Ecological and bioinformatic analysis and project support, for those who need it most.
As ecological systems that sustain us are coming under increasing pressure from climate change and habitat loss, the need to protect and regenerate our natural systems is greater than ever. Scientific conservation and ecological studies will be essential in this process.
Limited access to up-to-date analysis and lab techniques are often research bottlenecks, delaying or halting important ecology research. Amanita Associates is a private, not-for-profit research group that focuses on enabling plant or fungal ecology research and scientific conservation projects to happen.
Ecology and conservation science are in tough times.
In recent years developments in bioinformatics, numerical ecology, and lab technology have made it possible to ask and answer questions about all aspects of the intricate ecological system that is our earth. However, many of these methods are taught only in elite universities, and some of these technologies are expensive and complex, often beyond the reach of under-funded academic researchers and citizen scientists. In many countries, public funding of science is non-existent or under attack. These issues have created vast inequalities in the international ecological research community. Many important projects in scientific conservation and ecology are starved for funding and technical expertise, just as they are most needed to help repair and protect our earth’s ecosystems.
All questions have an answer.
Some solutions do exist to bridge the gap. Thanks to the open-source software revolution and the open-access movement, many high-performance tools are now available for free to anyone who can understand them. Use of these analytical tools can be facilitated by collaboration between trained academics willing to help, and research groups in under-privileged circumstances. Expensive lab technological needs such as massively parallel DNA sequencing or other ‘Omics tools can be identified as pain-points of research plans, to be focused-upon and overcome, often with creative funding solutions. They can then be maximized to their full use-potential to allow cost-sharing and other budgetary solutions.
This is where Amanita Associates is trying to help. We partner with ideologically-motivated conservation or ecology projects that need help with the bottleneck presented by general scientific programming and analysis. We can also advise and cooperate on developing research plans, choices of lab technology, grant-writing, and other challenges to conducting scientific projects. If our contribution is significant, we typically act as co-authors on papers that result from partnerships. Our contribution does not cost the research partners, except when grants are co-written by Amanita Associates with research partners, in which case our expenses are explicitly stated. Our main partners are non-profit conservation groups in the Ecuadorian Andes, but we welcome discussion with any group that is doing good work and needs help with quantitative methods or other challenges in modern scientific projects. We bring substantial experience in ecological survey techniques, microbial and plant ecology, GIS, and community statistical analysis to projects that need them. Send us a message below if you think your project might benefit from a collaboration with us.
Amanita Associates specializes in:
python and R for scientific computing
multivariate ecological statistical analysis
Bayesian spatio-temporal modeling
experimental design and field protocols
processing and analysis of Illumina-platform sequence data
GIS tools for vector and raster data.
Who we are
Amanita Associates consists of eight members, from the United States, Mexico, Canada, and Germany. Learn more about us here.