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 16th Volume of the journal, our Senior Editors carefully shortlisted the following 10 papers:

Or Ben-Zvi: The Benthic Underwater Microscope imaging PAM (BUMP): A non-invasive tool for in situ assessment of microstructure and photosynthetic efficiency

Pieter Sanczuk: Continuous quantification of forest microclimate temperatures in space and time using fibre-optic technology

Jenna Kline: Studying collective animal behaviour with drones and computer vision

Jordan Martin: Covariance reaction norms: A flexible method for estimating complex environmental effects on trait (co)variances

Peter Dietrich: Advancing plant biomass measurements: Integrating smartphone-based 3D scanning techniques for enhanced ecosystem monitoring

Maia Austin: A computational framework to characterize and compare the tonal repertoires of toothed whales

Robin Boyd: Using causal diagrams and superpopulation models to correct geographic biases in biodiversity monitoring data

Nina Schiettekatte: habtools: An R package to calculate 3D metrics for surfaces and objects

Kal Backman: Human inspired deep learning to locate and classify terrestrial and arboreal animals in thermal drone surveys

Xiaotian Zheng: Spatial-statistical downscaling with uncertainty quantification in biodiversity modelling

Congratulations to all our shortlisted researchers and all our early career authors. We’ll be announcing the overall winner soon, so stay tuned for more!