Tootfinder

Day 5: Robin Wall Kimmerer
I'm taking these liberty of changing my hashtag and expanding the intent of this list to include all non-men, although Kimerer is a woman so I'll get to more gender diversity later... I've also started planning this out more and realized that I may continue a bit beyond 20...
In any case, Robin Wall Kimmerer is an Indigenous academic biologist and excellent non-fiction author whose work touches on Potawotomi philosophy, colonialism (including in academic spaces), and ideas for a better future. Anyone interested in ecology, conservation, or decolonization in North America will probably be impressed by her work and the rich connections she weaves between academic ecology and Indigenous knowledge offer a critical opportunity to expand your understanding of the world if like me you were raised deeply enmeshed in "Western" scientific tradition. I suppose a little background in skepticism helped prepare me to respect her writing, but I don't think that's essential.
I've only read "Braiding Sweetgrass," but "Gathering Moss" and her more recent "The Serviceberry" are high on my to-read list, despite my predilection for fiction. Kimmerer incorporates a backbone of fascinating anecdotes into "Braiding Sweetgrass" that makes it surprisingly easy reading for a work that's philosophical at its core. She also pulls off an impressive braided organization to the whole thing, weaving together disparate knowledges in a way that lets you see both their contradictions and their connections.
The one criticism I've seen of her work is that it's not sufficiently connected to other Indigenous philosophers & writers, and that it's perhaps too comfortable of a read for colonizers, and that seems valid to me, even though (perhaps because I am a colonizer) I still find her book important.
An excellent author in any case, and one doing concrete ideological work towards a better world.
#20AuthorsNoMen

MetaQuestion: A web application for expert knowledge elicitation addressing plant health and applied plant ecology
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https://

MetaQuestion: A web application for expert knowledge elicitation addressing plant health and applied plant ecology
1. Expert knowledge elicitation provides information to characterize ecological systems and management options. Linking expert knowledge elicitation with a curated question catalog supports a community of practice for ongoing improvement of question quality. 2. The MetaQuestion web app we introduce here draws on the PlantQuest catalog of questions addressing applied plant ecology and management options, making the catalog available in a flexible form for organizers of expert knowledge elicita…

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https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00114 https://

The Living Library of Trees: Mapping Knowledge Ecology in the Arnold Arboretum
As biodiversity loss and climate change accelerate, botanical gardens serve as vital infrastructures for research, education, and conservation. This project focuses on the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, a 281-acre living museum founded in 1872 in Boston. Drawing on more than a century of curatorial data, the research combines historical analysis with computational methods to visualize the biographies of plants and people. The resulting platform reveals patterns of care and scientific o…

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https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09278

Data Driven Discovery of Emergent Dynamics in Reaction Diffusion Systems from Sparse and Noisy Observations
Data-driven discovery of emergent dynamics is gaining popularity, particularly in the context of reaction-diffusion systems. These systems are widely studied across various fields, including neuroscience, ecology, epidemiology, and several other subject areas that deal with emergent dynamics. A current challenge in the discovery process relates to system identification when there is no prior knowledge of the underlying physics. We attempt to address this challenge by learning Soft Artificial Li…