Each year Methods in Ecology and Evolution awards the Robert May Prize to the best paper in the journal by an author at the start of their career. Today we present the shortlisted papers for 2019’s award, based on articles published in volume 10 of the journal.

The winner will be chosen by the journal’s Senior Editors in a few weeks. Keep an eye on the blog for the announcement.

This year’s shortlisted candidates are:

Extracting individual trees from lidar point clouds using treeseg – Andrew Burt

A quantitative framework for investigating the reliability of empirical network construction – Alyssa R. Cirtwill

A novel biomechanical approach for animal behaviour recognition using accelerometers – Pritish Chakravarty

Anacapa Toolkit: An environmental DNA toolkit for processing multilocus metabarcode datasets – Emily E. Curd

MistNet: Measuring historical bird migration in the US using archived weather radar data and convolutional neural networks – Tsung‐Yu Lin

Using quantum dots as pollen labels to track the fates of individual pollen grains – Corneile Minnaar

Untangling direct species associations from indirect mediator species effects with graphical models – Gordana C. Popovic

Matrix methods for stochastic dynamic programming in ecology and evolutionary biology – Jody R. Reimer

Current and emerging statistical techniques for aquatic telemetry data: A guide to analysing spatially discrete animal detections – Kim Whoriskey

Over the next month or so, we’ll be finding out more about these articles. You’ll be able to keep up to date with all of the Robert May Prize news here.