Author: Harriet Rhodes

Journal Issues

Our October issue is out now!

This issue contains the latest methods in ecology and evolution. Read to find out about this month’s featured articles and the article behind our cover! Featured Advancing causal inference in ecology: Pathways for biodiversity change detection and attribution Here, authors address key challenges of biodiversity change detection and conservative causal attribution and propose solutions to overcome barriers in (1) biodiversity and driver data characteristics, (2) detection of change within both data types and (3) linking driver and biodiversity … Continue reading Our October issue is out now!

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Practical Tools

Making heatwaves in the wild: lessons from extreme fieldwork

Post provided by Pieter Arnold, Xuemeng Mu, James King We are a team of ecologists in Australia with keen interest in how plants and ecosystems will respond to climate change. Conducting research on the effects of forecasted climate change, and particularly extreme events like heatwaves, is extremely challenging to do in the field. We had to first convince ourselves that it would be possible to … Continue reading Making heatwaves in the wild: lessons from extreme fieldwork

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Journal Issues

Our September issue is out now!

This issue contains the latest methods in ecology and evolution. Read to find out about this month’s featured articles and the article behind our cover! Featured DeepDiveR—A software for deep learning estimation of palaeodiversity from fossil occurrences The incompleteness of the fossil record presents a barrier to estimating changes in biodiversity which standard statistical methods struggle to account for. Here authors present DeepDiveR, an R package … Continue reading Our September issue is out now!

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Journal Issues

Our August issue is out now!

This issue contains the latest methods in ecology and evolution. Read to find out about this month’s featured articles and the article behind our cover! Featured Empirical ecology to support mechanistic modelling: Different objectives, better approaches and unique benefits Making mechanistic models credible requires empirical studies, but traditional study topics and designs often do not support them well. The models we use for modern problems need … Continue reading Our August issue is out now!

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Ecology

Catching Biodiversity in the Wind: How a Simple Dust Cloth Revolutionizes Airborne eDNA Monitoring

Post provided by Meng Yao Biodiversity is disappearing at an alarming rate worldwide. To protect it, we first need to monitor it—but tracking species traditionally requires significant time, expertise, and often expensive equipment. What if we could detect the presence of plants and animals just by sampling the air around us? As the principal investigator of the molecular ecology and biodiversity laboratory at Peking University, … Continue reading Catching Biodiversity in the Wind: How a Simple Dust Cloth Revolutionizes Airborne eDNA Monitoring

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Journal Issues

Our July Issue is out now!

This issue contains the latest methods in ecology and evolution. Read to find out about this month’s featured articles and the article behind our cover! Featured MicroEcoTools: An R package for comprehensive theoretical microbial ecology analysis Authors introduce MicroEcoTools, an R package designed to test ecological framework predictions using microbial community data. It assesses microbial diversity and evaluates the relative impacts of stochastic and deterministic … Continue reading Our July Issue is out now!

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Code and Applications

An easy-to-manage tool for forest ecosystem modeling—The pnetr R package

Post provided by Xiaojie Gao I am a remote sensing ecologist currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Forest department of Harvard University. My research focuses on mapping and understanding the impacts of climate change and human activities on the terrestrial vegetation ecosystems. The development of the pnetr R package for forest ecosystem modeling was inspired by my own research interest in understanding how … Continue reading An easy-to-manage tool for forest ecosystem modeling—The pnetr R package

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Field Methods, LGBTQ+

Supporting safe and equitable access to field research

To celebrate Pride Month 2025, we are excited to share a series of blogs and podcasts highlighting useful articles and resources for LGBTQIA+ ecologists and researchers. In each post, the authors behind these resources explain what they are, how they came to produce them, and why they are important. In this post, Elizabeth shares fieldwork advice for researchers with marginalized identities. Post provided by Elizabeth N. … Continue reading Supporting safe and equitable access to field research

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Ecology

Charting the Unheard: A Primer for Analysing Toothed Whale Vocal Repertoires

Post provided by Maia Austen Introduction: Why toothed whale voices matter I’m a PhD candidate in the ONDAS Lab at the University of Vermont, advised by Dr. Laura May-Collado. My PhD looks to utilize machine learning analysis to better understand how and why dolphins communicate with each other. Toothed whales – like dolphins and belugas – are among the most acoustically sophisticated animals on Earth. … Continue reading Charting the Unheard: A Primer for Analysing Toothed Whale Vocal Repertoires

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Ecology

Predictability or pondering prediction

Post provided by Marieke Wesselkamp At the beginning of this project, we often found ourselves contemplating on the evolution of various environmental systems – some vast and global, others local. These were, for example, the trajectory of elephant populations in the Southern African Kruger national park over the next decades, the change in plant species composition on the roof the neighbour’s garage over the months, … Continue reading Predictability or pondering prediction

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