We are excited to announce Beth Preston and Julie Koch Sheard as our new Blog Associate Editors. Beth and Julie will be working together to drive the blog forward by commissioning content for the blog and working with authors to promote their papers.

Julie is a postdoc at the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate, GLOBE Institute, Copenhagen University, where she also recently completed her PhD. Her PhD work focused on the community ecology of ants, while her postdoc work foc

uses on amphibians and fish in freshwater lakes. Common to both is that she actively engages children and teenagers in her work through citizen science. Children have conducted baiting experiments in the Ant Hunt project and teenagers have collected and analysed eDNA in the RealScience project. Julie is also a co-founder of the Danish National Citizen Science Network and enjoys opportunities to combine science and art.

Beth recently completed her PhD on the impacts of intergroup conflict on banded mongooses at the University of Exeter, and is now working with the Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Programme at the University of Oxford. She is interested in social behaviour, and applying behavioural research to conservation biology. She used social networks and behavioural experiments to investigate the impacts of intergroup conflict on banded mongooses, which have frequent and violent between-group encounters. Now she hopes to transfer these skills to helping save the Ethiopian wolf, one of the most endangered canids in the world.

You can find out more about Beth and Julie on our contributors page.

If you would like to get involved with the new initiatives that Beth and Julie will be leading please contact us.