Methods Digest – March 2010

The first thing to point out this month is that issue 1 of the journal is now online here. To accompany the issue we have a podcast and a videocast. There is also now a  journal correspondence site to host feedback and discussion of published papers, more on this soon.

The one day journal launch symposium is accepting bookings, with a good response so far. However places are still available, and the booking form is here.

We hope that Methods in Ecology and Evolution will be listed on ISI as soon as possible – if you have 2 minutes to spare we would be really grateful if you would fill out the nomination form. This will help us get noticed by them.

To begin this month’s round up of recent methods papers, Ecological Monographs has a paper  by James Grace and colleagues on structural equation modelling. In this paper they outline how meta-models can be used to aid the translation of theory into SEMs.

In Ecological Applications, Lester Yuan describes how observational data and propensity scores can be used to estimate the effects of excessive nutrients on stream invertebrates.

In Ecology Fitsum Abadi and colleagues perform an analysis of the performance of integrated population models, particularly focussing on the issue of independence of data. Pierre Legendre et al. look at how ‘space-for-time’ experiments can be analysed in the absence of replication. Toby Patterson et al. look at how state space methods can be used to correct telemetry data and the limits to this approach. Etienne Laliberté & Pierre Legendre present a new approach for measuring functional diversity, along with R code.

Richard P. Brown and Ziheng Yang in Systematic Biology look at the problem of dating shallow phylogenies with relaxed clocks using Bayesian methods. Jeremy Brown et al. discuss the problem of very long branch length estimates in trees generated using Bayesian methods, compared with ML alternatives. R. Alexander Pyron presents a Likelihood method for assessing molecular divergence time estimates with the placement of fossils.

In Ecology Letters Colleen Webb et al. present a new approach to develop trait based theory for predicting community composition and ecosystem function.

The latest issue of the Journal of Applied Ecology has a section on ‘Modelling Distributions’. This includes methods papers on the use of proxy-based methods for mapping ecosystem services,  estimating individual survival using occupancy data, estimation of immigration rates using integrated population models, and the ability of habitat suitability models to predict the recovery of threatened species.

In the American Naturalist Bart Haegeman and Rampal Etienne look at the relationship between entropy maxization and species distributions.

Thanks to Rua Mordecai for pointing out an interesting paper in the Auk by Jason Riddle and colleagues on incorporating estimates of prior detections in estimating occupancy, abundance and probability of detection.

Please let me know if there are any papers that could be featured in the next month’s digest update.