By Charles M. Francis, Richard J. Barker, Evan G. Cooch This joint Special Feature (published in MEE and the open access journal Ecology and Evolution) brings together a series of papers presented at the EURING 2013 technical conference that, collectively, cover many of the latest developments in the analysis of data from marked individuals to estimate demographic parameters, such as survival, recruitment, nest success, density, population size … Continue reading Modelling Demographic Processes in Marked Populations: Proceedings of the EURING 2013 analytical meeting
Lidar point cloud from a scanned Eucalyptus tree (left) with colours correlating to point density (blue to red moving from high to low density). On the right is the reconstructed tree volume from which mass can be estimated.
A terrestrial laser scanning technique that allows the structure of vegetation to be 3D-mapped to the millimetre is more accurate in determining the biomass of trees and carbon stocks in forests than current methods, according to new research involving UCL.
The research paper, an international collaboration led by Wageningen University, is published today in Methods in Ecology and Evolution and demonstrates the technique in Australian forests.
The study authors believe it could be an important development in the monitoring of carbon stocks for worldwide climate policy-making. Both above-ground biomass and carbon stocks are important details for UN-REDD, the United Nations initiative on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation that is striving to keep the destruction of forests in check and thereby preserve the uptake of carbon by trees.
Paper co-author Dr Mat Disney (UCL Geography) said: “This new paper shows how effectively we can now turn highly-accurate laser measurements, comprising millions of 3D laser points, into estimates of tree mass. Weighing trees is really hard – time Continue reading “Laser scanning accurately ‘weighs’ trees”
BY CHRISTOPHER DOYLE This article has been taken from ABC Environment. Scientists have developed a new technique to assess how much plastic a seabird has eaten. It involves a quick massage and a cotton swab. A TEAM OF AUSTRALIAN scientists has developed a new method for assessing how much plastic debris a seabird has eaten while foraging on the open ocean, leading to a better … Continue reading Seabirds’ plastic diet shows up in their feather oil
We’d like to welcome 4 new Associate Editors to the team! Patrick Jansen from Wageningen University, Nicolas Lecomte from Université de Moncton, John Reynolds from Simon Fraser University and Matt Schofield from the University of Otago. Read their profiles below to find out about their research interests: “I am an ecologist specializing in consumer-resource interactions, particularly those between predators and their prey and between herbivores … Continue reading New Associate Editors
In this video Francis Hui introduces boral, a new R package he developed for Bayesian analysis of multivariate data in ecology. It uses Bayesian MCMC estimation to fit latent variable models for unconstrained ordination (read the MEE paper, Model-based approaches to unconstrained ordination, for details), and for multi-species inference while accounting for inter-species correlation: Download boral from CRAN Read the MEE paper Model-based approaches to … Continue reading boral: R package for multivariate data analysis in Ecology
Originally posted on Animal Ecology in Focus: In 2003 Milner-Gulland et al. wrote a paper on extreme adult sex ratios in saiga antelope. Males had become so rare in some years that the behavior of the system became dysfunctional and population performance suffered catastrophically. The only other environments where I know of heavily skewed adult sex ratios are university science faculties. Except here the skew… Continue reading Solving the skewed sex ratio problem in science
Issue 5.10 is now online! This month we include 4 freely available application articles: – agTrend: A Bayesian approach for estimating trends of aggregated abundance – MEMGENE: Spatial pattern detection in genetic distance data – mizer: an R package for multispecies, trait-based and community size spectrum ecological modelling – PyRate: a new program to estimate speciation and extinction rates from – incomplete fossil data We … Continue reading Issue 5.10
Once more Open Access Week has rolled around. At MEE we operate a hybrid model: although we are a subscription journal, authors can choose to make their papers open access (for a price – sorry). Over the past year, 21 papers have been published as open access (listed here). They span the range of topics we cover, including citizen science, using cell phones, and asking … Continue reading Open Access Week 2014
In this video David Warton interviews the organisers of the “Modern Statistical Methods for Ecology” Graybill/ENVR Conference (Sept 7-10 2014, Fort Collins) – Alix Gitelman, Geof Givens, and Janine Illian. They discuss highlights of the conference, current trends in statistical ecology, and where the Graybill conference series (organised at Colorado State every year) is going next. Continue reading Graybill/ENVR 2014 – highlights, current trends and what’s next
A new Methods paper comparing SCUBA diving to bubble-free diving suggests that fish are deterred by the sound of SCUBA bubbles, particularly in heavily fished areas, which can result in potentially biased fish counts and research conclusions. Steven Lindfield and colleagues from the University of Western Australia studied coral reef fish populations in Guam using two diving systems: the commonly used SCUBA equipment that produces … Continue reading Noisy SCUBA bubbles scare fish(shh!)
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