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Dr Nadiah Kristensen

@nadiah.bsky.social

Watching “Animal Pride” hosted by Queer FoS at QUT

A screen showing a movie. It’s an underwater shot of two Orcas.

September 26, 2025 at 6:09 AM

Dr Nadiah Kristensen

@nadiah.bsky.social

I can't even be mad any more. This is art.

Two equations, one after the other, contradicting each other. No variables are defined.

August 26, 2025 at 6:13 AM

Dr Nadiah Kristensen

@nadiah.bsky.social

Now that I know what's up, it's actually kind of fun to read

August 26, 2025 at 6:05 AM

Dr Nadiah Kristensen

@nadiah.bsky.social

These were the first three citations I checked, btw, all from the same paragraph

Screenshot of paragraph. It reads as follows:--

3.2.1. Ecosystem services quantification

Improving human well-being and fostering sustainable development are both made possible by ecosystem services (ESs). This is especially the case in places like the Longdong Loess Plateau, where issues like water scarcity, worries about food security, soil erosion, habitat loss, and the need to attain carbon neutrality are significant problems. To address these issues, this study zeroes in on five key indicators of ecosystem services critical to maintaining the region's ecological and socioeconomic stability. One measure of an ecosystem's ability to sustain life is its water yield (Schuldt et al., 2021). This resource is vital for farming and human consumption. Soil conservation is essential to sustaining agricultural production; it examines ecosystems' capacities to prevent soil erosion and degradation (Apostolopoulos et al., 2020). (Marschke and Rousseau, 2022) developed the Grain Provision indicator to measure environmental impacts on food production. This indicator focuses on grain, the primary food source in the region. An important step in mitigating climate change is evaluating ecosystems' capacity to sequester carbon. As a last consideration, Habitat Quality examines the availability and state of animal habitats, a crucial factor in protecting biodiversity. The estimations shown in Fig. 4 provide a comprehensive review of the area's ecological functions, highlighting their significance for the Longdong Loess Plateau's long-term development.

August 26, 2025 at 5:47 AM

Dr Nadiah Kristensen

@nadiah.bsky.social

Damn, Figure 2's got some interesting AI-looking features as well

A flow diagram with some less egregious signs of AI generation.

August 26, 2025 at 5:30 AM

Dr Nadiah Kristensen

@nadiah.bsky.social

Check out the graphical abstract for a paper recently published in Ecological Modelling.

I have papers published in Ecological Modelling. Never again, I guess.

A diagram titled "Ecological Network Optimisation" with attractive landscapes and networks and very clear AI-generation artifacts.

August 25, 2025 at 11:05 PM

Dr Nadiah Kristensen

@nadiah.bsky.social

I'm interested in this online seminar next week.

If you want to sign up for this seminar series, which is timed to suit researchers in Asia and Oceania, there's a Google form here -- forms.gle/WSnJS3bNK1b4... -- or you can follow @courtgt.bsky.social for updates.

Online seminar: PopBio on the Dark Side

Joe Wan
National Taiwan University
Thursday 31st July
1 pm AEST UTC+10

**A unified theory of community structure**

Much of our theoretical understanding of biodiversity, including well-established tools such as coexistence theory, focuses on the identity and number of coexisting species. Yet even when species coexist, they may show stark differences in abundance. Though such differences in community structure determine ecosystem function, we lack general quantitative tools linking interactions to abundance patterns in complex communities. In this seminar, I will address this gap by proposing a theoretical framework uniting coexistence with community structure and function.

Beginning with the classic niche–fitness framework and canonical models of small communities, I illustrate simple links between species' fitness (as measured by invasion growth rates) and abundance (or more generally, their contributions to total function). New quantitative tools generalize these relationships to non-additive competitive interactions and high species richness, providing a general way to predict the structure and function of complex communities. This extends foundational theories of coexistence to new questions of community structure and function: a functional coexistence theory which, as I show using plant and microbial case studies, provides tractable insight into both theoretical models and empirical systems.

**Footer**: Add your email to the above google form to receive the zoom link and future seminar announcements!

July 24, 2025 at 2:29 AM

Dr Nadiah Kristensen

@nadiah.bsky.social

@carlo-h.bsky.social has finished OCR-ing the Antarctic Treaty System documents, and he also indulges my dork-nostalgia for games like Myst, excessive adjectives and archaic prose.

An image resembling the text pop-up of an adventure game from the late 1990s. It reads:

*Journal Entry Found*

Dearest Dr Kristensen;

At long last - and not without the eldritch whisper of unseen forces pressing at the frayed edges of my resolve - the Antarctic Documents have yielded to my labours and now lie assembled, murmuring with the strange energies of the austral post. They are ready. There is a sense, almost a tremor in the veil, as though by unearthing them we have disturbed something older than mere time.

[Access the sealed archive]

Yours at the threshold,

Dr C. Hamalainen
Scribe of the Forgotten Latitude

May 21, 2025 at 11:00 PM

Dr Nadiah Kristensen

@nadiah.bsky.social

biorxiv is down, in case anyone else has revisions due today. Either that or something has happened to my user account :-(

On the plus side, guess I get to go home now :-)

A screenshot of the downforeveryoneorjustme website saying biorxiv.org is down.

May 15, 2025 at 8:08 AM

Dr Nadiah Kristensen

@nadiah.bsky.social

Thanks, past self, that's exactly what I was looking for!

$A snippet of code. It reads: # NOTE to future self - commented code is a more elegant way to find attractors and basins """ # find the attractors and their full basins of attraction # --- idx_2_attractor = {$

April 28, 2025 at 10:35 PM

Dr Nadiah Kristensen

@nadiah.bsky.social

PopBio on the Dark Side Seminar this week - "Predicting Ecosystem Responses to Perturbations via a Geometric Approach" by @akshitg.bsky.social

Thursday 1pm AEST, UTC +10 April 24.

Our students chose to do a project on this topic this semester, so very interested to hear Akshit's talk!

Advert for the seminar with abstract: How ecosystems respond to environmental perturbations is a fundamental question in ecology, made especially challenging due to the strong coupling between species and their environment. Here, we introduce a theoretical framework for calculating the steady-state response of ecosystems to environmental perturbations in generalized consumer-resource. Our construction is applicable to a wide class of systems, including models with non-reciprocal interactions, cross-feeding, and non-linear growth/consumption rates. Within our framework, all ecological variables are embedded into four distinct vector spaces and ecological interactions are represented by geometric transformations between these spaces. We show that near a steady state, such geometric transformations directly map environmental perturbations - in resource availability and mortality rates - to shifts in niche structure. We illustrate these ideas in a variety of settings including a minimal model for pH-induced toxicity in bacterial denitrification. We end by discussing the biological implications of our framework. In particular, we show that it is extremely difficult to distinguish cooperative and competitive interactions by measuring species' responses to external perturbations.

April 21, 2025 at 10:53 PM

Dr Nadiah Kristensen

@nadiah.bsky.social

Carlo Hamalainen has been doing an amazing job using LLMs for OCR on early Antarctic Treaty System documents.

A window with two columns. On the left-hand side is a scanned document. On the right-hand side is the text that was extract. It reads:
---
INTRODUCTION

The time is past now, when a yacht's arrival at an Antarctic base was the cause of marvel and admiration. That era, short though it was, is over - despite the still as yet un-cruised waters of most of Antarctica's coastline.

Yachts and cruise ships, scientists and support personnel, all have contributed in these past few years to the opening up of Antarctica. We must be careful that this increasing familiarity with the Antarctic does not dull the emotions or lessen the respect that did so often transform the lives of earlier visitors, that enticed them back again and again, stimulating others to go, until visitors today must be numbered in their thousands every year.

Because few visitors will be familiar with the Antarctic environment, or the way in which the various nations occupying bases here operate, these guidelines have been drawn up to help you and your crew during your season South.

Above all, an understanding and appreciation of the Antarctic as a very special and fragile environment will go a long way to lessening the ...
---

April 13, 2025 at 9:10 PM

Dr Nadiah Kristensen

@nadiah.bsky.social

Today, I attended the International Women in Mathematics Day, jointly hosted between @griffith.edu.au, QUT, and UQ.

A conference room with 7 people standing at the front hosting a Q&A. In the background is a screen that says "group break out sessions".

March 31, 2025 at 5:09 AM

Dr Nadiah Kristensen

@nadiah.bsky.social

I’m happy to announce our J Theor Biol paper about kin selection in group games in now available online

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A net plot the dynamics between four strategies: Unconditional Cooperators, Liars, Unconditional Defectors, and Coordinating Cooperators. There are arrows showing the direction of evolution, and dots representing stable and unstable steady states. There’s a lot of info in there, but it’s more intended as decorative in this context.

March 30, 2025 at 7:27 PM

Dr Nadiah Kristensen

@nadiah.bsky.social

Attending the inaugural PopBio on the Dark Side seminar with Ryan Chisholm at National University of Singapore.

It's tricky for those of us on this side of the planet to attend most online ecology seminars. You can sign up for the series here: forms.gle/WSnJS3bNK1b4...

Thx @courtgt.bsky.social !

Screenshot of a Zoom meeting of an online talk. The title is "A unified theory of niche assembly and dispersal assembly in community ecology". At the top of the right-hand panel is Courtney Taylor's video stream. She organised the seminar.

March 28, 2025 at 3:09 AM

Dr Nadiah Kristensen

@nadiah.bsky.social

Hisashi and I working out some of the maths together when I visited in 2023. You can see us in the reflection of the whiteboard

A photo of a whiteboard with some maths scribbled on it. It's very messy and doesn't mean very much to me anymore in this moment. In the reflection, you can see Hisashi and me. We're both wearing COVID masks, and I'm holding up a phone to take the photograph.

March 9, 2025 at 10:08 PM

Dr Nadiah Kristensen

@nadiah.bsky.social

A picture of us 3 coauthors together from when Hisashi visited Singapore last year

Hisashi, Ryan, and me standing in front of a sign reading "Department of Biolog[y]".

March 9, 2025 at 10:02 PM

Dr Nadiah Kristensen

@nadiah.bsky.social

🎉 After minor revisions, J Theor Biol has accepted our new paper!

We explored how to model the evolution of discrete strategies in group games played between relatives, and we applied it to a situation where players could verbally agree to contribute to the public good ("Coordinated Cooperation").

Screenshot of an abstract.

Title: Many-strategy games in groups with relatives and the evolution of coordinated cooperation

Authors: Nadiah P. Kristensen, Ryan A. Chisholm, Hisashi Ohtsuki

Text: Humans often cooperate in groups with friends and family members with varying degrees of genetic relatedness. Past kin selection can also be relevant to interactions between strangers, explaining how the cooperation first arose in the ancestral population. However, modelling the effects of relatedness is difficult when the benefits of cooperation scale nonlinearly with the number of cooperators (e.g., economies of scale). Here, we present a direct fitness method for rigorously accounting for kin selection in $n$-player interactions with $m$ discrete strategies, where a genetically homophilic group-formation model is used to calculate the necessary higher-order relatedness coefficients. Our approach allows us to properly account for non-additive fitness effects between relatives (synergy). Analytical expressions for dynamics are obtained, and they can be solved numerically for modestly sized groups and numbers of strategies. We illustrate with an example where group members can verbally agree (cheap talk) to contribute to a public good with a sigmoidal benefit function, and we find that such coordinated cooperation is favoured by kin selection. As interactions switched from family to strangers, in order for coordinated cooperation to persist and for the population to resist invasion by liars, either some level of homophily must be maintained or following through on the agreement must be in the self-interests of contributors. Our approach is useful for scenarios where fitness effects are non-additive and the strategies are best modelled in a discrete way, such as behaviours that require a cognitive `leap' of insight into the situation (e.g., shared intentionality, punishment).

Celebratory cupcakes. Three small cakes in a cardboard tray on a wooden table. The flavours are: raspberry cheesecake, orange poppy seeds, and berry frangipani.

March 9, 2025 at 9:56 PM

Dr Nadiah Kristensen

@nadiah.bsky.social

Thinking of things of they did wrong, that allowed it to happen to them, reassures us that we can prevent it from happening to us.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-wo...

Early evidence

In 1966, Lerner and his colleagues began a series of experiments that used shock paradigms to investigate observer responses to victimization. In the first of these experiments conducted at the University of Kansas, 72 female participants watched what appeared to be a confederate receiving electrical shocks for her errors during a learning task (learning pairs of nonsense syllables). Initially, these observing participants were upset by the victim's apparent suffering. But as the suffering continued and observers remained unable to intervene, the observers began to reject and devalue the victim. Rejection and devaluation of the victim was greater when the observed suffering was greater. But when participants were told the victim would receive compensation for her suffering, the participants did not derogate the victim.[6] Lerner and colleagues replicated these findings in subsequent studies, as did other researchers.[8]
Theory

To explain these studies' findings, it was theorized that there was a prevalent belief in a just world. A just world is one in which actions and conditions have predictable, appropriate consequences. These actions and conditions are typically individuals' behaviors or attributes. The specific conditions that correspond to certain consequences are socially determined by a society's norms and ideologies. Lerner presents the belief in a just world as functional: it maintains the idea that one can influence the world in a predictable way. Belief in a just world functions as a sort of "contract" with the world regarding the consequences of behavior. This allows people to plan for the future and engage in effective, goal-driven behavior. Lerner summarized his findings and his theoretical work in his 1980 monograph The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion.[7]

Lerner hypothesized that the belief in a just world is crucially important for people to maintain for their own well-being. But people are confronted daily with evide…

February 24, 2025 at 10:26 PM

Dr Nadiah Kristensen

@nadiah.bsky.social

Sorry, "just-world fallacy"

In 1966, Lerner and his colleagues began a series of experiments that used shock paradigms to investigate observer responses to victimization. In the first of these experiments conducted at the University of Kansas, 72 female participants watched what appeared to be a confederate receiving electrical shocks for her errors during a learning task (learning pairs of nonsense syllables). Initially, these observing participants were upset by the victim's apparent suffering. But as the suffering continued and observers remained unable to intervene, the observers began to reject and devalue the victim. Rejection and devaluation of the victim was greater when the observed suffering was greater. But when participants were told the victim would receive compensation for her suffering, the participants did not derogate the victim.[6] Lerner and colleagues replicated these findings in subsequent studies, as did other researchers.[8]
Theory

To explain these studies' findings, it was theorized that there was a prevalent belief in a just world. A just world is one in which actions and conditions have predictable, appropriate consequences. These actions and conditions are typically individuals' behaviors or attributes. The specific conditions that correspond to certain consequences are socially determined by a society's norms and ideologies. Lerner presents the belief in a just world as functional: it maintains the idea that one can influence the world in a predictable way. Belief in a just world functions as a sort of "contract" with the world regarding the consequences of behavior. This allows people to plan for the future and engage in effective, goal-driven behavior. Lerner summarized his findings and his theoretical work in his 1980 monograph The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion.[7]

February 24, 2025 at 10:15 PM

Dr Nadiah Kristensen

@nadiah.bsky.social

The steampunk spaceship interactive display at QUT’s “The Cube” is all I ever wanted as a kid 🥹

December 2, 2024 at 10:48 PM

Dr Nadiah Kristensen

@nadiah.bsky.social

I think his National Institutes of Health pick, Jay Bhattacharya, is linked to the CREC Christian Nationalists somehow as well. I’m not 100% sure, but they’re very happy about it and reminding their friends he attended their Civic and Medical Freedom Summit in May.

gaberench.com/idaho-civic-...