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Two Postdoc Positions Available

June 02, 2025

Planet Texas 2050 is currently seeking two innovative, collaborative, and community-engaged Climate and Community Resilience postdoctoral scholars to join our teams in a cluster hire across two research areas: (1) Environmental Social Science, Education, and Communication/Meaning-Making and (2) Environmental Data Science and Spatial Computing. Successful candidates will contribute to groundbreaking research while building their academic careers within a supportive, interdisciplinary, and highly collaborative environment at a top-tier research university. We welcome applicants across a range of disciplines and have particular interest in those who seek to work at the interfaces between disciplines.

Please note that the listings say the position is “expected to continue through May 31, 2026” – year one will actually go until August 31, 2026 and will be renewable for up to one additional year pending funding availability and performance.

(1) Environmental Social Science, Education and Communication/Meaning-Making: Applicant link (Link for UT employees)

(2) Environmental Data Science and Spatial Computing: Applicant link (Link for UT employees)

Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions about the positions and working in the Keitt Lab (these positions will be shared among PI’s and you are encouraged to contact anyone involved in the project).

First MOTUS Detection

April 25, 2025

We had our first MOTUS tower detection at Fennessey Ranch this week! On April 18 a Franklin’s Gull passed by our tower. The previous detection for this gull was at the Estación Biológica Maritza in Costa Rica on November 17, 2024, which is a 2279km journey! Most recently, the gull was detected in South Dakota on April 23.

MOTUS detection
Flight path of the Franklin's Gull detected by our tower

This gull was originally tagged by a group in North Dakota evaluating bird movement around airfields to better understand bird strike risk with aircrafts. The MOTUS wildlife tracking network is made up of many individual participant projects like this one, each deploying tags and receiver stations for their own goals. By centralizing data from all of these projects, the coordinated network expands the scale and impact of each project’s work.

Funding for this Gulf Coast sensing project was provided by the Texas Gulf Coast Research Center.

Motus Tower Installation

March 11, 2025

We installed two Motus towers at our UTMSI/Fennessey Ranch field station last week. The Motus network tracks the movements of migratory birds. Radio receiver towers can detect transmitter tags attached to birds from as far as 20km away. As the number of birds carrying tags and the number of towers increase over time, the greater resolution we will have on the routes long-distance migratory birds use. This is especially important in identifying key stop-over locations where birds refuel before contining migration. These are the first MOTUS equipment installed as part of UT that we are aware of.

MOTUS installation
On the roof of the MSI
MOTUS installation
Second tower at Fennessey Ranch

Funding was provided by the Texas Gulf Coast Research Center.

BioSense software

February 13, 2025

I have made my BioSense repository public on github. The BioSense software runs sdm inside of a docker and generates raspberry pi os images that can be burned to media and used to boot a raspberry pi. These images can be fully configured to connect to a wireguard vpn and begin recordding data. Services are provided to record sound, interogate a GPS, record environmental data off of a BME 280 sensor, manage a UPS (power up and down as needed), run BirdNet, and log soil moisture data. We currently have BioSense running on 8 devices in the field.

If you think BioSense could be useful for your project, please contact me. We are happy to collaborate and consult on projects. Note that I am rewriting BioSense at the moment, so a future version will have a cleaner and more automated design. Nonetheless, BioSense represents a considerable amount of development on my part and I hope will be useful to others and stimulate collaborations.

Spatial Sorting Manuscript

January 22, 2025

Super-student Nikunj Goel (now a postdoc with Mevin Hooten) has posted a preprint to bioR$\chi$iv. Nikunj has extended the theory of natural selection to include spatial sorting, a process in which dispersal-linked genes are disproportionately represented in newly colonized regions. The cool thing is that he developed the theory and used that to figure out what to measure. He found folks that had relevant data and closed the loop. A really impressive bit of theory-data integration. Check it out here.

Figure from manuscript

New R Package

January 08, 2025

FFTAB Logo

FFTAB 2D ACF
Simulated autocorrelation.

Every time I need to use Fourier transforms in R, I have to relearn the layout and the relationship between the order of coefficients and their associated frequencies.

I decided to make things easier for myself by wrapping the Fourier coefficients, along with their frequencies, in a tibble for easy manipulation.

The result is the fftab package. You can also find it on CRAN.

New Year, New Website

January 01, 2025

I have been wanting to move to GitHub Pages and Jekyll for awhile. Now that the college is shutting down its site service, I finally got around to building the new site. I made two tries at using an existing Jekyll template called Academic Pages. It was quite helpful, yet it is designed for a single investigator, not a lab group. Once you start modifying the site extensively, the theme becomes more of a hassle than an asset. So I started fully from scratch an built my own pages, collections, and style sheets. It is not too bad once you get the hang of it. See if you can find the embedded pun.

Happy New Year!