Alastair R Tanner

University of Bristol | UB · Advanced Computing Research Centre

Motivation: Social media represent an unrivalled opportunity for epidemiological cohorts to collect large amounts of high-resolution time course data on mental health. Equally, the high-quality data held by epidemiological cohorts could greatly benefit social media research as a source of ground truth for validating digital phenotyping algorithms....

Introduction Digital footprint records -- the tracks and traces amassed by individuals as a result of their interactions with the internet, digital devices and services -- can provide ecologically valid data on individual behaviours. These could enhance longitudinal population study databanks; but few UK longitudinal studies are attempting this. Wh...

Introduction: Digital footprint records - the tracks and traces amassed by individuals as a result of their interactions with the internet, digital devices and services - can provide ecologically valid data on individual behaviours. These could enhance longitudinal population study databanks; but few UK longitudinal studies are attempting this. Wh...

Background Digital phenotypes such as social media data are increasingly being used to infer supposed trends in population mental health and wellbeing. These methods are attractive for their potential scale and timeliness. However, many methodological aspects need investigation to establish if these approaches could be applied successfully. We aim...

Background Disasters such as the COVID-19 pandemic pose an overwhelming demand on resources that cannot always be met by official organisations. Limited resources and human response to crises can lead members of local communities to turn to one another to fulfil immediate needs. This spontaneous citizen-led response can be crucial to a community’s...

Background: Cohort studies gather huge volumes of information about a range of phenotypes but new sources of information such as social media data are yet to be integrated. Participant’s long-term engagement with cohort studies, as well as the potential for their social media data to be linked to other longitudinal data, may give participants a uni...

Background: Cohort studies gather huge volumes of information about a range of phenotypes but new sources of information such as social media data are yet to be integrated. Participant’s long-term engagement with cohort studies, as well as the potential for their social media data to be linked to other longitudinal data, could provide novel advance...

Understanding the temporal context of terrestrialization in chelicerates depends on whether terrestrial groups, the traditional Arachnida, have a single origin and whether or not horseshoe crabs are primitively or secondarily marine. Molecular dating on a phylogenomic tree that recovers arachnid monophyly, constrained by 27 rigorously vetted fossil...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

We found support for clades that clarified key controversies in chelicerate phylogeny. Foremost among these is the alliance between mites and ticks, resulting in a grouping of arachnids with even more species than spiders. More broadly, our results suggest that the success of the arachnid order was most likely based on a single terrestrialisation e...

The reconstruction of the Tree of Life is a central activity for understanding evolution, biodiversity and ecology in the widest temporal framework. Phylogenomics is the inference of relationships between species using inherited molecular characteristics, and is now a major methodology for tree reconstruction, contributing to the multidisciplinarit...

Exceptionally preserved fossils are the product of complex interplays of biological and geological processes including burial, autolysis and microbial decay, authigenic mineralization, diagenesis, metamorphism, and finally weathering and exhumation. Determining which tissues are preserved and how biases affect their preservation pathways is importa...

Coleoid cephalopod molluscs comprise squid, cuttlefish and octopuses, and represent nearly the entire diversity of modern cephalopods. Sophisticated adaptations such as the use of colour for camouflage and communication, jet propulsion and the ink sac highlight the unique nature of the group. Despite these striking adaptations, there are clear para...

Morphological data provide the only means of classifying the majority of life's history, but the choice between competing phylogenetic methods for the analysis of morphology is unclear. Traditionally, parsimony methods have been favoured but recent studies have shown that these approaches are less accurate than the Bayesian implementation of the Mk...

Understanding animal terrestrialization, the process through which animals colonized the land, is crucial to clarify extant biodiversity and biological adaptation. Arthropoda (insects, spiders, centipedes and their allies) represent the largest majority of terrestrial biodiversity. Here we implemented a molecular palaeobiological approach, merging...

Different analytical methods can yield competing interpretations of evolutionary history and, currently, there is no definitive method for phylogenetic reconstruction using morphological data. Parsimony has been the primary method for analysing morphological data, but there has been a resurgence of interest in the likelihood-based Mk-model. Here, w...

Annelids are a phylum of segmented bilaterian animals that have become important components of ecosystems spanning terrestrial realms to the deep sea. Annelids are remarkably diverse, possessing high taxonomic diversity and exceptional morphological disparity, and have evolved numerous feeding strategies and ecologies. Their interrelationships and...