Journal updates

Double anonymous peer review frequently asked questions

Like many of the other British Ecological Society journals, MEE has recently transitioned to a double anonymous peer review model. This decision was made after the results of a recent study conducted from 2019-2022 on the Journal of Functional Ecology. Below are some frequently asked questions to help with the preparation of your submission to Methods in Ecology and Evolution. Can I publish a preprint … Continue reading Double anonymous peer review frequently asked questions

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Editor Profiles, Journal updates

Welcoming new Associate Editors to Methods in Ecology and Evolution

Following an open call for applicants at the beginning of 2026, we are pleased to welcome 44 new Associate Editors to Methods in Ecology and Evolution. The researchers joining us span 18 different countries. We are really delighted to have further expanded the expertise on our board so that we can continue to promote the development of new methods in ecology and evolution. Welcome aboard! … Continue reading Welcoming new Associate Editors to Methods in Ecology and Evolution

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Ecology, Statistical methods, Theoretical methods

Hybrid Forest Models: integrating mechanistic knowledge and data

Post provided by Yannek Käber and Maximilian Pichler We met at YOMOS, a workshop for early-career researchers and young modelers in ecology supported by the German Society for Ecology, and we came at modeling from opposite ends. Yannek builds dynamic forest models, which are mechanistic models that integrate decades of ecological reasoning about how trees grow, compete, and die. Max builds machine learning models for … Continue reading Hybrid Forest Models: integrating mechanistic knowledge and data

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Practical Tools

Developing the Mothbox automated light trap

Blog post provided by Hubert A. Szczygieł Origins Back in 2022, I was in Panama working on landscape-scale biodiversity monitoring. The system I was testing included a lot of standard approaches – for example trail cameras for mammals, point counts and passive acoustic monitoring for birds, and Gentry transects for trees. However, I realized that none of the standard insect monitoring methodologies work for large-scale … Continue reading Developing the Mothbox automated light trap

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Methods papers

Forking anatomy: borrowing software’s best idea to build 3D atlases together

Post provided by A. Murat Maga Picture a graduate student who has just spent eighty hours tracing the individual bones of a fish skull, slice by slice, through a high-resolution microCT scan. The result is a beautiful, richly labelled 3D dataset. And then? Too often it lands on a hard drive, or gets flattened into a static 3D model that no one else can edit, … Continue reading Forking anatomy: borrowing software’s best idea to build 3D atlases together

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Ecology, Field Methods, Practical Tools

Goby gummies: the fish ‘lolly’ that provides a window to study predation underwater

Post provided by Christopher Hemingson Close your eyes and picture a predation event. Personally, I default to the Planet Earth series’ “Mountains” episode, in which a snow leopard acrobatically chases a mountain goat across near-vertical cliffs in an adrenaline-inducing pursuit. While iconic, predation sequences like this one generally represent the minority. More often than not, predation events occur on the order of split seconds – … Continue reading Goby gummies: the fish ‘lolly’ that provides a window to study predation underwater

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Ecology

RAPID re-identification of patterned animals

Post provided by András Zábó Just imagine… You’re all sitting excitedly around the monitor, watching the video captured by the drone. This is the first time you’ve tested the complete monitoring system in the national park… Your drones had already been capable of autonomously finding, detecting, and tracking zebras, but you had never flown drones that were also capable of identifying individual zebras… And both … Continue reading RAPID re-identification of patterned animals

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Practical Tools

Why we built a new approach to field sampling for soil eDNA

Post provided by Karen Dyson and Kayla Aburida When we first started using soil environmental DNA (eDNA) to understand how sustainable farming practices affect biodiversity, we thought the hard parts would be in the lab or the analysis. We were wrong. Instead, one of the biggest challenges came much earlier: in the field when collecting data. Soil eDNA is patchy, shaped by microhabitats, plant cover, … Continue reading Why we built a new approach to field sampling for soil eDNA

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Practical Tools

From video to behaviour: new tool for automated nest monitoring

Post provided by Liliana Silva Why we developed this automation framework Observing animal behaviour is one of the most widely used methods in ecology. But anyone who has spent hours viewing video footage knows how quickly behavioural analysis becomes overwhelming. A single nest camera can generate hundreds of hours of recordings, and turning those videos into behavioural data often means endless manual annotation. As a … Continue reading From video to behaviour: new tool for automated nest monitoring

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Code and Applications, Ecology

Processing visual survey data with sampley

Post provided by Jonathan Syme Picture this idyllic scene: You’re on a research vessel that is steadily making its way through the vast blue sea, surveying back and forth along a set of transect lines, its track recorded by a GPS. Through your binoculars, you see a column of spray, an arching back, a fluke that rises high above the water, then disappears. You call … Continue reading Processing visual survey data with sampley

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Code and Applications

Lost in taxonomic sampling? Maybe you should consider having some SOUPE!

Post provided by Nyniane Steinkampf–Pellecuer, Idriss Pelletan and Pauline Provini We are two PhD students and a researcher at the MECADEV lab of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle of Paris. As part of our research on birds’ evolution, we study the functional morphology of their organs to understand how their shape is linked to their function, and how they evolved. Due to the size of … Continue reading Lost in taxonomic sampling? Maybe you should consider having some SOUPE!

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