Biodiversity losses across Colombia
Field data from hundreds of bird species showed that local assessments can understate broader biodiversity losses from land-use change.
Read paperJacob B. Socolar, PhD
Ecological evidence for decisions that matter.
I am a conservation scientist, field ecologist, and applied statistician working across biodiversity, land-use change, forest carbon, and Bayesian modeling. I currently direct Nature Based Solutions work at BeZero Carbon.
Current Work
Carbon ratings with ecological depth.
My present work brings quantitative ecology into the assessment of nature-based carbon projects.
At BeZero Carbon, I work on the scientific and conceptual foundations of ratings for nature-based carbon projects, with particular attention to forests, baselines, biodiversity, biomass sampling, carbon mapping, and project integrity.
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Nature Based Solutions
Building evidence-led approaches for evaluating forest carbon and related climate and biodiversity claims.
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Forest carbon baselines
Worked at NCX on forest carbon baselines and identifying high-quality landowners for carbon offset projects.
Past Academic Research
Biodiversity and carbon across scale, space, and climate.
My academic research asks how biodiversity responds to human impacts across scales: from the local field plots where organisms are counted, to the broad landscapes where conservation and climate decisions are made. Much of this work combines tropical field biology, bird-community data, Bayesian and hierarchical models, and careful attention to what is lost when ecological variation is collapsed into a single number.
Across projects, the common thread is measurement under complexity: land-use change in tropical forests, climate-linked shifts in bird populations, beta and zeta diversity, macro-demography, occupancy models, and the statistical infrastructure needed to turn messy biodiversity observations into defensible evidence. For a complete publication list, see my Google Scholar profile.
Beta diversity and conservation
A framework for thinking about how turnover among ecological communities should inform conservation priorities.
Read paperClimate and bird phenology
Work on thermal niches and seasonal timing in North American birds under climate change.
Read paperCarbon accounting is ecological measurement.
Several projects sit close to my current work on nature-based carbon: how carbon, biodiversity, field data, and remote-sensing inference interact when real landscapes refuse to behave like tidy accounting units.
Wood density and biomass estimates
Showing how ignoring spatial variation in wood density can bias forest biomass estimates across Colombia.
Read paperSavanna carbon and plant diversity
Examining tradeoffs between woody carbon storage and plant diversity in the Brazilian Cerrado.
Read paperCommunity
Data, records, and shared ecological judgment.
Some of the work happens in papers; some of it happens in the communities that make ecological data trustworthy.
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Voting member, Comité de Registros de Aves Peruanas
Contributing to review of rare and significant bird records in Peru.
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Regional reviewer for Peru and parts of Colombia
Helping maintain the quality and scientific utility of public bird-observation data.
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Field recordings
Contributing bird sounds from fieldwork and natural-history observation.
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Community leader on Stan Discourse
Supporting applied modelers working through Bayesian workflow, diagnostics, and model implementation.
Software
Tools for ecological modeling.
Preserved project pages and package documentation remain available at their original paths.
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flocker
Flexible occupancy modeling through brms and Stan, including single-season, multiseason, nonlinear, and data-augmented models.
Writing
Statistical intuition, plainly built.
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Jacobian adjustments explained simply
An intuitive explanation of why nonlinear transformations require Jacobian adjustments in Stan and related Bayesian workflows.
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Getting closure on occupancy models
A gentle introduction to closure, detection, and the interpretation of occupancy models.
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Occupancy model likelihoods
Advanced notes on likelihood construction, posterior predictive checks, and cross-validation.