Tom Finch
@tfinch.bsky.social
5.7K followers 360 following 340 posts
Birds, science, climate, hills. Dad. RSPB Conservation Scientist. Views here are my own. Sorry for not getting back to you sooner.
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tfinch.bsky.social
In case you missed it, our paper on the challenges and benefits of getting UK ag/land to net zero is now out: doi.org/10.1016/j.on...
Reposted by Tom Finch
saskajanet.bsky.social
Look at her go!
#invertebrates 🌿
Screen shot of Project Monarch app map of progress of a monarch butterfly from southern Ontario to Oklahoma.
Reposted by Tom Finch
richardkbroughton.bsky.social
New issue of #BirdStudy out today!
Birds on solar farms
Numbers of released Pheasants & Partridges
Woodlarks & Meadow Pipits in Central Europe
Hawfinch supplementary feeding
Black-billed Cuckoo diet
Serengeti Secretarybirds
Tracking Lesser Flamingos
www.tandfonline.com/toc/tbis20/c...
#ornithology
Reposted by Tom Finch
stubearhop.bsky.social
Fully funded PhD working on insectivorous bird declines with a broad range of stakeholders. Starting ASAP #ornithology #zoology #biodiversity #science #ecology
www.exeter.ac.uk/study/fundin...
Reposted by Tom Finch
rspbscience.bsky.social
New job alert: An amazing opportunity - our International science team are hiring for a 2yr position (initially) for an experienced scientist to work on tropical forest conservation 🌍🧪

Full details here: app.vacancy-filler.co.uk/salescrm/Car...

📷Nick Williams/RSPB
The Gola Rainforest
tfinch.bsky.social
Some recent beaver activity too
tfinch.bsky.social
👀 Green Sandpiper and Kingfisher on the Allan Water, just before it joins the Forth. Bit of a mess down there - loads of giant hogweed and Himalayan Balsam, also lots of cow muck washing into the river from the fields behind the prison #birdingScotland
tfinch.bsky.social
I've considered it. Interested to know how the data are labelled - e.g. could you filter by season, activity type, year? This paper found a relationship between heatmap intensity and brown bear usage, by screen-grabbing and georeferencing the online heat map: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
www.sciencedirect.com
tfinch.bsky.social
Yep, I guess it comes down to how the technology gets framed, and what the people paying for it claim in return
tfinch.bsky.social
OTOH, why would we reject something with the potential to reduce global temperature by 0.7-1.2C? Or, what if you divided "emissions reductions" into its constituent interventions - each would have a small potential on its own. Don't we need everything?
tfinch.bsky.social
I really like this paper, which models patterns and drivers of occupancy change across GB for 1252 insect species. Especially like Fig 5 which shows the most important negative and positive drivers for each grid square #conservationscience 🌍
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
The drivers are ordered by geographical coverage for which they are the key cause of increased predicted probability of presence (A) and decreased predicted probability of presence (B). The percentage values in the legend indicate the proportion of the map covered by each of the colours. For example, B shows that increases (↑) in the proportion of urban cover and decreases (↓) in the proportion of broadleaf forest are the first causes of degradation in 17% and 5% of the map respectively.
tfinch.bsky.social
Nice story of a 'European' Roller - equipped with a satellite tag over winter in South Africa, tracked up the east coast of Africa and across the Gulfs of Adan and Oman, to breed in north-west China - where it was eventually found by local ornithologists www.birdlife.org/news/2025/08...
Finding Rory the Roller
A European Roller’s extraordinary journey from South Africa to China demonstrates the power of birds and migration to connect us, along with teaching us about their needs along the world’s Global Flyw...
www.birdlife.org
Reposted by Tom Finch
nadiah.bsky.social
Check out the graphical abstract for a paper recently published in Ecological Modelling.

I have papers published in Ecological Modelling. Never again, I guess.
A diagram titled "Ecological Network Optimisation" with attractive landscapes and networks and very clear AI-generation artifacts.
tfinch.bsky.social
I don't think this is quite right. As long as A < C then additional adults tend to reduce T. It's only once there as many adults as kids that additional adults slow things down.
tfinch.bsky.social
Sounds bad, but "The trees felled to accommodate this infrastructure were productive conifer that would in any event have been harvested at some stage"
tfinch.bsky.social
I get the resistance to a carbon-only lens, but why can't climate mitigation but one of many reasons to pursue ecosystem restoration?
tfinch.bsky.social
I'm also not sure how justifiable it is to net the benefits of ecosystem restoration against terrestrial carbon losses due to climate change. The counterfactual, in the absence of restoration, is that we get the same (or bigger!) losses without any of the benefits.
tfinch.bsky.social
Lots of things have close to zero impact on the gigatonne scale. How far above <1 GT/yr does a climate solution need to get before we consider it worth pursuing.
tfinch.bsky.social
Serendipitously, this just showed up on my feed: bsky.app/profile/nich...
nicholasdcarter.bsky.social
'Cows just replaced the methane from wild bison'

Not even close.

At their peak, wild ruminants incl. bison emitted ~15 Tg CH₄/yr

Today’s 4+ billion farmed ruminants emit over 100 Tg CH₄/yr

That’s nearly 7x more methane.

essd.copernicus.org/articles/17/...
Global Methane Budget 2000–2020
Abstract. Understanding and quantifying the global methane (CH4) budget is important for assessing realistic pathways to mitigate climate change. CH4 is the second most important human-influenced gree...
essd.copernicus.org
tfinch.bsky.social
Like all good lies, isn't there some truth in the biogenic methane one? The methane itself warms the atmosphere the same regardless of source, but the CO2 from oxidised fossil methane is additional? I think AR6 has different (yet similar!) GWPs for fossil and biogenic methane.
Reposted by Tom Finch
j-dunning.net
My first ‘careers’ style blog post.
bou.org.uk
BOU @bou.org.uk · Jul 28
NEW on the #BOUdiversityBlog from Jamie Dunning

Why I don’t want to talk about my neurodivergence

bou.org.uk/blog-dunn...

#ornithology 🪶