Each year, Methods in Ecology and Evolution awards the Robert May Prize to the best article by an early career researcher. Named for the late Lord May, the award recognises an outstanding ecologist or evolutionary biologist within five years of finishing their PhD.

Today we announce the shortlisted papers for the 2020 award, based on articles published in Volume 11 – in the coming weeks we will hear from the shortlisted authors with the stories behind their articles. A big congratulations to all the authors for their impressive work!

Focused Ultrasound Extraction (FUSE) for Rapid DNA Extraction from Tissue Matrices – Hal Holmes

The neglected impact of tracking devices on terrestrial arthropods – Femke Batsleer

ML-morph: A fast, accurate and general approach for automated detection and landmarking of biological structures in images – Arthur Porto

Tree-based Inference of Species Interaction Networks from Abundance Data – Raphaëlle Momal

Chipper: Open‐source software for semi‐automated segmentation and analysis of birdsong and other natural sounds – Abigail Searfoss

The many population genetic and demographic routes to islands of genomic divergence – Claudio Quilodran

Hyperoverlap: detecting biological overlap in n-dimensional space – Matilda Brown 

functionInk: An efficient method to detect functional groups in multidimensional networks reveals the hidden structure of ecological communities – Alberto Pascual-García