The Robert May Prize is awarded by the British Ecological Society each year for the best paper in Methods in Ecology and Evolution written by an early career author. With entries spanning the 14th Volume of the journal, our Senior Editors carefully shortlisted the following 9 papers:

Megan Laxton; Balancing structural complexity with ecological insight in Spatio-temporal species distribution models

Charlotte de Vries; Discretising Keyfitz’ entropy for studies of actuarial senescence and comparative demography

Matěj Man; myClim: Microclimate data handling and standardised analyses in R

Inês Silva; movedesign: Shiny R app to evaluate sampling design for animal movement studies

Eva Gril; Slope and equilibrium: A parsimonious and flexible approach to model microclimate

Stanislas Rigal; A toolbox to explore the composition of species dynamics behind multi-species indices

Willem Bonnaffé; Fast fitting of neural ordinary differential equations by Bayesian neural gradient matching to infer ecological interactions from time-series data

Alison Binnley; The data double standard

Cristian Roman Palacios; The phruta r package: Increasing access, reproducibility and transparency in phylogenetic analyses

Congratulations to all our shortlisted researchers and all our early career authors!