This monthly digest is a bit late as we have been busy writing an editorial and finalizing the running order for the first issue of the journal. That should be online in a couple of weeks. Pre-publication versions of papers are here, whilst an up-to-date list of accepted papers is here. The very latest updates are also available via Twitter and Facebook.

In Ecology Letters, Colin Beale et al. review problems in the regression analysis of spatial data. This review deals with some of the practical considerations in dealing with spatially referenced ecological data.

In Conservation Biology, Jared Underwood and colleagues look at the difficulties of identifying conservation area using different distribution data sets: this is a tricky methodological issue and they identify novel tools for addressing such problems. The problem of how to build an efficient conservation fence is dealt with in a paper by Michael Bode and Brendan Wintle in the same issue and also Wolfgang Nentwig et al. propose a new method for scoring the impact of invasive species.

Andrew Solow and Woollcott Smith describe in Evolution a new test for Cope’s Rule, the tendency for body size to increase along an evolutionary lineage.

In the Journal of Evolutionary Biology Klug et al. review problems in the measurement of sexual selection. Jarrod Hadfield and Shinichi Nakagawa present a new approach that synthesizes comparative analysis with meta-analysis and quantitative genetics, and shows the formal equivalence between some commonly employed methods.

In the Journal of Applied Ecology there are several papers of interest: Devictor et al. consider the problem of defining and measuring ecological specialization; Ward et al. consider the issue of inferring spatial structure in time series data; Obbard et al. compare density estimators for large carnivores; Firn et al. apply alternative state models to invasive species control; De Barba et al. commpare opportunistic and systematic approaches for genetic monitoring; finally Parris et al. consider how to assess ethical trade-offs in ecological field studies.

Andy Hector and colleagues review the analysis of variance with unbalanced data in the latest Journal of Animal Ecology. In the same issue Marc Kéry and Andy Royle present a method for modelling and estimating abundance and trends in metapopulations.

In Global Ecology and Biogeography, Peres-Neto and Legendre look at how to estimate and control for spatial structure in ecological communities. Mellin et al. look at the problem of developing estimators for predicting species and abundance in coral reef fishes.

In Ecological Modelling David Bausch and colleagues compare three statistical methods for modelling resource selection.

Please do email if there are any papers that you think should be featured in the next digest.