Post provided by Liam MacNeil
Collecting data from thousands of biological specimens can reveal wide scale patterns, however, doing this manually is time intensive. In this blog post, Liam MacNeil describes their automated approach to data collection and the insights this provided on mudsnail morphology.
Continue reading “Measuring the mighty mudsnails with superpixels”
Post provided by Violette Chiara and Sin-Yeon Kim There are many tools available to track and analyse animal movement. In this post, Violette Chiara and Sin-Yeon Kim share insights on how AnimalTA fills the niche of an accessible, user-friendly software for video analysis. Why AnimalTA? AnimalTA is a new tool to track and analyse animal movement in digital videos. When we began to develop AnimalTA, … Continue reading AnimalTA: an easy-to-use program for tracking and analysing animal movement
Post provided by Yves P. Klinger (he/him)
Photos collected by citizen scientists are a rich source of information that is still relatively unexplored. Phenology, the study of recurring biological events, could make use of photos taken by citizen scientists at different times, but accessing and preparing the plethora of publicly available data is challenging. In this post, Yves P. Klinger describes the motivation behind developing a workflow for using citizen science photos for phenological research, as featured in the paper “iPhenology – using open-access citizen science photos to track phenology at continental scale”.
Continue reading “Using citizen science photos to perform phenological studies”
Post provided by Anusha Bishop (she/her)
Global biodiversity loss and increased availability of genomic-scale data has motivated a growing interest in conserving genetic diversity. To do so, we need tools that help us understand how genetic diversity is distributed. In pursuit of this, we have developed a new method for creating maps of genetic diversity using spatial moving windows, which we have implemented in the R package wingen.
Continue reading “wingen: mapping genetic diversity using moving windows”
Post provided by Narimane Chatar (She/Her) Romain Boman (He/Him), Valentin Fallon Gaudichon (He/Him), Jamie A. MacLaren (He/Him), Valentin Fischer (He/Him).
Understanding the way that bones and other biological materials deal with the stresses and strains of everyday life is fundamental for interpreting the behaviour of modern and extinct organisms. Researchers frequently do this by using a digital simulation which can predict the behaviour of materials by breaking complex objects down into much smaller elements – this is known as finite element modelling. In this blog post, Narimane Chatar and her co-authors discuss their new protocol for performing finite element modelling aimed at life-sciences and biomechanics which is fast, open-source, and free for all to use.
Continue reading “FOSSILS: free, fast, and open-source biomechanical modelling”
Post provided by Hannah Owens (she/her)
One of the base units of analysis for biogeography and conservation science is the species range map. Once we know where a species is, we can ask questions like “Why is it there?”, “How did it get there?”, or “What can we do to make this place better for it?” Especially these days, I am very interested in mapping marine fish distributions, which, it turns out, is not as simple as mapping terrestrial species.
Continue reading “voluModel: a new R package to model species distributions in 3 dimensions”
Post provided by Charlotte Christensen (she/her) and Damien Farine (he/him)
Miniaturisation of technology has made GPS tags increasingly accessible for studying animal behaviour. However, limitations in battery life introduces challenging trade-offs in data collection. In this blog post, Charlotte Christensen and Damien Farine discuss how these sampling trade-offs can impact studies that use GPS tags to study social animals.
Continue reading “A guide to sample design for GPS-based studies in animal societies”
Post provided by Jeff W. Atkins (he/him)
Ecological researchers have adopted light detection and ranging (LiDAR) as a means of quantifying ecosystem structure over the past 25+ years. This is especially true in forest-related research, as LiDAR provides the ability to estimate ecosystem structure with incredibly fine detail, over broad areas. LiDAR can work at the scale of individual trees—for example crown delineation algorithms that identify singular tree canopies—or the stand-level with aggregate structural metrics. In this blog post, Jeff shares insight from he and his co-author’s recent publication “Scale dependency of LiDAR-derived forest structural diversity,” which proposes that using LiDAR requires statistical reassessment to ensure we are measuring what we think we are.
Continue reading “Reconsidering how we measure forests with LiDAR”
Post provided by Nathan Hirtle (he/him)
A whale’s size not only provides information on its own health, but also the status of the marine ecosystem in which it lives. So how do scientists weigh the biggest creatures on planet? In this blog post, Nathan Hirtle shares insight from his recent paper on measuring the volume of whales using drone images.
Continue reading “How to weigh a whale”
Post provided by Anthony Ives
It was a true privilege to be asked to write the inaugural E. C. Pielou Review for Methods in Ecology and Evolution. The first ecology book I bought as an undergraduate was her Ecological Diversity (1975) which still sits on my bookshelf full of marginalia. Both ecology and evolution have long and rich histories of theoretical and empirical work, yet sometimes theory and observation have been only loosely connected. Pielou’s work made it possible to link theory and observation more tightly by providing quantitative, statistical metrics to describe patterns in the world that can be related back to theory.
Continue reading “Random errors are neither: interpretation of correlated data“
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