We would like to welcome 4 new Applications Editors to our editorial board: Rich Fitzjohn from Macquarie University, Australia, Ruth King from the University of St Andrews, Scotland, Brian O’Meara from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Timothée Poisot from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Rich, Ruth, Brian and Tim are the first of a new group of Associate Editors who will deal solely with … Continue reading New Applications Editors
Issue 5.8 includes articles on lidar & radar in ecology, occurrence data analysis, ecological networks, measuring habitats, life history variation, dispersal, biodiversity–productivity and monitoring populations, along with the freely available application article: ‘a simple numerical tool to infer whether a species is extinct‘. There’s an associated video this month in which Phillip Stepanian and colleagues talk about the background and motivation behind their paper: ‘an introduction … Continue reading Issue 5.8
In this video David Warton interviews Ben Bolker, Professor in Theoretical and Statistical Ecology at McMaster University and maintainer of the lmer package, and Mark Brewer, Principal Consultant for Ecology and Environmental Science at BioSS, Scotland. They discuss the tendency to develop and use big fancy analyses that are in some applications unnecessarily complex, why it happens, and what can be done about it. Look … Continue reading Are your analyses too fancy?
At MEE we are looking to publish the best methodological papers. It is no surprise, then, that we are able to contribute several papers to this ‘Ecology in China’ Virtual Issue. The topics covered range from an elegant new way of using very old technology (Zhao et al.) to methods based on next generation sequencing to investigate biodiversity (for example Liu et al.). It is … Continue reading Ecology in China
Here is a video and press release about the recent Methods paper, ‘Investigating three-dimensional meso-scale habitat complexity and its ecological implications using low-cost RGB-D sensor technology‘, taken from Griffith University:
The Kinect line of devices developed by Microsoft for Xbox consoles and Windows PCs is marrying gaming technology with ecological research to deliver precise three-dimensional data in greater efficiency and at a fraction of the cost of current imaging techniques.
At Griffith University’s Australian Rivers Institute (ARI) on the Gold Coast, Professor Joe Lee, Dr Jan Warnken and Higher Degree Research student Ms Shafagh Kamal have been Continue reading “Kinect connects for mangroves research”
Issue 5.7 is now available online, including papers on population ecology, landscape ecology, spatial ecology, community ecology and environmental ecology. This month there is a forum discussion by Murray Efford and Andy Royle, about the 2013 paper Integrating resource selection information with spatial capture–recapture. There are 2 open access papers on particle size distribution and optimal capture of aqueous macrobial eDNA, and measuring convergent evolution, … Continue reading Issue 5.7
David Warton interviews David Borchers, Reader in Statistics at the University of St Andrews, about his latest paper in MEE, “Continuous-time spatially explicit capture-recapture models, with an application to a jaguar camera-trap survey“: Continue reading An interview with David Borchers: Continuous-time SECR
Methods in Ecology and Evolution has been publishing papers on statistical ecology since its inception in 2010. Since the last ISEC meeting, we have published many more papers, of an increasing quality and influence. We have put together a Virtual Issue to showcase some of those papers (but it also misses out many more that will be just as interesting)!. The papers chosen show the … Continue reading Ecological statistics are methods too!
In this video, Phillip Stepanian, Phillip Chilson and Jeffrey Kelly talk about the background and motivation behind their recent MEE paper ‘An introduction to radar image processing in ecology‘, followed by a short tutorial. Continue reading NEW VIDEO: An introduction to radar image processing in ecology
By 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?”
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