Blas M. Benito
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blasbenito.com
Blas M. Benito
@blasbenito.com
🌍 Spatial Data Scientist | Team Lead | 🌱 AgTech | PhD in Computational Ecology + MSc in GIS

#rstats developer | geospatial engineering | soil microbiome and crop health mapping | product development

https://github.com/BlasBenito - www.blasbenito.com
Pinned
{collinear} 3.0 is now on CRAN (yay! 🥳)

This #rstats package automates multicollinearity management to improve model robustness and interpretability.

You can learn more at blasbenito.github.io/collinear/, but here's a summary of the most exciting new features: 🧵 1/5
collinear: Automated Multicollinearity Management
Provides a comprehensive and automated workflow for managing multicollinearity in data frames with numeric and/or categorical variables. The package integrates five robust methods into a single functi...
blasbenito.github.io
Reposted by Blas M. Benito
Our global soil predictions at 30 m for 5 year periods (2000-2022+) are now available for viewing from world.soils.app; paper at: doi.org/10.5194/essd.... Download GeoTIFFs with 5-year predictions of soil carbon content, soil carbon density (kg/m3), soil pH, texture fractions, BD and USDA subgroups.
Openlandmap-soilDB, global 30 meter soil datacube
Explore the Openlandmap SoilDB, global 30 meter soil datacube with google earth engine based visualization.
world.soils.app
February 10, 2026 at 12:39 PM
I've been outside of academia for more than 4 years, so I didn't expect this!
February 9, 2026 at 11:57 AM
Reposted by Blas M. Benito
I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself!

bluesky-map.theo.io

I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail
Bluesky Map
Interactive map of 3.4 million Bluesky users, visualised by their follower pattern.
bluesky-map.theo.io
February 8, 2026 at 10:59 PM
Reposted by Blas M. Benito
chronometre: A new package (pair) demo for R and Python
Efficient yet simple object exchange between R and Python
dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2026/02...
#rstats #rcpp #python #datascience
February 8, 2026 at 6:16 PM
Reposted by Blas M. Benito
SHE’S FINISHED! My 5-foot-long Enterprise D oil painting is complete after nearly 100 hours of work!

I remember being 13 years old or so and trying to draw her and it was so hard, and all I wanted was to be able to do something like this. Truly a dream come true. 🥰🖖
February 7, 2026 at 11:37 PM
Reposted by Blas M. Benito
Bit of love for #rstats 📦 {paint} today as I had to swap out a deprecated dependency.

The interactive scrolling ipaint() got a speed up, and some additional controls to advance pages, or to start / end. I find myself using this one a bit lately.
February 8, 2026 at 6:39 AM
Reposted by Blas M. Benito
I'm in the Highlands' newspaper @northerntimes.co.uk, this time with an update on my latest cancer scans from a few weeks ago - still no evidence of disease, exactly 2 years since I finished being on immunotherapy. Yay! ht @ahenderson96.bsky.social #cansky

www.northern-times.co.uk/news/ultra-r...
Ultra-runner now cancer-free after terminal diagnosis
The retired UCL professor is one of very few to have made it through a full two years of an innovative cancer treatment, to wondrous results.
www.northern-times.co.uk
February 6, 2026 at 6:12 AM
Today is my son's 6th birthday.

Kinda bittersweet day though: it is a tough remembrance of our hardest day ever and a milestone nobody though he would reach.

But here he is, living the worst possible life one can imagine with the unwavering resolve of someone that doesn't know better.

💔
February 5, 2026 at 10:52 PM
Reposted by Blas M. Benito
#rstats I'm very happy to announce Jarl 0.4.0!

Jarl is a very fast R linter, written in Rust. This release brings lots of improvements and fixes.

See the blog post: www.etiennebacher.com/posts/2026-0...

And the full changelog: jarl.etiennebacher.com/changelog

🧵 to highlight some features below
Etienne Bacher: Jarl 0.4.0
Find unreachable code, ignore diagnostics, show summary statistics of diagnostics, and more.
www.etiennebacher.com
February 5, 2026 at 1:30 PM
4. Queen
No matter the breed, every dog has one of three default dispositions:

1. Dipshit
2. Has a Job
3. Trying to Pick a Fight with God
February 4, 2026 at 8:09 PM
Me: I need to lose some weight...

Nutella: not today, honey 😘
February 4, 2026 at 1:08 PM
Reposted by Blas M. Benito
Until we as a species can settle on which modifier key we should use to switch between "newline" and "submit" when hitting ↩ I see no future for us
February 3, 2026 at 9:04 AM
Reposted by Blas M. Benito
🚨 GAMs have moved on—so it’s time for an update.

On March 3, 2026 (17:00–19:00 CET) I’ll be livestreaming an updated introduction to Generalized Additive Models in R

📺 YouTube livestream link: youtube.com/live/A9U8e1K...

#RStats #mgcv #GAMs #gratia #statistics 🧪
What's new in the world of Generalized Additive Models
YouTube video by Bottom of the Heap
youtube.com
February 3, 2026 at 12:57 PM
Reposted by Blas M. Benito
I am thrilled to co‑organise Visualising Climate with colleagues from Copernicus/ECMWF, BSC, BC3 and the University of Miami—the first global conference at the intersection of climate change and data visualisation, at a moment when clear, actionable communication is essential.

#dataviz #datavis
Join us in Bologna, Italy, 4–6 Nov 2026 for Visualising Climate — the first global conference fully dedicated to climate data visualization and its power to transform public understanding of a changing planet. Come see the data.
visualisingclimate.org
#VisualisingClimate2026 #DataVis #ClimateCrisis
January 28, 2026 at 11:11 AM
TIL _ can be used as a placeholder (like . in dplyr) when working with the base pipe.
I've been using |> for ages now and I still get caught out sometimes when placing _ inside a nested pipeline 😅
In case you ever wondered about the differences between magrittr pipe and base pipe 🤔

This table is taken from a great stackoverflow answer by @GeorgKindermann

stackoverflow.com/questions/67...

#rstats #dataviz #phd
January 31, 2026 at 12:20 PM
I just watched the game, and Marina "Crash-Out Queen" Mabrey was ABSOLUTE CINEMA

Her ball handling is eclipsed by her shooting, but pay attention, it is incredibly tight!
Unrivaled record in less than 3 quarters!

43 pts and 10 3s and counting for Marina Mabrey!
January 31, 2026 at 11:55 AM
"How AI Impacts Skill Formation", by Judy Hanwen Shen and Alex Tamkin, both working at Anthropic: arxiv.org/abs/2601.20245
January 30, 2026 at 8:25 AM
Reposted by Blas M. Benito
Dear colleagues, we are searching for candidates to fill a Full W3 Professorship for Plant #Ecology at the University of Regensburg, Germany. For details, see www.nature.com/naturecareer... 🌐 🌎 #AcademicJobs
Professorship W3 for Plant Ecology - Regensburg (Stadt), Bayern (DE) job with Universität Regensburg | 12851147
UNIVERSITÄT REGENSBURG   The Faculty of Biology and Pre-Clinical Medicine invites applications for a   Full Professorship W3 for Plant Ecology   Th...
www.nature.com
January 29, 2026 at 3:00 PM
Reposted by Blas M. Benito
One reason I especially like arrow is how easy it is to use a storage system (like your local filesystem or even S3!) like it's a database. Hive-partitions + parquet (optional) + arrow::open_dataset(), and you are absolutely cooking without a ton of setup overhead.
January 28, 2026 at 8:34 PM
Reposted by Blas M. Benito
We're excited to announce the release of {arrow} 23.0.0 🏹📦

Here's a roundup of the new features and changes in a 🧵

Full details can be found at arrow.apache.org/docs/r/news/

#rstats #apachearrow
Changelog
arrow.apache.org
January 28, 2026 at 4:55 PM
Reposted by Blas M. Benito
❓ Do you want to level up your #SDM skills?
Learn Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART) for SDMs in R. A hands-on course with @jbyoder.org on predictor selection, model training, interpretation & spatial projections using embarcadero and dbarts 🚀

www.physalia-courses.org/courses-work...
#Rstats
Species distribution modeling with Bayesian additive regression tree (BART) methods
Dates 1-3 July 2026
www.physalia-courses.org
January 27, 2026 at 1:29 PM
Reposted by Blas M. Benito
Heck, in ND your dog can escape your property and you can watch it run away for a solid three days before it disappears beyond the horizon.
January 21, 2026 at 7:15 PM
Call me silly, but hosting Copernicus Data Space (s3://EODATA) in AWS us-east-1 rather undermines the whole idea of "European data sovereignty", whatever that means.
#geospatial #eo
January 22, 2026 at 1:00 PM