There is too much science. That is not a complaint about the quantity of research being done. Quite the opposite: it is remarkable how much good work is now being published across the world. But the sheer volume creates a serious practical problem. How can any researcher keep track of what is relevant to their [ ]
In my book Birds Flowers, I included a chapter called “The curious case of Europe”. The point of that chapter was simple enough: compared with much of the rest of the world, Europe appears to be oddly deficient in bird pollination. There are no hummingbirds, no sunbirds, no honeyeaters, and very few native plants [ ]
NOTE FROM JEFF: This press release came out at the start of the week and I am involved in two of the EU-funded projects that are mentioned, Butterfly and ProPollSoil, and I m a co-author of the White Paper. For immediate release University of Bergen Brussels office, Rue Guimard 1040, Brussels, Belgium, 22 June 2026 Eight EU-funded [ ]
Sometimes, science does not go the way you plan. That is usually framed as failure: the experiment did not work, the results were inconclusive, the story was unclear. But science can also advance when we go back to old data and ask a different question. That is exactly what happened with a study of Field [ ]
Recently, I made a comment over on Steve Heard s Scientist Sees Squirrel blog: I have never published a paper that’s not been improved, to some degree, by peer review, and broadly the system works. But I do wonder if it’s sustainable in the long-term and whether in the future LLMs might actually be a more [ ]
One of the few positive things to come out of the COVID lockdowns was the unexpected opportunity to look much more closely at the nature right outside our doors. In 2020 I coordinated the Lockdown Gardens initiative, bringing together pollination ecologists from around the world to carry out standardised surveys of flower visitors in the [ ]
This year 2026 marks the 40th anniversary of my first publication. Forty years. Imagine that I certainly can t! It feels like a long time ago, a distant memory, another life. I was 21 and I hadn t even begun my undergraduate degree. After a less-than-successful time at school I decided to complete a [ ]
I d like to tell you about a dream that I had last night. As far as I can recall this is the first time I ve mentioned my dreams in about 14 years of regular blogging. I dream almost every night: vivid, highly immersive, realistic, often weird, sometimes scary, frequently funny dreams that, each morning, I [ ]
When most people think about pollinators, they picture bees visiting flowers. But for many species, a large part of life happens elsewhere: in the soil. Many pollinators do not just feed above ground, they also nest, shelter or develop below it Discovering more about this aspect of pollinator life histories is the focus of ProPollSoil, [ ]
Oxford University Press recently commissioned me to write a piece for their Expert Essentials series, which is designed to give legal professionals an overview of complex topics that increasingly affect their clients, their sectors, and the regulatory landscape in which they operate. My contribution, on pollinator decline, has now been published. That might seem an [ ]