Ethan Linck
@elinck
Biologist, writer. Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology at Montana State University. Interested in evolution, conservation, genetics, and ecology. +
new paper (my first w/ a Tok Pisin abstract)! our 2024 camera trap record of the rare New Britain Thrush prompted a review of all known observations of the species since its description—a mere 15 total. led by MS student Jason Gregg for the brand-new Journal of Lost Species: doi.org/10.66264/3c8...
played hooky and made it up the Villard Spires (12,020’) in the Beartooths last Friday 👍👍
grateful to have received the lab's first NSF grant to study cyclical processes of speciation with new theory and tools (applied to Melanesian birds). ad to come, but I'll be looking for a postdoc with computational biology chops—please reach out! (and repost) www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/...
This semester I developed and taught a course on applied population genomics. Lab activities proceed from the basics of the command line and Git to variant calling with workflow managers and a suite of downstream analyses (e.g., ADMIXTURE). All materials can be found here: elinck.org/genomics_eco...
oh yeah my field notes totally look like this too ebird.org/checklist/S3...
(in addition to describing the new resource, we show how default PSMC settings reproduce the false N_e peak pattern shown by Hilgers et al. 2025 Current Biology)
I've slowly been reformatting notes from my population and conservation genetics course at Montana State University into a web book—a rough draft is now live here: elinck.org/popgen_conge...
graphic design standards at science have slipped precipitously over the last 50 years
I suspect this is a sign of things to come—that opportunities to pursue an open-ended Ph.D. in EEB (i.e., a project not tightly tied to a particular grant) will be increasingly rare (www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...)
I can't help but notice polarization and societal dysfunction have increased since we stopped making websites like this
ad to come, but I'm looking for an M.S. student to study the conservation genomics of swift foxes on the American Prairie Reserve in Montana beginning 9/1. this is a collaboration w/ Smithsonian & Justine Becker; strong candidates will have prior genomics experience and be up for remote fieldwork
in the paper I review the long arc of elevational range research and use citizen science data to show that that elevational ranges include variation in abundance; are estimated, not observed directly; are dynamic at small scales; and that these things matter for inferring range shifts
maybe my favorite paper I've written, I have a synthesis out today early access in @asn-amnat.bsky.social today that attempts to answer a simple but slippery question: what is an elevational range? doi.org/10.1086/737130
skied the north couloir of Mt. Wallace in the Absarokas Saturday—perfect chalky powder in a beautiful windy breccia tube in the middle of nowhere (or arguably the middle of everything)