Wildlife ecology and conservation, metabarcoding, eDNA, disease ecology, mathematical modeling. Prof of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation at Oregon State U
Corvallis, OR
Joined June 2009
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Feel free to DM me issues that come up. I want this to be useful.
Please share with the community. I'm looking for beta testers for CascadiaTools, an AI coding agent harness for ecological, wildlife, fisheries and conservation-genetic analysis. It is available as a @claudeai plugin. Our aims are to: (i) argue that the trust ecologists place in vetted R packages can be extended to analyses run by coding agents, if the agents call vetted code instead of writing it; (ii) state the design principles that make agent-produced analyses checkable; (iii) describe the architecture shared by all modules; (iv) report how each of 29 modules was built and independently verified, including the limits each verification exposed; (v) show how a researcher with no coding experience uses it, from question to publication figures; and (vi) outline how vetted libraries for coding agents could become a standard part of ecological practice. /1 cascadiawildlifelab.org/tool…
Please share with the community. I'm looking for beta testers for CascadiaTools, an AI coding agent harness for ecological, wildlife, fisheries and conservation-genetic analysis. It is available as a @claudeai plugin. Our aims are to: (i) argue that the trust ecologists place in vetted R packages can be extended to analyses run by coding agents, if the agents call vetted code instead of writing it; (ii) state the design principles that make agent-produced analyses checkable; (iii) describe the architecture shared by all modules; (iv) report how each of 29 modules was built and independently verified, including the limits each verification exposed; (v) show how a researcher with no coding experience uses it, from question to publication figures; and (vi) outline how vetted libraries for coding agents could become a standard part of ecological practice. /1 cascadiawildlifelab.org/tool…
Install instructions for the command line or desktop app can be found here /2
cascadiawildlifelab.org/tool…
Progress report on the WolfQuest video game set in our study area on the Katmai coast with my PhD student @ellendymit as the science advisor. It's badass. You get to be a wolf fishing for salmon, hunting marine mammals, and navigating the fattest bears. youtube.com/watch?v=yYzoLvGg…
I'm truly impressed. I asked Opus 5.5 to make a video tutorial for PhD students to study community ecology for their comprehensive exam. I want them to have a strong grasp of ecological theory and history. This is incredible. taaltree.github.io/ecologica…
Taal Levi retweeted
1/10 I spent my PhD at ETH Zürich building pieces of an eDNA puzzle. Now I see them fit together in our new paper!
Years of method development, fieldwork and ideas that once seemed out of reach. Here is what we found, and what I think comes next.
Taal Levi retweeted
the goal is to uncover local adaptation in populations through this joint prediction of environmental covariates and geography
Taal Levi retweeted
The University of California was for so long a transformative force for social mobility because it had the highest standards and inspired people from all walks of California to aspire to them. Dumping the SAT, whatever you think of the motivations for doing so, was a retreat from this role, and has had cascading disastrous effects on secondary education in the state. Reinstating it will not solve all of these problems, but it is an absolutely essential first step.
This does not apply to all species and all places, but using less land for agriculture is as important a conservation issue as exists. This is a place where technological innovation to increase yields can really help. In fact, it already has, but lots of room for improvement. /2
One of the more important points about conservation globally is that, to an approximation, all that matters is using less land for agriculture. Ag is by far the largest source of land conversion, and land conversion is by far the biggest threat to biodiversity conservation./1
From a recent paper: "There is now overwhelming evidence for the destructive effects of the industrial model of agriculture on Earth’s life-support systems."
What we all need to recognize is that ALL models of crop production that will actually feed us have these destructive effects - it's how crops are grown.
The worst thing about agriculture is its use of land. Whether conventional, no-till, organic, or agroecological-regenerative, the biodiversity lost from initially clearing land for crops far outweighs any differences in farming systems.
And what is a measure of land use efficiency? Yield. High yield=high land use efficiency for cropping.
