Thanks for the inquiry, Carly! While very interesting, paleoecology is not my area of expertise and I recommend you reach out to @grumpyunclesean.bsky.social or @mhurteau.bsky.social for a comment instead.

Anecdotally, even, most of my peers who accepted faculty positions switched their research to focus more on public health impacts of climate/weather. Which is great! However, it is in no small part because NIH until recently used to be a much larger pool of new funding than NSF/DOE.

Provocative q: why admit more PhDs when static funding for the past decade or so (adjusted for inflation) has made tenure track offers in most areas quite limited?

This is a broader point beyond the completely egg-headed funding cuts that appear to be on the horizon.

Same. They were creative under constraints, now everyone benefits. Also a strong argument for open-sourcing all code.