Author: Harriet Rhodes

Editor Profiles, Journal updates

Welcoming new Associate Editors to Methods in Ecology and Evolution

Following an open call for applicants at the beginning of 2026, we are pleased to welcome 44 new Associate Editors to Methods in Ecology and Evolution. The researchers joining us span 18 different countries. 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. Welcome aboard! … Continue reading Welcoming new Associate Editors to Methods in Ecology and Evolution

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Practical Tools

Developing the Mothbox automated light trap

Blog post provided by Hubert A. Szczygieł Origins Back in 2022, I was in Panama working on landscape-scale biodiversity monitoring. The system I was testing included a lot of standard approaches – for example trail cameras for mammals, point counts and passive acoustic monitoring for birds, and Gentry transects for trees. However, I realized that none of the standard insect monitoring methodologies work for large-scale … Continue reading Developing the Mothbox automated light trap

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Methods papers

Forking anatomy: borrowing software’s best idea to build 3D atlases together

Post provided by A. Murat Maga Picture a graduate student who has just spent eighty hours tracing the individual bones of a fish skull, slice by slice, through a high-resolution microCT scan. The result is a beautiful, richly labelled 3D dataset. And then? Too often it lands on a hard drive, or gets flattened into a static 3D model that no one else can edit, … Continue reading Forking anatomy: borrowing software’s best idea to build 3D atlases together

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Ecology

RAPID re-identification of patterned animals

Post provided by András Zábó Just imagine… You’re all sitting excitedly around the monitor, watching the video captured by the drone. This is the first time you’ve tested the complete monitoring system in the national park… Your drones had already been capable of autonomously finding, detecting, and tracking zebras, but you had never flown drones that were also capable of identifying individual zebras… And both … Continue reading RAPID re-identification of patterned animals

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Practical Tools

Why we built a new approach to field sampling for soil eDNA

Post provided by Karen Dyson and Kayla Aburida When we first started using soil environmental DNA (eDNA) to understand how sustainable farming practices affect biodiversity, we thought the hard parts would be in the lab or the analysis. We were wrong. Instead, one of the biggest challenges came much earlier: in the field when collecting data. Soil eDNA is patchy, shaped by microhabitats, plant cover, … Continue reading Why we built a new approach to field sampling for soil eDNA

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Practical Tools

From video to behaviour: new tool for automated nest monitoring

Post provided by Liliana Silva Why we developed this automation framework Observing animal behaviour is one of the most widely used methods in ecology. But anyone who has spent hours viewing video footage knows how quickly behavioural analysis becomes overwhelming. A single nest camera can generate hundreds of hours of recordings, and turning those videos into behavioural data often means endless manual annotation. As a … Continue reading From video to behaviour: new tool for automated nest monitoring

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Code and Applications

Lost in taxonomic sampling? Maybe you should consider having some SOUPE!

Post provided by Nyniane Steinkampf–Pellecuer, Idriss Pelletan and Pauline Provini We are two PhD students and a researcher at the MECADEV lab of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle of Paris. As part of our research on birds’ evolution, we study the functional morphology of their organs to understand how their shape is linked to their function, and how they evolved. Due to the size of … Continue reading Lost in taxonomic sampling? Maybe you should consider having some SOUPE!

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Code and Applications

Testing Evolutionary Ecological and Community Ecological Outcomes with Matrix Projection Using R Package adapt3

Post provided by Richard P. Shefferson, University of Tokyo Matrix projection has become widely used by population ecologists to analyze and predict the behavior of wild populations of plants and animals… and sometimes even other, odder organisms (Salguero-Gómez et al. 2015; Salguero‐Gómez et al. 2016). Over the last few decades, the size and complexity of these models have increased dramatically, with matrix dimensions now ranging … Continue reading Testing Evolutionary Ecological and Community Ecological Outcomes with Matrix Projection Using R Package adapt3

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Journal updates, Peer Review

How to avoid a desk-rejection because your manuscript is the wrong type

Post provided by Dr. Aaron M. Ellison, Executive Editor at Methods in Ecology and Evolution You’ve worked for months, sometimes years, on developing and testing a new method, and spent a similar amount of time writing the manuscript. It’s finally finished and after navigating the online submission system and uploading and proofing your files, you press the “submit my manuscript” button. Back in the Dark … Continue reading How to avoid a desk-rejection because your manuscript is the wrong type

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What is series

What is acoustic spatial capture-recapture (aSCR)?

Post provided by Ané Cloete What is acoustic spatial capture-recapture (aSCR)? Estimating how many animals live in a given area is one of the most fundamental challenges in conservation. For species that are easy to see such as large mammals on open plains, for example, this is manageable. But for cryptic species that hide from view, counting them directly is often impossible. This is where … Continue reading What is acoustic spatial capture-recapture (aSCR)?

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