Author: Samantha Ponton

General

Gender bias?

PatBy Pat Backwell
Associate Editor, Methods in Ecology and Evolution

There is a lot of discussion about gender differences in the publication of scientific papers. A clear pattern is that men produce more papers than women. A less clear pattern is in citation rates: some studies show that females are cited less, some find no effect. Where biases are shown, many arguments are used to explain them. Two common arguments are (i) child rearing limits females from spending as much time publishing, applying for funding or advancing their careers; and (ii) self-promotion and overt competitiveness are more typically exhibited by males and are traits rewarded in the review process for publication, funding and promotion.

A paper of particular interest to me was published in 2006 (Symonds et al.). It looked at gender differences in publication outputs of Australian and British Evolutionary Biologists and Ecologists (I am an Australian behavioural ecologist). They showed that men published almost 40% more papers than women, and men were significantly more likely to win research funding; but there was no difference in the median number of citations per paper for males and females. While citation rates are not necessarily a good metric for research quality, they do crudely suggest that females produce work of equal quality to men.

This paper got me thinking about where males and females chose to publish their work. If Continue reading “Gender bias?”

Unknown's avatarSamantha Ponton12 Comments
General, Journal updates, Methods papers, Virtual Issues

Top methods in ecology and evolution

What links tea bags, glove puppets, vandalism, and cheddar? Or catching birds, bug soup, criminal profiling, snow leopards and jaguars? Methods in Ecology and Evolution, obviously! We have now been publishing new methods for over 4 years, and the sheer variety of papers we have received is quite amazing: field, lab, statistics, simulations and computing. All areas of methodology have been covered, as have all … Continue reading Top methods in ecology and evolution

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General, Journal updates, Society

New Editor on the block…

By Jana Vamosi How’s it going, eh? Yeah, that’s right. A Canadian has infiltrated the ranks as a new Senior Editor. I will be joining the esteemed Rob Freckleton and Bob O’Hara in directing manuscripts and developing the journal. My first challenge will be to master some of these modern communication tools, namely this “social media” fad I keep hearing so much about. A flash … Continue reading New Editor on the block…

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General, Journal updates, Methods papers

Issue 5.6

Issue 5.6 is now available online, containing articles on Spatio-temporal methods, lightscapes, stable isotopes, foodwebs, tree-based methods, modelling biomass change and occupancy models. This issue includes the applications paper Fitting occupancy models with E-SURGE: hidden Markov modelling of presence–absence data, and 2 open access articles on improving species distribution models: the value of data on abundance and mapping artificial lightscapes for ecological studies. About the … Continue reading Issue 5.6

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Conservation and management, General

Remote sensing for conservation: uses, prospects and challenges

By Nathalie Pettorelli, Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London

For many years, I believed I had a condition. Namely, a relatively short attention span, which prevented me from becoming fully engaged with series’ of talks at any given conference. Last month, however, I realised that there was a cure to this: being an organiser of the conference or symposium I attend. For the first time in my life, I was indeed able to sit and listen to talks from 9am to 5pm for two days in a row, without feeling the need to find excuses to disappear, or relying on coffee to keep me alert and engaged.

Like everybody else, I actually need my fix of “wow” moments, where you look at a slide or listen to a speaker and think “this is really cool”. What does it for me, it appears, is the combination of a good question, an “out-of-the-box” approach to tackle it, and an answer that has clear, applied implications. You can always rely on Conservation Biology to come up with loads of interesting questions whose answers have practical implications, and Remote Sensing as a science tends to provide fertile ground for developing unorthodox approaches – so having a symposium on Remote Sensing for Conservation was bound to get me my “wow” moments, and, indeed, I wasn’t disappointed.

N pettorelli 1
Nathalie Pettorelli, Woody Turner and Martin Wegmann

When Woody Turner, Martin Wegmann and I submitted our proposal for a symposium to the Zoological Society of London nearly two years ago, our vision was to pack our event with examples of how Remote Sensing can support the Conservation agenda. Our idea was to organise these examples around the classical Pressure/State/Response framework adopted by the Convention on Biological Diversity, to highlight the versatility of Remote Sensing approaches in terms of scope and monitoring abilities.

We invited 24 speakers from a range of backgrounds (e.g. Conservation NGO staff, academics, Space Agency employees), and asked them to present some of their latest Continue reading “Remote sensing for conservation: uses, prospects and challenges”

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General, Statistical methods

Some stats methods are like Rick Astley – best left in the 1980s

This week David Warton (Methods’ Associate Editor) received the 2014 Christopher Heyde Medal from the Australian Academy of Sciences for contributions in probability theory, statistical methodology and their applications. He gave a talk to the academy, which he’s summarised in this article, originally published on The Conversation.

Rick Astley
Sorry Rick – you should’ve been left behind about three decades ago (along with some algorithms). Claudio Poblete/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

By David Warton

It’s an exciting time to be doing statistics. You heard me – statistics: exciting.

It often gets a bad rap, but stats is after all at the business end of the research process. When I’ve collaborated on studies of megafauna, leopard seals, police confessions, a new casino game or climate change effects on biodiversity, the point where researchers find out their results and have those “Eureka!” moments is more often than not in front of a computer rather than out in the field.

Now is an especially good time to be a statistician because the technological revolution over the past couple of decades has blown the field wide open – but despite this, some researchers continue to use outdated and inadequate statistical methods.

The sooner we can change this, the better.

Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

 

When I started high school (around 25 years ago) computers looked like the one pictured right. They had 64kB memory. And this compressed digital image is more than 100kB, meaning that this poor computer doesn’t have enough memory to look at this picture of itself!

Modern computers are thousands of times faster and can have a million times as much memory. This and related technological advances has changed data analysis in two main ways: Continue reading “Some stats methods are like Rick Astley – best left in the 1980s”

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General, Journal updates, Methods papers

Issue 5.5

Issue 5.5 is now online! This months issue includes articles on species distribution models, detection and diversity, and movement and modelling. We have 2 open access papers on calculating second derivatives of population growth rates for ecology and evolution by Esther Shyu and Hal Caswell, and understanding co-occurrence by modelling species simultaneously with a Joint Species Distribution Model (JSDM) by Laura Pollock et al. Mick … Continue reading Issue 5.5

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Uncategorized

Joint Species Distribution Models

Originally posted on Michael McCarthy's Research:
Update: The paper is now available (free) from Methods in Ecology and Evolution. Species might tend to occur together, or they might tend to occur apart. Factors driving these patterns can include environmental variables or species interactions. Species distribution models can predict the probability of occurrence of species, but they rarely account for the joint occurrence of multiple… Continue reading Joint Species Distribution Models

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General, Journal updates, Methods papers

Notre Dame study reveals that particle size matters for environmental DNA monitoring

Common carp
Common carp

University of Notre Dame scientists have now published the first detailed investigation of just how small (or big) environmental DNA, or eDNA, particles really are, and their results provide important guidance for all eDNA monitoring programs.

Like investigators combing a crime scene for DNA traces from suspects or victims, ecologists now apply similar genetic tests to search the environment for important species. These traces of animal or plant DNA in water, soil and air are called environmental DNA. Aquatic eDNA monitoring is emerging as a powerful way to detect harmful species like invasive Asian carp and Burmese pythons or beneficial species like Chinook salmon and Idaho giant salamander. Because this tool is new, little is known about these tiny DNA-containing bits and how to best capture them from water.

Using common carp, one of the 30 worst invasive species worldwide, the researchers found eDNA in particles ranging from smaller than a mitochondrion to larger than a grain of table salt. Most of the eDNA was in particles between 1 and 10 micrometers, about the same diameter as a single strand of spider silk. Continue reading “Notre Dame study reveals that particle size matters for environmental DNA monitoring”

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