Author: India Stephenson

Conservation and management, Methods papers, Statistical methods

Bringing Ecologists and Statisticians Together for the Conservation of Endangered Species

Post provided by Cecilia Pinto and Luigi Spezia

The Benefits of High Frequency Data

One of the tagged flapper skates showing the three different kinds of tags. ©Cecilia Pinto
One of the tagged flapper skates showing the three different kinds of tags. ©Cecilia Pinto

High frequency data, like those obtained from individual electronic tags, carries the potential of giving us detailed information on the behaviour of species at the individual level. Such data are particularly useful for marine species, as we can’t observe them directly for long periods of time.

Understanding how individuals use water columns – both at daily and seasonal scales – can help define conservation measures such as restricting fishing activity to reduce by-catch or defining protected areas to help recovering populations or protect spawning and nursery areas. High frequency data have become popular as they give insight to detailed individual foraging behaviour and therefore the specific energetic needs that are linked to reproduction and fitness. Continue reading “Bringing Ecologists and Statisticians Together for the Conservation of Endangered Species”

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Journal updates

Issue 7.5

Issue 7.5 is now online!

The May issue of Methods is now online!

This month’s issue contains two Applications articles and two Open Access articles, all of which are freely available.

– piecewiseSEM: A practical implementation of confirmatory path analysis for the R programming language. This package extends the method to all current (generalized) linear, (phylogenetic) least-square, and mixed effects models, relying on familiar R syntax. The article also includes two worked examples.

– RPANDA: An R package that implements model-free and model-based phylogenetic comparative methods for macroevolutionary analyses. It can be used to:

  1. Characterize phylogenetic trees by plotting their spectral density profiles
  2. Compare trees and cluster them according to their similarities
  3. Identify and plot distinct branching patterns within trees
  4. Compare the fit of alternative diversification models to phylogenetic trees
  5. Estimate rates of speciation and extinction
  6. Estimate and plot how these rates have varied with time and environmental variables
  7. Deduce and plot estimates of species richness through geological time. Continue reading “Issue 7.5”
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Editor Profiles, Journal updates

New Associate Editor: Will Pearse

Today, we are pleased to be welcoming a new member of the Methods in Ecology and Evolution Associate Editor Board. Will Pearse joins us from McGill University in Canada and you can find out a little more about him below. Will Pearse “I am an evolutionary ecologist and use phylogeny to link the evolution of species’ traits with their ecological community assembly. I’m interested in phylogenetic methods, macro-evolution of species’ traits, community assembly … Continue reading New Associate Editor: Will Pearse

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Methods papers, Practical Tools

From Tree of Life to Web of Life: How Google Images Can Help Ecologists Study Evolution

Below is a press release about the Methods paper ‘Just Google it: assessing the use of Google Images to describe geographical variation in visible traits of organisms‘ taken from the British Ecological Society.

Black sparrowhawks are either completely dark or have a white breast. ©Oggmus
Black sparrowhawks are either completely dark or have a white breast. ©Oggmus

Animals caught on camera by amateur photographers and posted on the web could become an important new tool for studying evolution and other ecological questions, researchers from South Africa have found. Their study – the first of its kind – is published today in Methods in Ecology and Evolution.

Colour polymorphism – when a species has two or more colour types – has fascinated biologists since Darwin. The occurrence of these different colour types often varies geographically, providing a useful way of studying how different colour morphs – or phenotypes – evolve.

But the fieldwork needed to collect these data is time consuming and expensive, so Dr Arjun Amar and his student Gabriella Leighton from the University of Cape Town wondered if ecologists could use the thousands of animal images posted on the internet instead. Continue reading “From Tree of Life to Web of Life: How Google Images Can Help Ecologists Study Evolution”

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Publishing Tips & Tricks

New Initial Submission Requirements

Submitting to Methods in Ecology and Evolution is now easier than ever!

Formatting manuscripts for submission can take a long time.
Formatting manuscripts for submission can take a long time.

Formatting a manuscript for journal submission can be time-consuming and frustrating work, especially for the first version. To make things a little bit simpler for our authors, we now have just a few small formatting requirements for initial submissions.

To have a paper considered in Methods in Ecology and Evolution it just needs to:

  • Be double line spaced and in a single column
  • Be within the word count (6000-7000 words for Standard Articles, 3000 words for Applications)
  • Include both line and page numbers
  • Have a statement of where you intend to archive your data
  • Follow the standard manuscript structure: Author details, Abstract (must be numbered according to journal style), Keywords, Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion

This means that you do not need to worry about the format of your references, the placement of your figures (they can be within the text, at the end of the document or uploaded as separate files), whether or not you have used scientific names or anything else like that. Continue reading “New Initial Submission Requirements”

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Methods papers, Online extras, Practical Tools

Tips for Publishing Methods Papers in Ecological Journals

At the 2015 Eco-Stats Conference at the University of New South Wales there was a Q&A panel discussion of tips for authors publishing methods papers. The panel was chaired by Methods in Ecology and Evolution Associate Editor David Warton. It included Jane Elith (winner of the Methods Recognition of Achievement award), Associate Editor Matt Schofield and former Associate Editor Shinichi Nakagawa. There was also a late appearance, straight off a long haul flight from China, by Doug Yu (another current Associate Editor).

Continue reading “Tips for Publishing Methods Papers in Ecological Journals”

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Methods papers, Online extras, Practical Tools

The Arborist Throw-line Launcher

Collecting leaves or seeds from tall trees is a difficult task that many plant physiologists, ecologists, geneticists and forest managers encounter repeatedly. In a series of videos on the Methods in Ecology and Evolution YouTube channel, Kara N. Youngentob, Christina Zdenek and Eva van Gorsel demonstrate how to use the arborist throw-line launcher, which significantly simplifies this task. This new way of collecting seeds and leaves from tall trees is explained in their Applications article ‘A simple and effective method to collect leaves and seeds from tall trees‘. As this is an Applications paper, it is freely available to everyone.

Basic Techniques for the Arborist Throw-line Launcher

The first of the three videos is a basic overview of the method. In this tutorial, the authors teach you how to find the ideal branch, how to use the throw-line launcher and go through some important safety information. Continue reading “The Arborist Throw-line Launcher”

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Publishing Tips & Tricks

A Video is Worth a Million Words: Why You Should Make a Video about YOUR Article

Post provided by NATHALIE PETTORELLI & CHRIS GRIEVES

Why should you make a video about your article?
Why should you make a video about your article?

With impact being considered more and more in promotion applications and REF-style (Research Excellence Framework) exercises, science communication is becoming an integral part of a scientist’s job. The problem is: most of us academics aren’t exactly trained in science outreach and our communication styles are heavily biased towards anything written, as opposed to anything visual.

With technological advancements constantly making things easier, however, more and more scientists are taking the plunge and adventuring into the world of YouTube and Vimeo to disseminate their work. But why are they doing so? Is it easy? Do you need expert help or can you do it yourself easily?

This blog post aims to answer all the questions and worries you may have as a scientist thinking of making a video about your work for the first time. To address these worries and questions in the most comprehensive way, we asked 12 authors who recently produced a video about their paper (in some cases their first) if they could give us some insights on their experience, and detail for us the challenges and benefits of choosing this style of communication. Their stories are the background to our story. Continue reading “A Video is Worth a Million Words: Why You Should Make a Video about YOUR Article”

Unknown's avatarIndia Stephenson2 Comments
Conservation and management, Methods papers

Spatially-explicit Power Analysis: A First Step for Occupancy-Based Monitoring

Post provided by Martha Ellis and Jody Tucker

Where’s Waldo? Trying to find this fisher somewhere in a giant landscape is going to be tricky! ©Mike Schwartz
Where’s Waldo? Trying to find this little guy somewhere in a giant landscape is going to be tricky! © Mike Schwartz

The seemingly basic question of whether a population is increasing, decreasing, or stable can be one of the most difficult to answer. Collecting data on rare and elusive species is hard. Imagine trying to detect a handful of fisher or wolverine across hundreds of thousands of acres – it is physically demanding, time consuming and logistically complicated. And that’s just to do it once! To monitor a population for changes, you have to repeat these surveys regularly over many years. The long-term monitoring that is necessary for conservation requires careful planning and a substantial commitment of resources and funding. So before we spend these valuable resources, it’s critical to know whether the data we are collecting can help us to answer our questions. Continue reading “Spatially-explicit Power Analysis: A First Step for Occupancy-Based Monitoring”

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Journal updates

Issue 7.4

Issue 7.4 is now online!

The April issue of Methods is now online!

This month’s issue contains two Applications articles and one Open Access article, all of which are freely available.

– CPW Photo Warehouse: freely available software that has been customized to identify, archive, and transform photographs into data formats required for statistical analyses. Users navigate a series of point-and-click menu items that allow them to input information from camera deployments, import photos and store data. Images are seamlessly incorporated into the database windows, but are stored separately.

– SIMR: An R package that allows users to calculate power for generalized linear mixed models from the lme4 package. The power calculations are based on Monte Carlo simulations. It includes tools for (i) running a power analysis for a given model and design; and (ii) calculating power curves to assess trade-offs between power and sample size.

Continue reading “Issue 7.4”

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