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Academic writing with Markdown, Visual Studio Code and Zotero

02 Apr, 2023

Academic researchers devote a significant amount of time to writing papers to report their findings. As this is an important aspect of their job, they need to use a document preparation system (a word processor) that they are comfortable working with.... Read More


Trick or Tips 005 {R}

12 Feb, 2023

Trick or Tips Ever tumbled on a code chunk that made you say: "I should have known this f_ piece of code long ago!" Chances are you have, frustratingly, just like we have, and on multiple occasions too.... Read More


Continuous integration for R projects: from Travis CI to GitHub actions step by step

24 Nov, 2020

I have been using Travis CI (https://travis-ci.org/) since 2015 and GitHub Actions (hereafter GH Actions; https://github.com/features/actions) for over a year now1. While using these two hosted continuous integration services, I came to realize that I was spending less time troubleshooting with GH Actions than I was with Travis.... Read More


Welcome 👋


The overarching goal of this blog is quite straightforward: tackle challenges and opportunities provided by this new era of open-access and computationally intensive research in the field of ecology. You will therefore find a collection of blog posts that reflect this: code snippets, ecological insights, new and exciting computational tools, opinions on various field of ecology and programming, etc.

In the interest of full disclosure, we also have a hidden agenda for this blog. As a group revolving almost exclusively around academia (for more about us) - and as such, some might say out of touch with reality - we have to write a lot, which can be quite hard (cough read procrastination cough). This blog is therefore also our attempt at significantly stepping-up our writing game!

Wordcloud created with the wordcloud2 R package; silhouette image available on PhyloPic (Lepidochelys olivacea); full R script available on .