Our June issue is now online now! This issue contains 17 articles about the latest methods in ecology and evolution, including citizen science data, drones and multi authored papers and much more! Read to find out about this month’s featured articles and the article behind our cover.

Featured Articles

Researchers in ecology and evolutionary biology are increasingly dependent on computational code to conduct research. Hence, the use of efficient methods to share, reproduce, and collaborate on code as well as document research is fundamental. To help researchers in ecology and evolution adopt useful features from GitHub to improve their research workflows, this article reviews 12 practical ways to use the platform.As more ecologists and evolutionary biologists establish their workflows using GitHub, the field can continue to push the boundaries of collaborative, transparent, and open research. 

Computational training for ecological and evolutionary sciences has become more abundant and accessible over the past decade, but tool development has outpaced the availability of specialized training. Although current computational training creates an excellent starting place, linear styles of scripting can risk becoming labor- and time-intensive and less reproducible by often requiring manual execution. Workflow management software (WMS) can aid in the reproducibility, intelligibility and computational efficiency of complex pipelines. This article discusss the benefits and challenges of implementing WMS through a case study with the targets r package to further highlight WMS benefits through workflow automation, dependency tracking and improved clarity for reviewers.

Conservation planning requires extensive amounts of data, yet data collection is expensive, and there is often a trade-off between the quantity and quality of data that can be collected. Researchers are increasingly turning to community science programs to meet their biodiversity data needs, yet the reliability of such data sources is still a common source of debate. This article highlights four main solutions based on research using community science data that can be applied across all biodiversity data collection and research. This is to ensure that valuable community science data are given the prominent place they deserve, and that data collected by experts are appropriately vetted and biases accounted for using all the tools at our disposal.

The value of large-scale collaborations for solving complex problems is widely recognized, but many barriers hinder meaningful authorship for all on the resulting multi-author publications this article explains an approach for inclusive authorship arising from the author’s 15 years of experience coordinating the publication of over 100 papers arising from a long-term, international collaboration of hundreds of scientists

Sample size estimation through power analysis is a fundamental tool in planning an ecological study, yet there are currently no well-established procedures for when multivariate abundances are to be collected. This article proposes a power analysis procedure that addresses these three challenges by: using for simulation a Gaussian copula model with factor analytical structure demonstrated on pilot data from fish assemblages in a restoration study.

The Seals on the cover

This month’s cover is of a female northern elephant seals during the breeding season. They bring the fat energy stored from foraging at sea with them to land and use it to raise their offspring on the breeding grounds – body fat amount is an important indicator of the health of marine mammals because it determines their breeding success and individual survival. However, it is difficult to obtain longitudinal data on the increase and decrease in the fat amount of marine mammals, which spend most of their time at sea. In this study, a new satellite-linked animal-borne tag was developed to monitor the changes in fat store health in real-time. By processing time-series data of depth and acceleration onboard to solve a key biomechanical equation and sending the data via satellite, it was demonstrated that the change in fat amount (∝ body density) of ocean-migrating seals could be monitored in real-time for seven months. This tag-based system provides a methodological basis for health assessments for a wide range of marine mammals, including whales that do not haul out, and potentially helps to better understand the response of marine mammals to changes in the marine environment. © Taiki Adachi.