Following an open call for applicants in July, we are pleased to welcome 30 new Associate Editors to the Methods in Ecology and Evolution Editorial Board. The researchers joining us span 16 different countries, including our first editors working in Iran, Italy and Portugal. Find out more about them below.
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.
In this Editor’s Choice, Res Altwegg, our Associate Editor with expertise in citizen science, shares his favourite MEE papers in the field of citizen science and beyond.
Senior Editor Aaron Ellison has selected six Featured Articles this month. You can find out about all of them below. We also have eight Applications articles and seven Practical Tools articles in the November issue that are freely available to everyone – no subscription required!
In this post, three of our Associate Editors with expertise in phylogenetics Simone Blomberg, Will Pearse and Michael Matschiner share their favourite MEE papers in the field of phylogenetics and beyond.
We have a larger issue of 17 articles this month, featuring the ethics of wild animal research, an eco-acoustic monitoring network, a programmable optomotor and much more.
Senior Editor Rob Freckleton has selected six featured articles – find out about them below.
We also have three Applications, one Practical Tools and seven articles that are freely available to everyone – no subscription required!
A central component of an organism’s fitness is its ability to successfully reproduce. This includes finding a potential mate and successful mating. For plants, movement of pollen from an anther to a conspecific stigma is essential for successful reproduction, but directly tracking movement of individual pollen grains heretofore has been impossible (with the exception of those species of orchids and milkweeds whose pollen comes in large packages (pollinia)). Knowing how pollen move around, whether or not they successfully fertilize ovules, is also central to understanding the evolution and ecology of flowering plants (angiosperms) and floral traits.
Since I’ve been working from home and self-isolating for health reasons since the end of last summer, I thought that a post around the strategies that have helped me during this time might be useful.
So, first and foremost, your mental health. It’s really hard to concentrate on anything work-related if you’re not in the right mental state. Of course, these are not ordinary times, so making sure that family, friends and those we care about are doing well, would be my first step. When I feel anxious about the times ahead, the single most important thing that helps me to deal with anxiety is having those who I care for the most, close by. If that’s not possible because they’re self-isolating, keeping in touch remotely regularly is the next best thing. Developmental psychologists recognise that human motivation is linked to a hierarchy of needs: if the most basic needs are not met, more complex needs cannot be fulfilled. In a pandemic, it’s likely that our priorities will change and we need to adapt to them, this might take a while and that’s to be expected.
The latest issue of Methods in Ecology and Evolution is now online! This month’s issue is a little shorter than our last few. But, as they say, good things come in small packages!
Senior Editor Lee Hsiang Liow has selected six Featured Articles this month. You can find out about all of them below. We’ve also got five Applications articles and a Practical Tools article in the April issue that we’re going to cover. Those six papers are freely available to everyone – no subscription required!
There are many reasons that we might be interested in whether individuals, species or populations overlap in multidimensional space. In ecology and evolution, we might be interested in climatic overlap, morphological overlap, phenological or biochemical overlap. We can use analyses of overlap to study resource partitioning, evolutionary histories and palaeoenvironmental conditions, or to inform conservation management and taxonomy. Even these represent only a subset of the possible cases in which we might want to investigate overlap between entities. Databases such as GBIF, TRY and WorldClim make vast amounts of data publicly available for these investigations. However, these studies require complex multivariate data and distilling such data into meaningful conclusions is no walk in the park.