We have two new papers online this week:

In the first, David Watson looks at the problem of measuring diversity in highly diverse vertebrate communities. He shows that methods usually used for arthropod communities can be applied to monitoring bird populations. The analyses he performed answered important questions, such as: what effort is required to completely inventory a site? And, what is the least effort required to yield robust estimates of species richness?

In the second paper, Ian Stott & colleagues highlight some problems with population projection matrices, one of the most commonly used tools in population modelling. They find that ~25% of published models have a structural problem (they are reducible, i.e. do not contain pathways diretly or indirectly linking each stage to each other), and that ~16% are non-ergodic, i.e. there is more than one growth rate / stable state. This is clearly a previously unappreciated issue in modelling, and Stott et al. present simple approaches for diagnostic analysis.

Other papers currently online and available pre-publication include:

A list of currently accepted papers is here, and do check out our podcast and videocast interviews with authors.