Mason Fidino, PhD
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masonfidino.bsky.social
Mason Fidino, PhD
@masonfidino.bsky.social
Quantitative ecologist | Camera traps | Hierarchical models | Urban ecology | Line drawings | 🐦 & 🦝 | Views mine | He/him | masonfidino.com
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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...
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!
July 23, 2025 at 6:29 PM
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 🤣🤣🤣🧪
July 23, 2025 at 1:01 PM
Reposted by Mason Fidino, PhD
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
🎉 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 🧪🌍🐾👣
July 22, 2025 at 11:27 AM
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
July 11, 2025 at 11:33 AM
Reposted by Mason Fidino, PhD
🦨 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 🧵
July 9, 2025 at 3:14 PM
Reposted by Mason Fidino, PhD
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
June 23, 2025 at 4:42 PM
Reposted by Mason Fidino, PhD
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...
June 21, 2025 at 3:17 PM
Reposted by Mason Fidino, PhD
Have you ever cited or come across a mention of the 'human shield hypothesis' and wondered: what is the evidence for this hypothesis, and what is the quality of that evidence? Wonder no more!
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
The Human Shield Hypothesis: Does Predator Avoidance of Humans Create Refuges for Prey?
The human shield hypothesis posits that predators avoid areas of human disturbance due to perceived risk from humans, and prey therefore seeks refuge in these areas of perceived safety. Our systemati....
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
June 17, 2025 at 6:21 PM
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
June 17, 2025 at 8:04 PM
Reposted by Mason Fidino, PhD
An update from the team on the uncertain future of our program and the impact of NSF budget cuts. Please share and reach out 🦠
June 2, 2025 at 12:08 PM
Reposted by Mason Fidino, PhD
🌆🐾 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! 🌇🦝🧬🌳
May 30, 2025 at 6:37 PM
Reposted by Mason Fidino, PhD
Ecologists’ endless quest for automatic inference
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/05/28/e...
Ecologists’ endless quest for automatic inference | Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu
May 28, 2025 at 6:32 PM
Reposted by Mason Fidino, PhD
🐺🐺🐺 NEW PAPER! 🐺🐺🐺

Recovering wolves in WA tolerate threats except high harvest, high lethal removals, and lack of immigration

With @labgardner.bsky.social, Sarah Converse, & Ben Maletzke

zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Forecasting Dynamics of a Recolonizing Wolf Population Under Different Management Strategies
We use a novel spatially explicit projection model to evaluate how different management strategies and system uncertainties affect the recolonization dynamics of wolves. We found that scenarios relat....
zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
May 27, 2025 at 2:53 PM
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!
May 24, 2025 at 4:52 PM
Reposted by Mason Fidino, PhD
Check out the @uofubiology.bsky.social press release on our recent paper documenting advances in molt phenology! attheu.utah.edu/research/as-...
As climate warms, migratory songbirds’ fall feather molt advances by a day every year - @theU
Study by U biologists taps data from 22,000 songbirds captured at Bonderman Field Station to reveal changes in how they replace their feathers
attheu.utah.edu
May 23, 2025 at 5:11 PM
Reviewing a revised manuscript and the other reviewer linked to this blog post of mine in one of their comments. It's little things like this that makes me think my statistical musings are actually helpful. 🙂

masonfidino.com/camera_days/
Please reconsider including the number of sampling days as a covariate when estimating detection probabilities in occupancy models
When you flip a fair coin, the probability that you get heads at least once increases with the number of times you flip the coin. This makes intuitive sense. More chances means you are more likely to ...
masonfidino.com
May 23, 2025 at 1:51 PM
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...
May 22, 2025 at 9:11 PM
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! 🧪
May 20, 2025 at 1:58 PM
Reposted by Mason Fidino, PhD
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/
April 29, 2025 at 12:38 PM
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.
April 24, 2025 at 2:31 PM
In stark comparison to a recent paper I helped lead with over 200 coauthors, I just submitted my first sole authored paper today. VERY DIFFERENT WRITING PROCESSES.
April 21, 2025 at 9:24 PM
New publication out this week in @stacksjournal.bsky.social where we looked at the relative roles local and long-distance colonization play on the distribution of striped skunks throughout the Chicago Metropolitan area! 🧪

www.stacksjournal.org/article/kase...
Local and long-distance colonization influence the distribution of a species in a fragmented landscape - Stacks Journal
Peer-reviewed research - Local and long-distance colonization influence the distribution of a species in a fragmented landscape
www.stacksjournal.org
March 25, 2025 at 2:42 PM
Ah, yes, the joys of cleaning data from large-scale collaborations.
March 13, 2025 at 4:09 PM
Reposted by Mason Fidino, PhD