High-throughput genomic methods are increasingly used to investigate invertebrate thermal responses with greater dimensionality and resolution than previously achieved. However, corresponding methods for characterising invertebrate phenotypes are still lacking. Jacinta Kong and her co-authors propose a novel use of thermocyclers as temperature-controlled incubators for characterising invertebrate phenotypes. Why use a thermocycler instead of current methods to characterise thermal phenotypes? In this video they outline key advantages of … Continue reading Why You Should Use a Thermocycler Instead of an Incubator
At the last ISEC, in Montpellier in 2014, an informal survey suggested that Methods in Ecology and Evolution was the most cited journal in talks. This reflects the importance of statistical methods in ecology and it is one reason for the success of the journal. For this year’s International Statistcal Ecology Conference in Seattle we have produced a virtual issue that presents some of our best recent papers which cross the divide between statistics and ecology. They range over most of the topics covered at ISEC, from statistical theory to abundance estimation and distance sampling.
We hope that Methods in Ecology and Evolution will be equally well represented in talks in Seattle, and also – just as in Montpellier – some of the work presented will find its way into the pages of the journal in the future.
Collecting leaves or seeds from tall trees is a difficult task that many plant physiologists, ecologists, geneticists and forest managers encounter repeatedly. In a series of videos on the Methods in Ecology and Evolution YouTube channel, Kara N. Youngentob, Christina Zdenek and Eva van Gorsel demonstrate how to use the arborist throw-line launcher, which significantly simplifies this task. This new way of collecting seeds and leaves from tall trees is explained in their Applications article ‘A simple and effective method to collect leaves and seeds from tall trees‘. As this is an Applications paper, it is freely available to everyone.
Basic Techniques for the Arborist Throw-line Launcher
The first of the three videos is a basic overview of the method. In this tutorial, the authors teach you how to find the ideal branch, how to use the throw-line launcher and go through some important safety information. Continue reading “The Arborist Throw-line Launcher”
Register for FREE for the first ever BES Publishing webinar based on our forthcoming Demography Beyond the Population Special Feature.
This hour long webinar will begin at 1pm (GMT) on Tuesday 1 March. It highlights some of the excellent articles soon to be published in the British Ecological Society journals Special Feature entitled “Demography Beyond the Population”. The Special Feature is a collaborative effort including articles in all six BES journals. This is the first time such a large ecological collaboration has been attempted worldwide. Using a cross-journal approach has allowed us to highlight the strongly interdisciplinary nature of the field of demography to its fullest potential as well as to lay down the foundations for future directions at the interface of ecology, evolution, conservation biology and human welfare. The webinar has several international speakers and will discuss the articles in the Special Feature and the implications for demography research going forward. Continue reading “Demography Beyond the Population Webinar: Register for Free Now”
Today is 10th National Wildlife Day. As we have done for a few awareness days this year (Bats, Biodiversity and Bees so far) we are marking the day by highlighting some of our favourite Methodsin Ecology and Evolution articles on the subject. Obviously ‘wildlife’ is a pretty big topic, so we have narrowed our focus (slightly) to monitoring wildlife (with one or two additional papers that we didn’t want to leave out).
This list is certainly not exhaustive and there are many more wonderful articles on these topics in the journal. You can see more of them on the Wiley Online Library.
If you would like to learn more about National Wildlife Day, you may wish to visit the organisation’s website, follow them on Twitter and Facebook or check out today’s hashtag: #NationalWildlifeDay.
Without further ado though, please enjoy our selection of Methods articles for National Wildlife Day:
Integrating Demographic Data
Our National Wildlife Day celebration begins with an article from our EURING Special Feature. Robert Robinson et al. present an approach which allows important demographic parameters to be identified, even if they are not measured directly, in ‘Integrating demographic data: towards a framework for monitoring wildlife populations at large spatial scales‘. Using their approach they were able to retrieve known demographic signals both within and across species and identify the demographic causes of population decline in Song Thrush and Lawping.
As you may know, tomorrow (Saturday 22 August) is National Honey Bee Day in the USA. To mark the day we will be highlighting some of the best papers that have been published on bees and pollinators in Methods in Ecology and Evolution.
You can find out more about National Honey Bee Day (and about bees in general) HERE.
Without further ado though, here are a few of the best Methods papers related to Honey Bees:
Honey Bee Risk Assessment
Our Honey Bee highlights begin with Hendriksma et al.’s article ‘Honey bee risk assessment: new approaches for in vitro larvae rearing and data analyses‘. Robust laboratory methods for assessing adverse effects on honey bee brood are required for research into the issues contributing to global bee losses. To facilitate this, the authors of this article recommend in vitro rearing of larvae and suggest some appropriate statistical tools for the related data analyses. Together these methods can help to improve the quality of environmental risk assessment studies on honey bees and secure honey bee pollination. As this article was published over two years ago, it can be accessed for free by anyone.
As you may know, today (Friday 22 May) is the United Nations Day for Biodiversity and we are celebrating by highlighting some of the best papers that have been published on biodiversity in Methods in Ecology and Evolution. This is by no means an exhaustive list and you can find many more articles on similar topics on the Wiley Online Library (remember, if you are a member of the BES, you can access all Methods articles free of charge).
If you would like to learn more about the International Day for Biological Diversity, you may wish to visit the Convention on Biological Diversity website, follow them on Twitter or check out today’s hashtag: #IBD2015.
Without further ado though, here are a few of the best Methods papers on Biological Diversity:
Biodiversity Soup
We begin with an Open Access article from one of our Associate Editors, Douglas Yu (et al.). This article was published in the August issue of 2012 and focuses on the metabarcoding of arthropods. The authors present protocols for the extraction of ecological, taxonomic and phylogenetic information from bulk samples of arthropods. They also demonstrate that metabarcoding allows for the precise estimation of pairwise community dissimilarity (beta diversity) and within-community phylogenetic diversity (alpha diversity), despite the inevitable loss of taxonomic information.
In this video Thomas Etherington shows how to use the NLMpy Python package to create neutral landscape models. The video demonstrates how the paper’s Supporting Information documentation, Python scripts, and GIS data can be used to create a the example neutral landscape models that are shown in the paper. Recognising that some ecologists may not be very familiar with Python, the authors have also created … Continue reading NLMpy: a python software package for the creation of neutral landscape models
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”
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