This photo represents an abundance of gratitude for me. . I’m grateful that a serendipitous moment led me to learning about Lou Jost’s work, that I got to trek into one of the reserves he, and the team at EcoMinga, created, and that I got to attend his class on the Mathematics of Biodiversity in Quito, before the pandemic swept its way across the globe. . With a background in physics and mathematics, Jost is not a typical biologist. Seeing the cloud forests of Ecuador and their unparalleled species richness, Jost realized that the conventional way of measuring diversity and comparing it between different sites was doing a major disservice to the true complexity of the many species which live in the tropical Andes. . What is needed is a shift in the way ecological sciences are quantified, to break free of this needless cycle, as it does not substitute for real measures of effect size and is rarely the appropriate model for valid research. We should move to methods where questions are designed in terms of estimating meaningful parameters and statically uncertainties are expressed in confidence intervals, rather than testing an always-false null hypothesis and determining an arbitrary p-value. . Cheers to moving away from inefficient and even harmful practices, simply because they are what we’ve always done in the past. . #ecominga #loujost #mathematics of #biodiversity #ecology #biology #diversity #serendipity #stem #gratitude https://www.instagram.com/p/CAQSnEjhVUg/?igshid=16jj43ctbzt35