Issue 5.8 includes articles on lidar & radar in ecology, occurrence data analysis, ecological networks, measuring habitats, life history variation, dispersal, biodiversity–productivity and monitoring populations, along with the freely available application article: ‘a simple numerical tool to infer whether a species is extinct‘.
There’s an associated video this month in which Phillip Stepanian and colleagues talk about the background and motivation behind their paper: ‘an introduction to radar image processing in ecology‘, followed by a short tutorial.
About the cover: This issue’s cover image shows a bull African elephant (Loxodonta africana), called B1177 ‘Obama’, moving through Samburu National Reserve in Kenya. Positional data collected using GPS tracking is increasingly used to study the movement ecology of a wide variety of species and can also be used for applied conservation as in our elephant program in Kenya. Space-use estimators are often needed to model an individual’s utilization of its environment based on sampled positional data. In the associated article we present a new space-use estimator called the Elliptical Time-Density (ETD) model that is ideally suited to frequently sampled GPS locations. Unlike other methods, this approach is based on empirically derived parameters that are biologically interpretable.
Photo© George Wittemyer.
To keep up to date with Methods newest content, have a look at our Accepted Articles and Early View articles, which will be included in forthcoming issues.
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