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 2021 award, based on articles published in Volume 12 – 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 outstanding work!

Daniel Padfield: rTPC and nls.multstart: A new pipeline to fit thermal performance curves in R

Jennifer Moore: The potential and practice of arboreal camera trapping

David Wilkinson: Defining and evaluating predictions of joint species distribution models

Cléber Rodrigo de Souza: Tropical forests structure and diversity: A comparison of methodological choices

Daniel Edler: raxmlGUI 2.0: A graphical interface and toolkit for phylogenetic analyses using RAxML

Adedayo Michael Awoniyi: Using Rhodamine B to assess the movement of small mammals in an urban slum

Sam Levin: ipmr: Flexible implementation of Integral Projection Models in R

Jolle Jolles: Broad-scale applications of the Raspberry Pi: A review and guide for biologists

Jordan Milner: Modelling and inference for the movement of interacting animals

Valerie Steen: Spatial thinning and class balancing: Key choices lead to variation in the performance of species distribution models with citizen science data