Post provided by Jody Reimer

One of the unifying themes in ecology may be the acknowledgement that we live in a world of finite resources, and so we also live in a world of tradeoffs. A diverse range of research questions can be distilled into a question about tradeoffs. For example, how should an animal forage in the presence of predation? Which selective forces determine the life history of a flowering perennial? How should we manage a population to maximize the sustainable harvest rate?

Questions as varied as these can all be addressed using the same method of stochastic programming[1] (SDP) (see McNamara and Houston, 1986; Rees et al. 1999; and Runge and Johnson, 2002, respectively). SDP has been used extensively to study optimal tradeoffs in a wide range of applications in ecology, evolutionary biology, and management. It is a flexible and powerful modelling framework that allows for simultaneous consideration of an individual’s state, how an optimal decision might explicitly depend on time, and for a probabilistic landscape of risks and rewards. 

[1] Also known as Markov Decision Processes

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The June issue of Methods is now online!

This month’s issue features articles on designing camera trap studies, measuring coral growth rates, quantifying carbon assimilation by marine calcifiers and much more.

Senior Editor Rob Freckleton has selected six featured articles this month – find out about them below. We’ve also got three Applications and a Practical Tools article which are freely available to everyone – no subscription required!

Continue reading “Issue 11.6: goats, camera traps, coral imaging and more!”

The May issue of Methods is now online! As well as four Application and two Practical Tools articles, the latest issue of Methods in Ecology and Evolution includes six Featured Articles handpicked by our editors – you can find out more about them below.     Featured Articles Tree-based inference of species interaction networks from abundance data To be relevant, any network inference methodology needs … Continue reading Issue 11.5: Our May issue is now online!