Spring is in the air which means it’s time for our April Issue! This issue features two Applications and two Practical Tools articles, as well as methods for quantifying macronutrient content in invertebrates, mapping forest leaf area density, classifying avian vocal activity and much more! Plus, read on to discover more about our intriguing cover image.
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Each year, Methods in Ecology and Evolution awards the Robert May Prize to the best article by an early career researcher. Named for the late Lord May, the award recognises an outstanding ecologist or evolutionary biologist within five years of finishing their PhD.
Today we announce the shortlisted papers for the 2020 award, based on articles published in Volume 11 – in the coming weeks we will hear from the shortlisted authors with the stories behind their articles. A big congratulations to all the authors for their impressive work!
Continue reading “Robert May Prize 2020 – The Shortlist”Earlier this year, the BES Movement Ecology Special Interest Group held a competition to find the best animal movement maps in four categories: ‘pretty’, ‘nerdy’, ‘dynamic’ and ‘RMap’ (for maps produced entirely using R).
The results of the vote are in, and the winner of the RMap Category is Pratik Gupte from the University of Groningen, who used R to create this beautiful map of elephant movements across thermal landscapes. Here, we asked Pratik for the story behind the elephant map.
Continue reading “Mapping Animal Movement in R: The Science and the Art”We are looking for an engaging researcher with expertise in the fields of evolutionary biology and ecology and a passion for communicating new methods. They will work with our current Editor to continue delivering high-quality content on the blog. The Editor will gain excellent experience in commissioning, writing and editing – as well as having early access to articles on the most cutting-edge methods in … Continue reading Blog Associate Editor Wanted!
Our third issue of the year is now online!
This month we have five Applications and two Practical Tools articles, all of which are completely free to read!
Senior Editor Rob Freckleton has selected six featured articles, including methods for defining and evaluating predictions of joint species distribution models, inferring extinction date of a species and choosing cost‐effective indicators for conservation decisions. Find out all about them below.
Continue reading “March Issue Out Now!”
In an era of rapid global change, ecologists are increasingly asked to provide answers to big, urgent questions of global concern. On the one hand, responding to such requests seems increasingly feasible – given the rapid increase in the ability to collect ecological data at ever-higher spatio-temporal scales, new, unsolved questions can be tackled and increasingly realistic models can be developed, pushing the boundaries of the questions which can be answered. However, large datasets and complex models can lead to ”big” trouble, in terms of handling and manipulating the data, in addition to fitting complex models to data and interpreting the output.
Continue reading “Open Call for Papers: Special Feature on Realising the Promise of Large Data and Complex Models”As part of our goal towards more open science, Methods in Ecology and Evolution and Journal of Ecology are participating in a transparent peer review pilot. Now, over a year since it began in November 2019, we review the success of the trial so far.
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Our second issue of the year is now online!
Senior Editor Lee Hsiang Liow has selected five featured articles, find out all about them below. We also have one article from the Special Feature on Citizen Science, a joint venture across the British Ecological Society journals which held an open call for papers. Read all about the Special Feature in this editorial.
Continue reading “February Issue Out Now!”We are excited to announce that our January Issue, including the Animal Social Networks Special Feature, is now online! All the articles in this issue are free to access – find out more about them below.
Joint with the Journal of Animal Ecology, we held a successful open call for papers, soliciting original research capturing novel methodological developments or applications of social network theory to new empirical questions.
Read all about the Special Feature in the editorial Animal social networks: Towards an integrative framework embedding social interactions, space and time by editors Sebastian Sosa, David Jacoby, Mathieu Lihoreau and Cédric Sueur.
Continue reading “Animal Social Networks Joint Special Feature out now!”We are pleased to announce our Machine Learning Virtual Issue is now online.
This collection of MEE articles showcases exciting advances and applications of machine learning (ML) across a wide range of ecological and evolutionary disciplines.
From the analysis of reef structure and tree crowns, to species and individual animal identification, biological overlap, content analysis, biodiversity assessment and counting animals, ML automates the extraction of meaningful information from large digital collections.
Our Associate Editors Arthur Porto, Marta Vidal-Garcia, Miguel Acevedo, Theoni Photopoulou and Sarab Sethi curated this virtual issue by selecting their favourite MEE articles that use machine learning. Find out below why these papers were chosen, and how they are helping to progress research in ecology and evolution.
Continue reading “Machine Learning Virtual Issue”
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