To celebrate the International Statistical Ecology Conference and British Ecological Society Quantitative Ecology Annual Meeting, Laura Graham and Susan Jarvis have compiled a virtual issue celebrating all things statistical and quantitative in ecology.

Statistical and quantitative methods within ecology have increased substantially in recent years. This rise can be attributed both to the growing need to address global environmental change issues, as well as the increase in data sources to address these challenges.

For this virtual issue, Laura and Susan chose papers from all five BES journals (People and Nature‘s first issue will be published next year) covering the key themes of the two meetings. They selected papers on methods including distance sampling, integrated modelling, point process models, network approaches and dynamic models. Many of the papers in this virtual issue take on challenges related to the rise in citizen science data and other novel data sources, including methods to integrate diverse sources of data and to make predictions under imperfect sampling.

The papers selected encompass the wide range of ecological disciplines covered by the two conferences including movement ecology, disease ecology, spatial ecology and quantitative genetics. All of them will be freely available for a limited time.

To find out more, please read the Statistical Ecology 2018 Virtual Issue.