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ESA Early Career Ecologists @esa-earlycareer.bsky.social · 20d

Read the paper here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Connect with Dimitrios:
Website: dgkontopoulos.io
Mastodon: @[email protected]
Bluesky: @dgkontopoulos.ecoevo.social.ap.brid.gy

No universal mathematical model for thermal performance curves across traits and taxonomic groups - Nature Communications

Thermal performance models support metabolic modeling in diverse contexts. Here, the authors compare 83 existing models with 2739 thermal performance datasets, finding that model performance doesn’t n...

www.nature.com

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ESA Early Career Ecologists @esa-earlycareer.bsky.social · 20d

They also publicly deposited code for fitting each model and provided study design recommendations, which should remove a major barrier to the use of TPC models by ecologists and other scientists.

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ESA Early Career Ecologists @esa-earlycareer.bsky.social · 20d

Thus, to facilitate the choice of the most appropriate model(s) for a given dataset, they estimated a dendrogram of all 83 models based on the average similarity of their fits.

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ESA Early Career Ecologists @esa-earlycareer.bsky.social · 20d

They found that model performance cannot be predicted from sampling resolution, type of biological rate, or taxonomic information.

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ESA Early Career Ecologists @esa-earlycareer.bsky.social · 20d

A major theme of his research involves investigating how biological rates of ectotherms respond to temperature—the “thermal performance curve” (TPC). In their recent paper in Nature Communications, he and his co-authors evaluated the performance of 83 TPC models across 2,739 datasets.

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ESA Early Career Ecologists @esa-earlycareer.bsky.social · 20d

He pursues this by combining approaches and datasets from several fields, such as ecoinformatics, phylogenetic comparative methods, comparative genomics, and behavioral experiments.

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ESA Early Career Ecologists @esa-earlycareer.bsky.social · 20d

The main focus of his research is on understanding how diverse biological systems (from molecules to ecosystems) respond to environmental changes over various timescales (from seconds to millions of years).

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ESA Early Career Ecologists @esa-earlycareer.bsky.social · 20d

📊 Dimitrios - Georgios Kontopoulos @dgkontopoulos.ecoevo.social.ap.brid.gy is an integrative ecologist, currently based at UCLA as an independently funded Walter Benjamin Postdoctoral Fellow.

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ESA Early Career Ecologists @esa-earlycareer.bsky.social · 20d

Centering and uplifting Indigenous voices requires time and trust, but represents the most rewarding science of Dr. Carroll's career.

Read the paper here:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Connect with Dr. Carroll:
Website: connectivityandconservation.com

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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ESA Early Career Ecologists @esa-earlycareer.bsky.social · 20d

While Dr. Carroll's career has primarily focused on applied conservation questions thus far, they note that finding ways to blend and balance traditional and western ways of knowing is critical.

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ESA Early Career Ecologists @esa-earlycareer.bsky.social · 20d

As part of their most recent postdoc and in collaboration with Dr. Jason Fisher and the ACME Lab at the University of Victoria, Dr. Carroll has been working alongside Canada's Traditional Knowledge Holders and First Nations.

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ESA Early Career Ecologists @esa-earlycareer.bsky.social · 20d

Specifically, Quest members study how to better model and map species movement, habitat use, and community structure to inform conservation, human-wildlife interactions, and land-use planning across multiple spatial scales and levels of biological organization.

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ESA Early Career Ecologists @esa-earlycareer.bsky.social · 20d

2025 Runner-ups:
🍃 Dr. Kathleen Carroll is the PI of the Quest (QUantitative Ecology and conServaTion) Lab at the University of Rhode Island. Members of the lab primarily focus on wildlife conservation ecology questions while relying on various spatial datasets and statistical tools.

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ESA Early Career Ecologists @esa-earlycareer.bsky.social · 20d

Read the award-winning paper here!
“The importance of distinguishing between natural and managed tree cover gains in the moist tropics”
Link: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Connect with Xueyuan:
LinkedIn:
www.linkedin.com/in/xueyuan-e...
Website:
xygao2.wixsite.com/xueyuangao
X: @eric_xueyuangao

The importance of distinguishing between natural and managed tree cover gains in the moist tropics - Nature Communications

Tree cover gains in the moist tropics (1982–2015) were 56% naturally regenerated forests and 27% managed tree systems, with forest type influencing carbon recovery. Effective forest restoration requir...

www.nature.com

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ESA Early Career Ecologists @esa-earlycareer.bsky.social · 20d

He serves as a Technical Expert Panel member for the Verra SD VISta Nature Framework, advising Verra—the biggest standard in the voluntary carbon market—on the evaluation of nature credit projects.

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ESA Early Career Ecologists @esa-earlycareer.bsky.social · 20d

His work has been recognized with the 2025 Ecological Society of America Early Career Ecologists Outstanding Paper Award and the 2023 American Association of Geographers Council Award for Outstanding Graduate Student Paper.

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ESA Early Career Ecologists @esa-earlycareer.bsky.social · 20d

2025 Award Winner:
🌦️Xueyuan Gao is a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University. His research focuses on nature-based climate solutions and voluntary carbon and nature markets.

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ESA Early Career Ecologists @esa-earlycareer.bsky.social · 20d

The award consists of a $500 cash prize, and the winner is announced at the ESA-ECE business meeting and awards ceremony at the ESA annual meeting. Congrats to all the contenders for the 2025 award! 🎉

Find out more through the link in our bio 🔗

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ESA Early Career Ecologists @esa-earlycareer.bsky.social · 20d

🏆📚 AWARD ANNOUNCEMENT! ✨The "Outstanding Publication by an Early Career Ecologist" award, given by the Section every year since 2017, honors exceptional research by an ECE section member published as a peer-reviewed manuscript of particular importance and relevance to the ecological community. 🧵1/19

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ESA Early Career Ecologists @esa-earlycareer.bsky.social · Sep 9

As always, you can find this and more in this month’s newsletter, available to everyone through the Early Career Ecologists Discourse (not Discord) page. Access it here: discourse.esa.org 🌱

Ecologists Collaborating Online

ESA's community portal for anyone interested in the science of ecology and the opportunities that it represents.

discourse.esa.org

ESA Early Career Ecologists @esa-earlycareer.bsky.social · Sep 9

💬 How do you communicate your research in a way that will successfully reach your target audience?

This toolkit, developed by SESYNC goes over the key components needed to build a communications strategy, and is available in a variety of formats and as a worksheet!

www.sesync.org/resources/co...

SESYNC'S Communications Toolkit

SESYNC developed this toolkit to guide interdisciplinary researchers in communicating their findings to a variety of audiences.This toolkit goes over the key...

www.sesync.org

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ESA Early Career Ecologists @esa-earlycareer.bsky.social · Sep 9

🔗 Looking for a place to share and search open-source data and publications?

Manage and share your research projects with the Open Science Framework! osf.io

OSF

osf.io

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ESA Early Career Ecologists @esa-earlycareer.bsky.social · Sep 9

🌉 How can we bridge the gap between environmental data science and real-world applications?

Register for the Environmental Data Science Summit to join the conversation!

Date: January 27-29th, 2026
Location: Santa Barbara

Applications due Oct 8th!
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

2026 NCEAS Environmental Data Science Summit Application

Thank you for your interest in attending the Environmental Data Science (EDS) Summit in Santa Barbara on Jan 27-29, 2026! The EDS Summit brings together all types of environmental data scientists to b...

docs.google.com

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ESA Early Career Ecologists @esa-earlycareer.bsky.social · Sep 9

Hey all,
Happy back to school! For those not in the academic sector, don’t worry, you can still use this as an excuse to get new stationary 🤫 Here is a snippet of this month’s newsletter! 🧵 #ECEnewsletter

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Reposted by ESA Early Career Ecologists

Alyson East @alyeast.bsky.social · Aug 15

Thats a wrap. That you all for such a great #ESA2025. I have loved my time at Chair of the @esa-earlycareer.bsky.social section, and am so happy to pass the seat to Cait for 2026 🎉

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