My post on ecologists who think in terms of dynamical models vs. those who think in terms of regressions. I think I finally put my finger on something real and important in this one, after struggling for years to articulate it.

Finally, I used the blog to encourage more applications from a more diverse range of applicants for the ASN Jasper Loftus-Hills Young Investigator Awards, and succeeded more than I had hoped. Having more strong applications than you ever imagined you’d get is a great problem for any awards committee to have.

Brian’s posts on description vs. prediction vs. understanding, and his taxonomy of scientific crises, were right up my alley, and got excellent discussions going.

This past year Meghan continued to provide a lot of excellent nuts-and-bolts advice for doing science. But my own personal favorite posts of hers were her book reviews. And I thought her post critiquing the evidence that grad students are 6x as likely as members of the general population to have depression and anxiety was a timely and brave intervention into the social media discussion going on at the time.

In terms of guest posts, I’d highlight our series on doing ecology in developing countries, particularly Isabela Borges’ post on doing ecology in Canada and Brazil. Also Gina Baucom’s powerful pair of posts categorizing sexist comments in academia. Finally, I might not have quite picked it as one of my personal favorites, but given that it drew 120 comments (!) I’d be remiss if I didn’t highlight Mark Vellend’s post on the unbearable hypocrisy of being an ecologist.