Issue 7.2 is now online!
The February issue of Methods is now online! As you may have seen already, it includes the BES cross-journal Special Feature: “Demography Beyond the Population“. There are also eight other wonderful articles to read.
We have four articles in the Demography Beyond the Symposium Special Feature. You can read an overview of them by two of the Feature’s Guest Editor Sean McMahon and Jessica Metcalf here (Sean and Jessica are also Associate Editors of Methods).
If you’d like to find out more about each of the individual papers before downloading them, we have blog posts about each one. Daniel Falster and Rich Fitzjohn discuss the development of plant and provide some advice on creating simulation models in Key Technologies Used to Build the plant Package (and Maybe Soon Some Other Big Simulation Models in R). There is a look back at the evolution of Integral Projection Models from Mark Rees and Steve Ellner in How Did We Get Here From There? A Brief History of Evolving Integral Projection Models. In Inverse Modelling and IPMs: Estimating Processes from Incomplete Information Edgar González explains how you can estimate process that you can’t observe. And keep an eye out for Brittany Teller’s blog post coming next week!
Don’t wait too long to get the Demography Beyond the Population Special Feature papers though, they’re freely available for a limited time only
In addition to the Special Feature, we have a two Open Access articles this month. The first comes from Paul Blackwell et al. and is titled ‘Exact Bayesian inference for animal movement in continuous time‘. In the article the authors develop a novel methodology which allows exact Bayesian statistical analysis for a rich class of movement models with behavioural switching in continuous time, without any need for time discretization error. The methodology allows for exact fitting of realistically complex movement models, incorporating environmental information.
The second Open Access article is, ‘An asymmetric logistic regression model for ecological data‘, by Osamu Komori et al. In the article they present a method that can enhance the applicability of a generalized linear model to various ecological problems using a slight modification and significantly improves model fitting and model selection.
We also have an applications article from Martin Mühling et al.: ‘OEZY: Optimising EnZYme selection for best performing terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis using ARB‘. In this article, the authors introduce a new open source software tools which allows you to correctly predict the phylogenetic position of yet unknown sequence types by choosing restriction endonucleases that lead to a high correlation.
On top of all of this, we have articles on Animal Movement, Stable Isotopes, Estimating Abundance and Ecological Networks.
This month’s cover image shows sagebrush steppe in eastern Idaho, USA. In this community, population dynamics of the dominant perennial grasses and shrubs respond to both climate variation and competition. In the associated article, Linking demography with drivers: climate and competition, Teller et al. develop the use of spline methods that statistically link growth and survival data to high resolution competition and climate data. The authors demonstrate that spline methods can accurately reflect the spatial effects of neighbors and the temporal effects of climate covariates like precipitation and temperature.
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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