Russell Dinnage | Lightnews

Daijiang Li @djli.bsky.social · Jun 19

Excited to share this paper led by @rdinnager.bsky.social. It is truly years of team effort to get to this point. We are currently finalizing the data, which will be included in PhenoBase and will be open early next year. @er1ngrady.bsky.social besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

PhenoVision: A framework for automating and delivering research‐ready plant phenology data from field images

Plant phenology plays a fundamental role in shaping ecosystems, and global change-induced shifts in phenology have cascading impacts on species interactions and ecosystem structure and function. D...

besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Russell Dinnage @rdinnager.bsky.social · Jun 6

NicheFlow learns an underlying numerical representation of species' niches, letting you do neat things like interpolating between two species, generating hypothetical niches of non-existent species. This animation also shows how the model treats environmental and geographic space separately.

Russell Dinnage @rdinnager.bsky.social · Jun 6

I am currently training NicheFlow 2.0 on several hundreds of thousands of species' range maps and will be releasing it publicly in the coming months.

Join me at the #ESA2025 meeting in August to learn more about it. Stay tuned for an announcement of my #ESA2025 short course on foundation models.

Russell Dinnage @rdinnager.bsky.social · Jun 6

The magic? NicheFlow uses generative AI to:
🌍 Share knowledge across species
🧬 Capture complex environmental relationships
📊 Work with limited data
🔮 Predict distributions for rare species

Preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.10.15.618541v1

P.S. 'It's not magic.'

NicheFlow: Towards a foundation model for Species Distribution Modelling

1. Species distribution models (SDMs) are crucial tools for understanding and predicting biodiversity patterns, yet they often struggle with limited data, biased sampling, and complex species-environm...

biorxiv.org

Russell Dinnage @rdinnager.bsky.social · Jun 6

Excited to share my latest preprint: NicheFlow - which aims to be one of the first true foundation models for ecology! 🎉

It's like having an AI ecologist that learns from millions of species observations to predict where ANY species might live.

Ask me about it and its applications at #Evol2025! 🧵👇

NicheFlow: Towards a foundation model for Species Distribution Modelling

1. Species distribution models (SDMs) are crucial tools for understanding and predicting biodiversity patterns, yet they often struggle with limited data, biased sampling, and complex species-environm...

biorxiv.org

Matt Grainger @drmattg.bsky.social · Jun 6

🚀 New paper led by Dr Becks Spake!

We make the case for precision ecology—using big data & predictive tools to tailor conservation actions to local contexts.

Can ecology learn from medicine & marketing to boost impact? We think so.

Read it here: rdcu.be/eoaR4
#Conservation #Ecology #BigData

Precision ecology for targeted conservation action

Nature Ecology & Evolution - The fields of medicine and marketing use large data volumes and computational power to target individuals. This Perspective argues that applied ecologists should...

rdcu.be

Russell Dinnage @rdinnager.bsky.social · Jun 5

For more details on graduate opportunities in my lab see: rdinnager.github.io/dinnage_lab_...

Prospective Students

Graduate Student Opportunities: AI Foundation Models for Organismal Biology Fully Funded MSc and PhD Positions with Dr. Russell Dinnage Department of Biological Sciences, University of…

rdinnager.github.io

Russell Dinnage @rdinnager.bsky.social · Jun 4

What if we could teach machines to think in the logic of evolution? 🌱🤖

That's what I'll be discussing at #Evol2025 in Athens, Georgia - showing how AI reveals that evolution moves along curved paths, not straight lines.

June 24, 12:15pm, Computational Biology session. See you there? 🧵👇

Russell Dinnage @rdinnager.bsky.social · Jun 2

Currently funded by NSF to develop AI that learns ecological principles from species distributions. Looking forward to connecting with the computational biology community here!

Lab: rdinnager.github.io/dinnage_lab_website/
Code: github.com/rdinnager

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Dinnage Lab

Biological | Computational | Eco-Evolutionary Systems Welcome to the Dinnage Lab at Florida International University, where we develop foundation models for understanding complex biological systems.

rdinnager.github.io

Russell Dinnage @rdinnager.bsky.social · Jun 2

Recent highlights:
📚 NicheFlow: First foundation model for species distributions
🌸 PhenoVision: AI analyzing 53M field photos (98.5% accuracy!)
📦 Open-source R packages: slimr, ENMTools, phyr

I believe in democratizing computational methods for all biologists.

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Russell Dinnage @rdinnager.bsky.social · Jun 2

New to Bluesky! I'm Russell Dinnage, developing AI foundation models for organismal biology @FIU (moving to @UAlberta July 2025)

My mission: Create AI systems that understand life from molecules to ecosystems, bridging computational innovation with biological insight 🧬🤖

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Dan Warren's Greatest Hits.m3u @danlwarren.bsky.social · Jun 1

Hey everybody! A few months ago @americanbeetles.bsky.social had the idea to do a Schoolhouse Rock-style video about the important work insect taxonomists do, so I wrote a song and she illustrated it. Please share as widely as you can!

youtu.be/yYSIhzb14QI

The Pest Is Still To Come

YouTube video by Dan Warren

youtu.be

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