For my twelfth or thirteenth birthday, my parents gifted me a copy of the then-newly published Natural History of Madagascar. This mammoth tome, comprising 1728 pages, set a benchmark in the literature on every topic it covered, and it covered almost everything you could think of. I spent many nights […]
Open access (OA) is increasingly demanded by funders, and of course is desired by researchers and readers alike. Yet some journals charge incredibly high fees for you to publish your research open access. This has led to a lot of researchers being resigned to either publish behind a paywall, or […]
I have just returned from three weeks at the Udzungwa Ecological Monitoring Centre (UEMC) in central Tanzania, just outside Udzungwa Mountains National park, where I have been teaching as one of four main lecturers on a Field Training Course, part of the Erasmus+ project ‘Developing curricula for biodiversity monitoring and […]
Another year is over, and 2021 seemed still more full and stressful than 2020! So here are some reflections on my year from an academic perspective. The first of January 2021 saw me starting a new job: PI on a three-year German Research Foundation (DFG) funded PostDoc project in Michael […]
The herpetofauna of the EU is relatively well studied, and it is rare that species new to science are discovered. Today, my colleagues and I have described a new species of blindsnake from the island of Mayotte—an island that lies in the western Indian Ocean between Madagascar and Mozambique, but […]
We’re officially in the 2020s! It’s the time of year when I look back on the academic events of my last year! My 2019 started with fondue and raclette, surrounded by friends. But on the 2nd of January I was back at it already, working hard on what would take […]
On the 14th of August 2019, my colleagues and I published a paper in PLoS ONE, wherein we talk about the way that the IUCN Red List deals with species complexes and taxonomic uncertainty, and the real meaning of ‘Data Deficient’. As I have written about this topic here before, I […]
Continuing our work on the small arboreal chameleons of the Calumma nasutum species group, today my colleagues and I have published a new paper in which we describe three new species from the C. guibei complex. These new chameleon species are marvellously different, with one having a rainbow of colour, another having […]
Two years ago, I travelled with a team of international and Malagasy researchers to a remote forest in the north of Madagascar, on ‘Expedition Angano.’ The goal of the expedition was to study forest fragmentation and its impact on reptile and amphibian biodiversity and distribution, as well as to identify […]
For Biodiversity Day 2015, I wanted to shine a spotlight on Madagascar. I don’t have time for a long post, so here are some short points about the biodiversity of Madagascar: First of all, Madagascar is the world’s fourth largest island, and stretches 1000 km from northern to southern tip. […]
This week saw the publication of a paper by Javier Nori and Rafael Loyola in the Open Access journal PLoS One, entitled “On the Worrying Fate of Data Deficient Amphibians” (read the article here). The goal of the paper was to discuss the precarious position of amphibians assessed as Data […]
