Álvaro Luna
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alvaroluna87.bsky.social
Álvaro Luna
@alvaroluna87.bsky.social
2.5K followers 950 following 630 posts
PhD in Biology 🐦🌍🦅 | Urban Ecology, Plastic Pollution & Wildlife Conservation | Head of the “Study and Conservation of Biodiversity” Research Group at the European University of Madrid
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Reposted by Álvaro Luna
ecography.bsky.social
Proximity to seabird colonies and water availability shape moss distributions in Antarctica vist.ly/4fqxk #SDM #Mosses #Biogeography
November 24, 2025 at 9:24 AM
Reposted by Álvaro Luna
jgpausas.bsky.social
Homo sapiens and the environmental mismatch hypothesis

"It is possible that the rapid industrialisation of our habitat is outpacing our adaptive capacity & is imposing selective pressures that threaten our evolutionary fitness." Longman & Shaw
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

🧪🏺 #ecoevo
Visual representation of the Environmental Mismatch Hypothesis
November 23, 2025 at 8:17 PM
Reposted by Álvaro Luna
paolocrosetto.bsky.social
What is the most profitable industry in the world, this side of the law? Not oil, not IT, not pharma.

It's *scientific publishing*.

We call this the Drain of Scientific Publishing.

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Background: doi.org/10.1162/qss_...

Thread @markhanson.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy 👇
November 12, 2025 at 10:31 AM
Reposted by Álvaro Luna
alvaroluna87.bsky.social
November 19, 2025 at 5:35 PM
Reposted by Álvaro Luna
alvaroluna87.bsky.social
November 20, 2025 at 12:16 PM
Reposted by Álvaro Luna
alvaroluna87.bsky.social
Little owl (Athene noctua) and long-eared owl (Asio otus) in peri-urban Madrid (Spain).
November 22, 2025 at 7:32 PM
Reposted by Álvaro Luna
tprstly.com
Aye
November 21, 2025 at 11:16 PM
alvaroluna87.bsky.social
Little owl (Athene noctua) and long-eared owl (Asio otus) in peri-urban Madrid (Spain).
November 22, 2025 at 7:32 PM
Reposted by Álvaro Luna
bou.org.uk
Tree cavities water-drinking birds in Brazil: outline based on a citizen science platform | link.springer.com/ar... | Ornithology Research | #ornithology 🪶
Tree cavities water-drinking birds in Brazil: outline based on a citizen science platform
Ornithology Research - Tree cavities are valuable resources for wildlife worldwide. Cavities serve various purposes including breeding, roosting, protection, thermoregulating and foraging. Among...
link.springer.com
November 20, 2025 at 5:34 PM
Reposted by Álvaro Luna
chikichanka.bsky.social
Doñana bajo el agua es un desastre
Cuatro nasas en la llegada del La Rocina a la marisma dan esto. Cangrejo rojo, /Procambarus clarkii/, y pez gato negro, /Ameiurus melas/.
Nada de anguilas, colmillejas, salinetes, pardillas, cachuelos o espinosos (spp presentes cuando se declaró el Parque Nacional)
November 21, 2025 at 5:02 PM
Reposted by Álvaro Luna
pnas.org
The Amazon Rainforest was shaped by people. Analysis of 262 trees species across 1,521 forest plots reveals that both pre-Columbian Indigenous peoples and European colonists enduringly influenced the forest’s relative abundance of trees. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/VAqY50XuP38
The Ecuadorian Amazon taken from a canopy tower at the top of a Ceiba pentandra tree. CREDIT: Mark Bush
November 21, 2025 at 7:01 PM
Reposted by Álvaro Luna
ninanatureresearch.bsky.social
New article! Researchers GPS-tracked 349 individuals across 18 species. Result?
👉 Home range scaling is sex-driven — and we were missing it.
🐆 🦌 🐗

With NINA-researcher Bernardo Brandão Niebuhr dos Santos and many more

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Sex Drives Intraspecific Scaling of Home Range Size in Mammals
We GPS tracked 349 resident individuals across 18 mammal species to, for the first time, gain a broad understanding of how individuals' sex modulates home range scaling within species. Males showed a....
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
November 6, 2025 at 11:31 AM
Reposted by Álvaro Luna
lesleyhenders.bsky.social
www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/...
Is cutting back on plastic really worth all the effort?
For the average person, trying to avoid plastics can feel overwhelming—and maybe pointless. Our writer asked two experts how they navigate our plastic-filled world.
www.nationalgeographic.com
November 20, 2025 at 8:06 PM
Reposted by Álvaro Luna
natrevbiodiv.nature.com
New online! Conservation priorities for global amphibian biodiversity
Conservation priorities for global amphibian biodiversity
Nature Reviews Biodiversity, Published online: 20 November 2025; doi:10.1038/s44358-025-00101-5Amphibians are the most threatened vertebrate group but receive a disproportionately small fraction of conservation funding. In this Review, the authors discuss the status of amphibian conservation, highlighting examples of successful initiatives that have occurred despite global funding challenges.
bit.ly
November 20, 2025 at 7:33 PM
Reposted by Álvaro Luna
natecoevo.nature.com
New Comment:

A quarter of a century after its publication, the biodiversity hotspot concept remains one of the most cited and influential frameworks in conservation science, but its real-world impact is poorly documented in peer-reviewed literature www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Twenty-five years of misinterpreting the biodiversity hotspot approach - Nature Ecology & Evolution
A quarter of a century after its publication, the biodiversity hotspot concept remains one of the most cited and influential frameworks in conservation science. But its real-world impact is poorly doc...
www.nature.com
November 19, 2025 at 4:36 PM
Reposted by Álvaro Luna
alvaroluna87.bsky.social
Leshan (China)
August 17, 2025 at 5:29 AM
Reposted by Álvaro Luna
alvaroluna87.bsky.social
Lijiang
August 20, 2025 at 12:21 AM
Reposted by Álvaro Luna
alvaroluna87.bsky.social
I often miss my summer in the Himalayas, and I hope I get the chance to visit that part of the world many more times.
November 17, 2025 at 7:48 PM
Reposted by Álvaro Luna
amcell.bsky.social
Given the lack of trustworthy & robust peer review by #MDPI (& to a certain extent #FrontiersIn 🔽), a lot of researchers are paying (& wasting) a lot of money to essentially publish a #preprint! #ResearchEthics #SocialLicense
hansonmark.bsky.social Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · 12d
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 20, 2025 at 12:22 AM
Reposted by Álvaro Luna
nhmsystbiodiv.bsky.social
Pavan 𝘦𝘵 𝘢𝘭. (2024) look at mammalian diversity in the eastern Andean slopes, a biodiversity hotspot with high conservation priority, with high endemicity and new species of mammals revealed through DNA barcoding. Read the full study here: buff.ly/GLwWblD #Didelphimorphia #Peru #Rodentia #Yungas
November 19, 2025 at 8:00 AM
Reposted by Álvaro Luna
seobirdlife.bsky.social
🔴La situación general de las especies en España no mejora.

Publicamos el informe "El Estado de las Aves de España 2024", que presentamos esta tarde durante nuestras #jornadasornitológicas.

Te lo contamos👉 https://f.mtr.cool/wutixqxptt
November 19, 2025 at 12:19 PM
Reposted by Álvaro Luna
mongabay.com
Fewer than 150 adult achoque salamanders are thought to remain in the wild, all of them in Lake Pátzcuaro in Mexico’s central Michoacán state.

The lake is shrinking in size and is increasingly polluted with sewage, fertilizer runoff and sediment from deforestation, reports Mongabay’s Liz Kimbrough.
Scientists & nuns unite to save Mexico’s rare achoque salamanders
For the last 20 years, Dominican nuns in a Mexican monastery have cared for the largest known captive population of the critically endangered achoque salamander. Now scientists from Chester Zoo in…
news.mongabay.com
November 19, 2025 at 12:17 PM
Reposted by Álvaro Luna
zsofiahorvath.bsky.social
In our new review in WIREs WATER, we synthesize knowledge on ecosystem (dis)services, multifunctionality, and trade‐offs in urban ponds and highlight garden ponds as a specific subtype that deserves more attention
🏙️🔵🏡
doi.org/10.1002/wat2...
@epcn.bsky.social
Urban Ponds and the Emerging Role of Garden Ponds: Ecosystem Services and Disservices, Multifunctionality, and Trade‐Offs
Urban ponds and garden ponds—a specific subset of the former, usually located in private gardens—are both typical examples of ponds in the urban landscape. They deliver multiple ecosystem services bu...
doi.org
November 19, 2025 at 11:56 AM
Reposted by Álvaro Luna
listo.bsky.social
Tengo fotocopias de ejercicios de ir mirando noticias en periódicos y revistas que tengo que sustituir por mirar artículos en la Wikipedia porque es casi el último bastión sin publicidad intrusiva y titulares clickbait apuntando a muros de pago.
November 19, 2025 at 5:12 AM
Reposted by Álvaro Luna
mongabay.com
[FOUNDER'S BRIEF - @rhettayersbutler.bsky.social]

By some estimates, species are vanishing at up to a thousand times the natural background rate. Yet a new study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B suggests the picture is more complex. Extinctions may have peaked a century ago—and declined since.
A slowdown, not salvation: what new extinction data reveal about the state of life on Earth
For decades, biologists have warned that humanity is precipitating a sixth mass extinction. By some estimates, species are vanishing at up to a thousand times the natural background rate. Yet a new…
news.mongabay.com
November 18, 2025 at 9:01 PM