Reconnecting the Web of Life: Rewiring and Network Robustness

Posted on October 21, 2019 by Chris Grieves

Post provided by VINICIUS A. G. BASTAZINI, JEF VIZENTIN-BUGONI and JINELLE H. SPERRY

Esta publicação no blogue também está disponível em português

Species Loss and Cascading Effects

Scale-throated Hermit (Phaethornis eurynome). ©Pedro Lorenzo.

Minimising the effects the ongoing Anthropocene mass extinction has become one of the main challenges of our era. The data suggest that the current rate of species loss is 100–1,000 greater than the background rates seen in the geological record. “But does it really matter if species are lost?” This question has permeated social and political debates. It’s usually used to demean conservation efforts. But it has also intrigued conservation scientists.

We know that species don’t occur alone in their environment. They’re entangled by their interactions, forming complex networks. In these networks the loss of one species may result in the loss of other species that depend on it. This process is known as co-extinction. Estimates of the magnitude of past and future extinction rates have often failed to account for the interdependence among species and the consequences of primary species loss on other species though. Continue reading →

Religando a rede da vida: Reconexões de interações e a robustez de redes ecológicas

Posted on October 21, 2019 by Chris Grieves

Postagem fornecida por VINICIUS A. G. BASTAZINI, JEF VIZENTIN-BUGONI and JINELLE H. SPERRY

This post is also available in English

Perda de espécies e efeitos em cascata

Rabo-branco-de-garganta-rajada (Phaethornis eurynome). ©Pedro Lorenzo.

Minimizar os efeitos do atual processo de extinção em massa do Antropoceno se tornou um dos principais desafios da nossa era. Os dados sugerem que a taxa atual de perda de espécies é 100-1.000 vezes maior do que as taxas de fundo observadas no registro geológico. “Mas realmente importa se uma espécie é perdida?” Essa questão que permeia os debates sociais e políticos, geralmente para desqualificar os esforços de conservação, também tem intrigado os cientistas da conservação.

Sabemos que as espécies não ocorrem sozinhas em seu ambiente. Elas estão interligadas por suas interações ecológicas, formando redes complexas. Nessas redes, a perda de uma espécie pode resultar em um efeito dominó, culminando na perda secundária de outras espécies. Esse processo é conhecido como co-extinção. As estimativas da magnitude das taxas de extinção passadas e futuras muitas vezes falharam em explicar a interdependência entre as espécies e as conseqüências da perda primaria de espécies. Continue reading →

Researchers Use Drones to Weigh Whales

Posted on October 15, 2019 by Chris Grieves

Below is a press release about the Methods in Ecology and Evolution article ‘Estimating body mass of free‐living whales using aerial photogrammetry and 3D volumetrics‘ taken from the British Ecological Society.

A southern right whale female rolling on her side and exposing her lateral side to the surface while gently touching her calf. ©Fredrik Christiansen

Researchers have devised a way to accurately estimate the weight of free-living whales using only aerial images taken by drones. By measuring the body length, width and height of free-living southern right whales photographed by drones, researchers were able to develop a model that accurately calculated the body volume and mass of the whales.

Because of their large size and aquatic life, previously the only way to obtain data on the body mass of whales was to weigh dead or stranded individuals.

The innovative method can be used to learn more about the physiology and ecology of whales. “Knowing the body mass of free-living whales opens up new avenues of research. We will now be able to look at the growth of known aged individuals to calculate their body mass increase over time and the energy requirements for growth. We will also be able to look at the daily energy requirements of whales and calculate how much prey they need to consume.” said Assistant Professor Fredrik Christiansen from Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies in Denmark and lead author of the study. Continue reading →

Meaningful Monitoring or Monitoring for the Sake of Monitoring? epower Helps You Tell the Difference

Posted on October 9, 2019 by Chris Grieves

Post provided by REBECCA FISHER and GLENN R SHIELL

As environmental managers, we’re frequently asked to make judgements about the relative health of the environment. This is often difficult because, by its nature, the environment is highly variable in space and time. Ideally, such judgements should be informed by robust scientific investigation, or more precisely, the reliable interpretation of the resulting data.

Type I and Type II Errors

Even with robust investigations and good data, our interpretations can sometimes be wrong. In general, this happens when:

the investigation concludes that an impact has occurred, when in fact it hasn’t (Type I error)
fails to detect an impact, when an impact has actually occurred (Type II error).

Understanding the circumstances that lead to these errors is unfortunately complicated, and difficult unless you have a strong statistical background. Continue reading →

Issue 10.10: Conservation, Molecular Techniques, Stats and More

Posted on October 7, 2019 by Chris Grieves

The October issue of Methods is now online!

We’re a little lat on this post, but there’s another great issue of Methods in Ecology and Evolution online now.

This month, we cover movement ecology, plant cover class data, acoustic indices, local adaptations an much more.

There’s more information below on the Featured Articles selected by the Senior Editor and all of our freely available papers (Practical Tools and Applications articles are always free to access for everyone upon publication, whether you have a subscription or not). Continue reading →

Ten Tips for Dealing with Work and Parental Leave

Posted on October 3, 2019 by Chris Grieves

Post provided by Emily Nicholson

A version of this article was originally published on Women in Science AUSTRALIA (read the original article here) or on Emily’s blog.

As a Science Mum, I am often asked how I managed work and maternity leave, particularly by parents about to embark on a similar journey. So I thought that it might make a good topic for a blog post and start of a discussion. Here, I want to tackle things you can do as individuals for managing work and maternity/paternity leave – both for the person going on leave (e.g. mum or dad), and their colleagues – assuming that the person going on leave wants to maintain their academic career post-leave, including PhD students. There are other pieces for another day on what institutions should do to support those going on parental leave, and tips for coming back from leave (see also my previous post on accounting for career breaks in a CV or track record). I refer to maternity leave but this can equally be parental/carers/paternity leave – or any leave when you are taking a big chunk of time largely away from work to pursue other things in life. First, though, I’ll preface my tips with a little about my background.

I am writing predominantly from my own experience. Briefly, I have three children (born 2009, 2011 and 2013). I took about 8-9 months maternity leave with each, and returned to work part-time (3-4 days a week). All three were born while I was a postdoc on fellowships, the first two in the UK and the third in Australia, with good paid maternity leave provisions, and which allowed me to return to work part-time and extend my contract pro rata. For the first baby, our family was on the other side of the world, so we had little week-by-week support, and my husband was in a very demanding full-time job; while I was on maternity leave with my second we moved back to Australia, where we both work part-time and have a lot of family help and support, which makes a huge difference. I am a conservation scientist, and my work is desk based, including modelling and analysis, plus the usual academic roles of paper and grant writing, reviewing, editing and supervising students, but no teaching at the time. So the type of work I do wasn’t much affected by working part-time or being on leave. Continue reading →

Responding to New Weeds Needs Speed: Spatial Modelling with riskmapr Can Help

Posted on September 26, 2019 by Chris Grieves

Post provided by JENS FROESE

Disclaimer: this post is NOT about the drug or the TV series, but about invasive alien plants. Yes, even biologists often refer to them as ‘weeds’.

Responding to New Weed Incursions

Responding to new weed incursions early and rapidly is very important. ©Panda8pie2

Weeds are a major threat to biodiversity and agricultural industries globally. New alien plant species are constantly introduced across borders, regions or landscapes. We know that some (such as those listed in the IUCN Global Invasive Species Database) are likely become problematic invasive weeds from experiences elsewhere.

When a weed is first introduced, population growth and spread is typically slow. This ‘invasion lag’ may be due to straightforward mathematics (population dynamics) as well as geography, environmental change or genetics. In any case, the lag period often presents the only window of opportunity where weed eradication or effective containment can be achieved. So, responding to new weed incursions early and rapidly is very important. Anyone who has ever battled with a bad weed infestation in their backyard knows it’s best to get in early and decisively! But decisions about where to target surveillance and control activities are often made under considerable time, knowledge and capacity constraints. Continue reading →

Using Artificial Intelligence to Track Birds’ Dark-of-Night Migrations

Posted on September 24, 2019 by Chris Grieves

Below is a press release about the Methods in Ecology and Evolution article ‘MistNet: Measuring historical bird migration in the US using archived weather radar data and convolutional neural networks‘ taken from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

On many evenings during spring and fall migration, tens of millions of birds take flight at sunset and pass over our heads, unseen in the night sky. Though these flights have been recorded for decades by the National Weather Services’ network of constantly-scanning weather radars, until recently these data have been mostly out of reach for bird researchers.

“That’s because the sheer magnitude of information and lack of tools to analyse it made only limited studies possible,” says artificial intelligence (AI) researcher Dan Sheldon at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Continue reading →

A Celebration of World Rivers Day

Posted on September 22, 2019 by Chris Grieves

Post provided by Alfred Burian, Antonia Ford and Quentin Mauvisseau

Celebrating our river ecosystems world-wide on the 22nd of September.

It’s the 22^nd of September and that means it’s this year’s UN World Rivers Day! In over 60 countries around the globe events are going on today to bring attention to the many values of our waterways. And we, the Aquatic Ecology Special Interest Group of the BES, are joining in with the celebrations! We’re highlighting recent methodological advancements that will help us to manage and conserve our rivers in the future. So let’s get started…

Multiple Stressors and Molecular Tools

Today, human activities across the world are impacting rivers to varying degrees. As scientists, we frequently see the interaction of multiple different stressors such as flow regulations, pollution or climate change affecting our rivers. The combined impact of stressors like these may be worse than any of their individual impacts. To understand and manage the effect of them, we need cost-effective and reliable analytical tools that can capture site-specific and ecosystem-wide effects.

Recent methodological advances that will help us to achieve these goals often rely on the application of new or improved molecular tools. Emerging techniques include environmental DNA (eDNA) based applications to monitor endangered and invasive species as well as stable isotope ecology, which provides us with new insights into animal diets and energy flows through aquatic food webs. We’d like to take the opportunity to introduce some of the novel developments in both of these exciting fields. Continue reading →

Thank You to All of Our Reviewers: Peer Review Week 2019

Posted on September 20, 2019 by Chris Grieves

As many of you will already know, this week is Peer Review Week (16-20 September). Peer Review Week is a global event celebrating the vital work that is done by reviewers in all disciplines. Throughout the week, we’ve been looking back at some of the peer review advice and guidance that we’ve published on the blog.

The theme for this year’s Peer Review Week is quality in review. So we thought that the best way to end the week would be to thank to everyone who has reviewed for us. Without the hard work and expertise of the people who voluntarily review papers for us, Methods in Ecology and Evolution would not be the successful journal that it is today. We are incredibly grateful for all of the time and effort that reviewers put into reading and commenting on the manuscripts that we send to them.

We’d like to send a HUGE THANK YOU to everyone who has ever reviewed for Methods in Ecology and Evolution – whether you’ve worked on one paper or twenty – we really appreciate your time and effort.

You can see the names of everyone who has reviewed for us so far in 2019 on our website.

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