Author: besmee

Robert May Prize

Robert May Prize 2023: Winner announced for early career researcher award

We’re excited to announce Willem Bonnaffé as the winner of the 2023 Robert May Prize, celebrating the best article in the journal by an author at the start of their career. Winner: Willem Bonnaffé Research: Fast fitting of neural ordinary differential equations by Bayesian neural gradient matching to infer ecological interactions from time-series data About the Research In previous work, Willem Bonnaffé and Tim Coulson … Continue reading Robert May Prize 2023: Winner announced for early career researcher award

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Robert May Prize

Detangling NODEs

I’m Willem Bonnaffé,  a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. In my research, I integrate biological data, mathematical modelling, and machine learning. I spend most of my time modelling natural systems with neural ordinary differential equations – NODEs or Neural ODEs for short. In this blog post, I am hoping to shed light on what these models are and how I came to use … Continue reading Detangling NODEs

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Robert May Prize

Does my species senesce?

Post provided by Lotte de Vries Animals and plants exhibit a wide range of patterns of longevity, growth, and reproduction but the general drivers of this enormous variation in life history are poorly understood. Comparative demography uses large demographic databases to attempt to identify patterns in life-history strategies across the tree of life (e.g. this PNAS paper, and this one). In this paper, we show … Continue reading Does my species senesce?

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Robert May Prize

Increasing Complexity in Species Distribution Modelling

Megan Laxton and colleagues originally set out to translate an existing example of a species distribution model into a new software framework. However, what originated as a simple modelling example developed into a discussion on structural complexity in species distribution models. Complexity in Species Distribution Models The original idea for our paper was to provide a worked example demonstrating the usage of the R package … Continue reading Increasing Complexity in Species Distribution Modelling

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Robert May Prize

The Data Double Standard: how this article came to be

Post provided by Alison Binley As a new Master’s student at Carleton University, I was excited to learn the ins and outs of using community science data (also known commonly as citizen science, participatory research, and crowd-sourced data) to conduct conservation research. I was working on estimating population trends using eBird, a popular, opportunistic community science platform that collects data on birds, and fascinated by … Continue reading The Data Double Standard: how this article came to be

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Code and Applications, Phylogenetic analysis, Robert May Prize

Early career research: Increasing access, reproducibility and transparency in phylogenetic analyses with Cristian Román-Palacios

I was born in the Colombian Andes (Armenia, Quindío) back in the 90s. I received my bachelor’s degree in Biology from Universidad del Valle, in Cali, Colombia, in 2015. I moved to the US in 2016 to pursue a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona – a degree that I completed in Fall of 2020. Although my research interests seem … Continue reading Early career research: Increasing access, reproducibility and transparency in phylogenetic analyses with Cristian Román-Palacios

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Robert May Prize

2023 Robert May Prize Shortlist: Methods Ecology and Evolution’s Award for Early Career Researchers

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 … Continue reading 2023 Robert May Prize Shortlist: Methods Ecology and Evolution’s Award for Early Career Researchers

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Uncategorized

Methods in Ecology and Evolution: International Women’s Day 2024 

To celebrate International Women’s Day 2024, we are excited to share a collection of blog posts showcasing the work of some of our new Associate Editors. In each post, our editors discuss their experiences in ecology, as well as what this year’s theme, ‘Inspire Inclusion‘, means to them.   Dr Lorna Hernandez-Santin (She/her)  What work do you do?  These days I work mostly with restoration ecology. … Continue reading Methods in Ecology and Evolution: International Women’s Day 2024 

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Ecology

Key Concepts in Ecology: Competition 

This blog post on ‘Competition’ is part of the BES ‘Key Concepts in Ecology’ series, designed to help ecologists in learning the key topics in ecology! Take a look at the full series for a list of key topics you might typically find in an ecology textbook, each providing a quick introduction to the topic, and a list of suggested papers for students to refer … Continue reading Key Concepts in Ecology: Competition 

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Methods papers

Opening Ecology to Local, Traditional, and Indigenous Knowledge

Post provided by James T. Thorson Ecologists have a social responsibility to document, interpret, and forecast how human activities are impacting our shared world.  There’s an ongoing movement to open ecology to new voices: for example, the Biden-Harris Administration has directed US agencies to incorporate Indigenous Knowledge through ethical and mutually beneficial relationships with tribal nations.  This direction is clearly important, and requires developing new … Continue reading Opening Ecology to Local, Traditional, and Indigenous Knowledge

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