Mason Fidino, PhD
@masonfidino.bsky.social
1.5K followers 720 following 73 posts
Quantitative ecologist | Camera traps | Hierarchical models | Urban ecology | Line drawings | 🐦 & 🦝 | Views mine | He/him | masonfidino.com
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masonfidino.bsky.social
New blog post sharing updates on the latest version of the Diel.Niche R package, which we just released about an hour ago. Interested in quantifying if a species is nocturnal with data? Well it is easier than ever now! 🧪 #rstats #cameratrapping

masonfidino.com/Diel.Niche_u...
A ternary plot showing the traditional hypothesis set in the Diel.Niche R package.
masonfidino.bsky.social
Took a little walk just outside @lpzoo.org and came across a family of Cooper’s hawks. There were four flying from tree to tree, got a good picture of two of them!
Two Cooper’s hawks in a tree
masonfidino.bsky.social
In the past I've told people that "I've seen it all" when it comes to conducting an urban #cameratrapping study for 15 years. But today, after literally millions of images collected, we now have our first image of a deer peeing in the woods, so I guess there is still more to see out there 🤣🤣🤣🧪
Reposted by Mason Fidino, PhD
mhmurray.bsky.social
Really excited about our new pub on how health (of people, animals, and ecosystems) can affect, and are affected by, human-wildlife interactions

tinyurl.com/OneHealthHWIs

In the BioScience One Health collection @aibsbiology.bsky.social 🧪

#humanwildlifeconflict #onehealth #urbanwildlife

🧵1/4
scrappynaturalist.bsky.social
🎉 Excited to share our new publication, out now in BioScience: “Health as an outcome and driver of human-wildlife interactions”

Check it out here: tinyurl.com/OneHealthHWIs

Huge thanks to @mhmurray.bsky.social for leading us, and to the rest of our amazing team!

@aibsbiology.bsky.social 🧪🌍🐾👣
Figure 2 from the described publication: A conceptual framework showing the links among human health, wildlife health, and environmental health in the context of human-wildlife interactions as well as key guiding questions to advance health equity and human-wildlife coexistence. The three main components of health included in the diagram are human health, wildlife health, and environmental health. Questions included are "Who disproportionately experiences the health benefits and risks of HWI?", "Who is more likely to experience HWI because of land use and climate change?", and "How do human actions to promote or prevent HWI affect wildlife health?"
masonfidino.bsky.social
Apps are open for the 2026 Biota Awards postdoctoral fellowship! My coworkers and I would love to chat about this opportunity with recent PhD grads (or those close to finishing). We've been honored to receive funding from the Walder Foundation in the past! 🧪

www.biotaawards.org/2026-applica...
2026 Application — Biota Awards
www.biotaawards.org
Reposted by Mason Fidino, PhD
stacksjournal.bsky.social
🦨 Ever wonder how skunks decide where to live in urban landscapes like Chicago?

New research from @masonfidino.bsky.social, @lizalehrer.bsky.social, & @sbmagle.bsky.social from @lpzoo.org used nearly a decade of data to find out! 🦊🌍🧪

A 🧵
Reposted by Mason Fidino, PhD
carlsonlab.bsky.social
Do you study wildlife disease? Don't just share your sequences - share your testing data! We've developed a minimum data standard and an R package to help you, and wrote a little how-to-share-data handbook for disease ecology and One Health surveillance projects 🦇🦟🦠🗺️🔢

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A minimum data standard for wildlife disease research and surveillance - Scientific Data
Scientific Data - A minimum data standard for wildlife disease research and surveillance
www.nature.com
Reposted by Mason Fidino, PhD
colincarlson.bsky.social
NEW! 🎉 We need wildlife disease surveillance to predict epidemics, but data sharing is rare - we found that only 2-3% of studies share raw data. So, we spent three years developing a data standard and R package to help get wildlife disease data into FAIR repositories. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
The title of the paper: "A minimum data standard for wildlife disease research and surveillance" - and an example data table
masonfidino.bsky.social
Tiny Diel.Niche R package update, bin.diel.times() outputs the proportion of time diel periods take up over a day (e.g., night, day, twilight) by setting prop.time = TRUE. VERY helpful if you want to quantify use of a given diel period relative to availability! #rstats 🧪

github.com/diel-project...
GitHub - diel-project/Diel-Niche-Modeling
Contribute to diel-project/Diel-Niche-Modeling development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
Reposted by Mason Fidino, PhD
viralemergence.org
An update from the team on the uncertain future of our program and the impact of NSF budget cuts. Please share and reach out 🦠
Some difficult news from the team:

In NSF's FY25-26 Budget Request to Congress, we learned that our program will take a whopping 50% cut - meaning that in September, we'll be $1.25m short of an operating budget that currently supports a cohort of seven PhD students, four postdocs, and three full-time staff.

Verena is one of the largest and last pandemic prevention-focused programs in the United States: since 2020, we've supported the training of over 60 postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduates. Our researchers have established unique laboratory resources for studying animal immune systems, and discovered new antiviral immune adaptations in bats; developed risk assessment algorithms for wildlife and livestock viruses, and diagnostic algorithms for viruses like dengue, Ebola, and Zika; and quantified the effects of climate change, deforestation, and factory farming on spillover risk. Everything we develop is 100% open source, and our data has supported the research of nearly 150 external researchers in 21 countries to date.

We have three months to make up our budget shortfall. Every dollar spent on Verena supports not just our team, but the community of researchers who use our data, code, and resources. You can help us by sharing this post, and reaching out if you're able to support a unique and vulnerable program. Or just head over to viralemergence.org, and take a look at what we do. 🦟 🦇 🦠
Reposted by Mason Fidino, PhD
tws-uwwg.bsky.social
🌆🐾 The International Urban Wildlife Conference kicks off this weekend in Atlanta! We’re bringing together researchers and practitioners to explore the ecology and evolution of cities. Stay tuned for updates, session highlights, and behind-the-scenes glimpses of #IUWC2025! 🌇🦝🧬🌳
masonfidino.bsky.social
Also my shop is a mess 😆😆😆
masonfidino.bsky.social
By far the largest glue up I’ve done. My shop isn’t great for dimensioning boards this size, so I’ve been putting off doing this for a while. Hopefully this does indeed become the top to my dresser!
Four pieces of cherry wood about to be joined up with biscuits and glue.
masonfidino.bsky.social
Yeah I feel like I could polish this up to be something more. Never thought about JMamm for it though! Adding in how prevalent this is with a review would help, but then it would also suck to write a paper where I’m just calling out statistical errors.
masonfidino.bsky.social
New blog post sharing updates on the latest version of the Diel.Niche R package, which we just released about an hour ago. Interested in quantifying if a species is nocturnal with data? Well it is easier than ever now! 🧪 #rstats #cameratrapping

masonfidino.com/Diel.Niche_u...
A ternary plot showing the traditional hypothesis set in the Diel.Niche R package.
masonfidino.bsky.social
Arguably the goofiest goose #cameratrapping photo we have collected in over 15 years of biodiversity monitoring throughout #Chicago. Be on the look out for laser eyes here in Humboldt Park! 🧪
a camera trap photo of a goose with bright shining eyes
Reposted by Mason Fidino, PhD
cghlewis.bsky.social
Looking for ideas of how to structure a repository when publicly sharing data files from research projects?

I've created a sample project on @cos.io to help you think through this. 👇
#databs #edresearch

osf.io/59gte/
masonfidino.bsky.social
My graduate school held onto this banner for years (I placed in a research image competition while I was there), and now it has made its way back to my office.
A great blue heron with its beak stuck through an American flag
masonfidino.bsky.social
Ha! Was not a good paper to sneak one in (was running a bit long) 😆