Florian Hartig
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florianhartig.bsky.social
Florian Hartig
@florianhartig.bsky.social

Professor at U. Regensburg, Germany #Ecology #Evolution #Statistics #MachineLearning

https://www.uni-regensburg.de/biologie-vorklinische-medizin/forschen/arbeitsgruppen/ag-hartig

Environmental science 57%
Geography 15%

Consider joining our session at the World Biodiversity Forum (WBF) 2026 in Davos:

Spatial models for biodiversity: Exploring state-of-the-art applications

Details and abstract submission are here meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/WBF2026/sess...
Session IND11
meetingorganizer.copernicus.org

Reposted by Florian Härtig

📣 Plenary speaker #5:

Dr. Florian Hartig @florianhartig.bsky.social

Professor for theoretical ecology at the University of Regensburg. His research concentrates on theory, simulation models, statistical methods and data science / AI in ecology, evolution and conservation.

statisticalecology.org

Our new study “Human and apex predators shape lower trophic levels through top-down control”, led by Ye Htet Lwin and conducted in in Htamanthi Wildlife Sanctuary, northwestern Myanmar, now out in Biological Conservation www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
I will soon open up calls for a PhD student (free choice of topic as long as it fits to our group) and a scientific programmer / ecological data scientist. If you know what we are doing and would like to join our team, feel free to get in touch.

Reposted by Irena Šímová

Our new article “Advancing general ecosystem models (GEMs): Towards a mechanistic understanding of the biosphere in the light of the Anthropocene” let by Joachim Paul Töpper just out at Ecological Solutions and Evidence dx.doi.org/10.1002/2688...
Advancing general ecosystem models (GEMs): Towards a mechanistic understanding of the biosphere in the light of the Anthropocene
General ecosystem models (GEMs) have been framed as the ‘climate model’ equivalents for nature, but while the latter have been continuously improved and diversified for several decades already, the f...
dx.doi.org

Reposted by Florian Härtig

Spannender Artikel (Paywall) von @christianschwaegerl.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy in der @faznet.bsky.social zur Diskussion über das Insektensterben & die Krefeld-Studie.

U.a. mit Argumenten von @sebseibold.bsky.social @florianhartig.bsky.social & Jens Dauber vom @thuenen.de.
Insektensterben: Warum Studien immer wieder kritisiert werden
An Studien, die nach den Ursachen für das Insektensterben suchen, wird viel Kritik geübt. Wie erklären Forscher, dass es unterschiedlichen Interpretationen gibt - und worin sind sich alle einig?
www.faz.net

I‘ll answer here github.com/florianharti... , feel free to add to the discussion
Support for survival models, in particular Cox PH? · Issue #464 · florianhartig/DHARMa
Via https://bsky.app/profile/staffan.betner.nu/post/3liessyzzqc2z
github.com

That being said, I agree that standard S3 functions schools conform to R defaults as far as possible and I’ll have a look at the example you point out … there are a number of other standard S3 functions that we still need to implement

Hi Norm, thanks for your comments - if you encounter any bugs or have suggestions for changes, please post them at github.com/citoverse/ci...
Issues · citoverse/cito
Building and Training Neural Networks with an R interface - Issues · citoverse/cito
github.com

deep neural networks in one line of R code, with convenient options for automatic hyperparameter tuning, xAI and bootstrapping.

The current CRAN version supports only fully connected DNNs, but our development version on GitHub also includes CNNs and multi-modal architectures.

Reposted by Matthew M. Kling

Looking for a simple way to do #deeplearning in #Rstats? Check out cito, available on #CRAN via cran.r-project.org/web/packages... and presented in this recent Ecography paper nsojournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Cito is an interface to torch for R and supports building and training

Nice! How do you see this in relation to ggeffects?

But why does the effect appear in the first place? We believe the reason is that as mutualism rates are predicted by latitude, mutualism and latitude are perfectly nonlinear confounded. Using only a linear model, nonlinear effects of latitude create spurious effects of mutualism.

The main issue we see is that the mutualism covariate is not measured, but predicted by a very simple model that only depends on latitude (R2 = 0.14). Predicting mutualism rates with a more precise model (R=0.39) removes any effect of this covariate in the main regression.

Reposted by Lisa Hülsmann

In Nature, Delavaux et al., 2024 suggest that species richness on oceanic islands is reduced by mutualism rates on the mainland. In arxiv.org/abs/2411.15105, @maximilianpichler.bsky.social and I had another look at this question and conclude that this effect is likely a statistical artefact.
Is there a robust effect of mainland mutualism rates on species richness of oceanic islands?
In island biogeography, it is widely accepted that species richness on island depends on the area and isolation of the island as well as the species pool on the mainland. Delavaux et al. (2024) sugges...
arxiv.org

Well, I've heard it said that great minds think alike ... ;)

It may be time for a starter pack of ecology starter packs ...

Our study "Analyzing longitudinal trait trajectories using #GWAS identifies genetic variants for kidney function decline" led by Simon Wiegrebe and Iris Heid just published via www.nature.com/articles/s41...

On my way back from a short visit at Uni Birmingham! Thanks Juliano Sarmento Cabral for inviting me!

Reposted by Michael Catchen

Our preprint "Calibration, sensitivity and uncertainty analysis of ecological models -- a review" with Anne Malchow now available at doi.org/10.22541/au.... Comments welcome!

DHARMa v0.4.7 #rstats package for #glmm residual diagnostics now available on #CRAN. Among other things, this version includes a new residual test for #phylogenetic correlation, as well as support for the #phylolm package. cran.r-project.org/web/packages...

Reposted by Florian Härtig

New paper on spatiotemporal population dynamics of #RedKite in Switzerland. We inversely fitted #RangeShifter to long-term monitoring data. This hugely reduced prediction #uncertainty. esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... 1/n

Reposted by Florian Härtig

cito v1.1 #rstats package for deep neural networks (#DL #DNN) (with formula syntax) is now available on #CRAN. New features include likelihoods such as the negative binomial distribution and easy hyperparameter tuning: cran.r-project.org/web/packages...

Reposted by Lisa Hülsmann

Our study "Latitudinal patterns in stabilizing density dependence of forest communities" now out in nature.com/articles/s41... . See also tread by first author @lisahuelsmann.bsky.social below

Our new preprint "Environmental DNA captures the internal structure of a pond metacommunity" led by Wang Cai with Maximilian Pichler, Jeremy Biggs, Pascale Nicolet, Naomi Ewald, Richard A. Griffiths, Alex Bush, Mathew A. Leibold, Florian Hartig, Douglas W. Yu www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Rockström et al. 2009 write e.g. "Many subsystems of Earth react in a nonlinear, often abrupt, way, and are particularly sensitive around threshold levels of certain key variables. If these thresholds are crossed, then [...] deleterious or potentially even disastrous consequences for humans"