Erin Hotchkiss

Ryan (and me) are hiring a PhD student! Sweden is a great country to do a PhD, see the link or ask us for more details, or share with potential students!

Flyer advertising the webinar "Honoring the legacy of Bob Hughes", with invited speakers Marcos Callisto, Leandro Juen, Phil Kaufmann, and Rafael Ligeiro.

Join the SFS Latin America Chapter for a webinar celebrating Bob Hughes' legacy and international collaboration in freshwater science!

🗓 March 31, 2026, 1:00 PM EST / 3:00 PM Brasília
📌 Preregister here: buff.ly/zKGpNyV

#FreshwaterScience #InternationalCollaboration

Bridging waters and power: Hydrosocial territories with socio-natural resilience in China's Great Yangtze River protection programme Global water governance has increasingly focused on resilience as a means to manage cross-scale complexity and change. In this paper, rather than prop…

Thrilled our paper is out in Environmental Science & Policy! We merge 'hydrosocial territories' & 'socio-natural resilience' to study the Yangtze River. TL;DR: Water resilience isn't just ecological—it's deeply political & shaped by hydro-hegemony. See attached PDF! 🌊 #AcademicSky

I was in a 2 hour briefing today on the Iran War. All the briefings are closed, because Trump can't defend this war in public.

I obviously can't disclose classified info, but you deserve to know how incoherent and incomplete these war plans are.

1/ Here's what I can share:

A small part of the Brazos river, Texas, USA.

Thru 4/3 you can join our partners at the @ijcsharedwaters.bsky.social for a series of webinars, or submit comments online to share your perspectives on how the Canadian and US governments are doing to restore, protect and enhance #GreatLakes water quality: glperspectives.ijc.org/en

Does anyone know if it’s recommended to measure TN/TP on a SEAL with the alkaline potassium persulfate digestion method or acidic potassium persulfate digestion? Thanks!!

This is absolutely brilliant.

Detection of energetic equivalence depends on food web architecture and estimators of energy use - Nature Communications The universality of the energetic equivalence rule has long been debated. Here, the authors show that across 183 soil invertebrate food webs, size–density and energy use varied with trophic level, ene...

Detection of energetic equivalence depends on food web architecture & estimators of energy use ... the "need to integrate food web energetics & trophic structure to better understand body size structure of ecosystems" #allometry #metabolicscalingtheory www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧪🌐

‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI As AI has upended the way students learn, academics worry about the future of the humanities - and society at large

I'm one of many professors quoted in this report from Alice Speri. I really appreciate The Guardian taking an angle which has basically eluded every other major outlet.

Never believe that budget cuts to social programs or education, or supporting the arts and science are about fiscal responsibility due to limited funds. They always find the money when they want to.

And this doesn't even include the cost of human lives, which is the real horror here.

most deicer‑derived chloride travels through subsurface pathways, and stream water age emerged as a powerful lens for understanding salinity patterns across seasons and storm events.

New paper with the crew at the Occoquan Lab and a big team of collaborators. We built a modeling framework that helps explain how deicing salts move through urban watersheds and shape stream salinity and drinking water quality.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Iran Conflict Sparks Global Rush For Critical Fertilizers A third of global fertilizer supply passes through the Strait of Hormuz, while gas from the region is crucial to production of nutrients for global agriculture.

If you, or one of your loved ones, are one of those people who likes to eat food, you need to read this story.

Because farmers from Poland to Australia to South Dakota are starting to freak out over the insane spike in fertilizer prices.

Gift link ⤵️

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

It is absolutely insane that the US appears to have targeted desalination plants first – putting them onto the board. Iran seems to have already retaliated against one in Bahrain. This is one of the most obvious ways this could spiral.

We published this yesterday before strikes today on oil storage facilities in Tehran.

So far strikes have also hit oil and LNG infrastructure and energy export facilities in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait and the UAE.

Map at the link ⬇️ @npr.org

Many heat-stressed tropical insects are reaching their limits Vast study in Peru and Kenya confirms limited defenses against rising temperatures, redoubling climate concerns

Insects living in the lowland tropics have evolved to deal with brutal heat. But many of them are close to their limit, according to a massive study that assessed the heat tolerance of hundreds of species. https://scim.ag/406Y5yh

Key Questions on the Role of Technology in the Expanding Middle East War Tech Policy Press asked experts working at the intersection of technology policy, security, and international affairs to share what they are watching.

The expanding war in Iran brought to the fore questions about the role of technology in armed conflict, including the controversial use of new artificial intelligence technologies. Tech Policy Press invited perspectives from experts on what they are watching for as the situation unfolds.

The Nature Record Now it’s our turn to shape what comes next. A new project. A mission years in the making.

The DRAFT Nature Record national assessment has dropped and is ready for comment! I'm proud to be one of the authors. This is the first comprehensive, independent, evidence-based assessment of how nature is doing across the U.S.
Come read. Come comment. Come shape the record.
naturerecord.org

It's the funding of taxonomic research & training that's dying out. Without an ability to identify life forms, we can't recognize/quantify invasions & extinctions and their impacts on ecosystems. Imagine trying to repair a complex steel structure if you can't distinguish different types of bearings.

a calendar that says today a day you can vote early on it ALT: a calendar that says today a day you can vote early on it

Today March 6 is the first day of early voting in Virginia for the redistricting referendum

All voters can cast ballots at their local election office and satellite locations in some places

Make your voice heard Virginia!

Link w more information below

www.elections.virginia.gov/casting-a-ba...

Data Visualization A Practical Introduction

Here’s a full draft of the upcoming second edition of my “Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction”: socviz.co

If you took $1 billion and gave it to the endowment of a different small college each day, they could each provide a free college education to several hundred students per year in perpetuity. Instead we are using that money to bomb schools and kill students in Iran, for no clearly stated purpose.

USAID’s Emergency Food Security Program spent $4 billion in FY2022 to feed 114 million people in 55 countries. We just blew that much money in four days of this war.

Big Tech Signs White House Data Center Pledge With Good Optics and Little Substance “Data centers … they need some PR help,” said President Donald Trump at the event.

NEW from me: the pledge big tech companies signed at the white house today is supposed to protect ratepayers from high utility bills due to data centers — but the WH actually has little ability to make that happen

"this is theater," @aripeskoe.bsky.social told me

Hydrology Paper of the Day @hollykirk.bsky.social on a Nature-Water Design framework for ensuring urban and landscape design in the context of ecological services, systems, and climate change: a combination of frameworks; design principles; ensuring connectivity and stewardship; and five principles.

Science Advocacy 101 The Union of Concerned Scientists invites scientists and experts to a training webinar to discuss what science advocacy looks like today. Learn how you can advocate on key issues such as climate chang...

4/ Are you interested in becoming a science advocate? Join our webinar and learn how you can use your voice and expertise to advocate on key issues such as climate change or public health policies.

📅Thursday, March 12, 3pm ET.

📍RSVP↘️

Even putting aside the implications for the laws of war, someone who describes mass killing in this way is not well, nor is the society that empowers that person to kill.

the state of public history, 2026:

with one eye on the Trump administration, NPS staff worries that describing the murder of an abolitionist "might denigrate the murderers"

Hi friends - I'm working on article about efforts to measure, track, and adjust WORKLOAD in higher ed, both for staff and faculty.

I'm interested in talking to people who have experiences w/:
-Workload management gone wrong
-Exemplars of workload measurement
-True tales of workload being adjusted

Anybody who has tried to take photos in the perpetual twilight of the tropical forest understory knows how frustrating it can be.
This is where you need an artist.
Debby Cotter Kaspari is a whiz with pen and ink. And this is one of her understory drawings from Isla Barro Colorado, Panama, 2001.