Ecologist, author, tree watcher. Shill for Big Forest. Writing another textbook on biodiversity and biogeography. It's always karaoke time. More at treesinspace.com
Markus Eichhorn
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Bob Ricklefs RIP. One of the giants of ecology. His textbooks were the gateway to the field for many students. His papers were invariably thoughtful, well-argued and provocative, even those I disagreed with. 🌏🧪🌐
Coming up with some memes for a talk on interdisciplinary collaboration and I'm having way too much fun.
For example, Ricklefs' 2008 paper 'Disintegration of the ecological community' is one I still recommend to my students, even while I don't agree with some of the conclusions. It's a brilliant essay and a great starting point for debate.
It's hard to explain how much this film was a defining cultural point for Gen X kids like myself. Sure, there are some problematic and dated elements, but so many moments are fixed in our collective memory.
OK, now leave me alone, I need to sit in a darkened room and watch it again for what might be the fiftieth time. At least. Happy 40th Ferris. Hope life turned out ok for you too.
So yeah, I might look more like his economics teacher these days, but there's still a teenager inside who thinks that "What would Ferris do" is a reasonable guiding principle.
A sad task, well done—Brian McGill pens a tribute to Bob Ricklefs.
One measure of Ricklefs’ influence: Ecology students from the 70s on were trained on “Ricklefs”: an imposing tome weaving graphs and equations together with fine, dense prose. Thanks Bob.
dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2026/06/11/r...
'Average person eats six times more chicken than in 1961, UN report finds' 🤯 🐔
A trend that's fuelling ecological destruction from the Amazon (rainforests cut down to grow soy feed for chickens) to the River Wye (full of chicken shit):
www.theguardian.com/environment/...
Abstract: In this essay, I argue that the seemingly indestructible concept of the community
as a local, interacting assemblage of species has hindered progress toward understanding
species richness a...
