This issue contains 19 articles about the latest methods in ecology and evolution, including drones, leaf wettability and much more! Read to find out about this month’s featured articles and the article behind our cover!

Featured Articles

What makes for a good submission for Methods in Ecology and Evolution and what really doesn’t work? The best Methods papers, regardless of the article type, are about the methodology itself, not
the results of the case study. A good first indicator of a Research Article that is really a Methods
paper is that the Introduction identifies a gap in existing methodologies that is independent of
an organism or study system. New models, statistical methods, and indices should be tested with simulated datasets that explore a large range of the possible parameter spaces and identify error rates.
Our shorter article types—Applications, Practical Tools—should be similarly framed. They
should fill an empty niche, not replicate or rehash an existing one. Any new method should
make researchers’ and practitioners’ work easier, but to encourage its uptake and future use, the
paper should clearly contrast the new method with those that are already available and make
the case for someone to switch.

Biodiversity loss has a large impact on many ecosystem functions (EFs). It is urgent to quantify the effect of biodiversity loss on EFs. This review summarises the mechanistic models commonly applied in current BEF studies, and proposed a new BEF model based on species interaction networks

Using phylogenies of present-day species to estimate diversification rate trajectories—speciation and extinction rates over time—is a challenging task due to non-identifiability issues. This article introduces a new method for exploring congruence classes that we implement in the R package CRABS. Whereas existing methods constrain either the speciation rate or the extinction rate trajectory, ours provides more flexibility by sampling congruent speciation and extinction rate trajectories simultaneously.

Bayesian approaches to the modelling of ecological systems are increasingly popular, but there are competing methods for formal model comparisons. Model-based approaches such as reversible-jump Markov chain Monte Carlo (RJ-MCMC) are flexible and allow multimodel inference, but can be complex to implement and optimise, and so we translate a model-based approach for ecological applications using Importance Sampling to estimate the marginal likelihood of the data given a particular model. This approach allows for model comparison through the estimation of Bayes’ Factors or interpretable posterior model probabilities, yielding model weights that facilitate multimodel inference through Bayesian model averaging.

Leaf wettability and drainage characteristics of different taxa are often hypothesised to have emerged as a result of evolutionary selection, perhaps to limit the duration of leaf wetness, or to direct water toward efficiently to the soil and root system, rather than suffering loss to evaporation. The new tilting table uses widely-available components (microcontroller, stepper motor and driver, liquid-crystal display (LCD) and custom operating code) to achieve controlled tilting through the range 0° to >90° at user-controlled rates of tilting. It is suitable for field use, such that leaf specimens can be tested within minutes of collection.

The moth on the cover

This month’s cover shows Hemaris fuciformis, the broad-bordered bee hawk-moth, in flight: one of the species recorded with the buzzOmeter system described by Volponi et al. Pollinators, from bees and wasps, through flies to moths, produce buzzing or humming noises in flight. Recording these sounds is not an easy task and has mostly been done in artificial conditions or using tethered insects. The buzzOmeter system consists of a simple tool for recording free-flying insects in the wild, a tutorial on file processing and an R script for the assignment of audio recordings to the corresponding species. The system can be applied in various bioacoustical and species interactions studies where it is important to obtain recordings of non-distressed animals in their habitat. © Marta Skowron Volponi.