Category: Journal updates

Journal updates, Methods papers

Issue 8.4: Technological Advances at the Interface of Ecology and Statistics

Issue 8.4 is now online!

The April issue of Methods, which includes our latest Special Feature – “Technological Advances at the Interface of Ecology and Statistics” – is now online!

This new Special Feature is a collection of five articles (plus an Editorial from Guest Editor David Warton) inspired by the December 2015 Eco-Stats conference at the University of New South Wales in Australia. It shows how interdisciplinary collaboration help to solve problems around estimating biodiversity and how it changes over space and time.

The five articles are based on joint talks given at the conference. They focus on:

As David Warton states in his Editorial, “interdisciplinary collaboration and the opportunities offered by recent technological advances have potential to lead to interesting and sometimes surprising findings, and will continue to be fertile ground for scientists in the foreseeable future”. Meetings like Eco-Stats 15 and Special Features like this one will, hopefully, help to encourage these sorts of collaborative research projects.

All of the articles in the ‘Technological Advances at the Interface of Ecology and Statistics‘ Special Feature will be freely available for a limited time.
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Methods papers, Online extras

Microphone Backpacks for Individual-level Acoustic Recordings

To understand the factors shaping vocal communication, we need reliable information about the communicating individuals on different levels. First, vocal behaviour should be recorded from undisturbed animals in meaningful settings. Then we have to separate and assign the individuals’ vocalisations. Finally, the precise timing of vocal events needs to be stored. Microphone backpacks allow researchers to record the vocal behaviour of individual animals in naturalistic settings – even in acoustically challenging … Continue reading Microphone Backpacks for Individual-level Acoustic Recordings

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General, Journal updates, Methods papers, Robert May Prize, Society, Virtual Issues

2016 Robert May Prize Winner: Gabriella Leighton

The Robert May Prize is awarded annually for the best paper published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution by an Early Career Researcher. We’re delighted to announce that the 2016 winner is Gabriella Leighton, for her article ‘Just Google it: assessing the use of Google Images to describe geographical variation in visible traits of organisms‘.

‘Just Google it’ marks an important step in converting ecology to an armchair science. Many species (e.g. owls, hawks, bears) are difficult, time-consuming, expensive and even dangerous to observe. It would be a lot easier if we didn’t have to spend time, energy and risk lives having to observe organisms in the field! Continue reading “2016 Robert May Prize Winner: Gabriella Leighton”

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Methods papers, Online extras

Decoupling Functional and Phylogenetic Dissimilarity between Organisms

Francesco de Bello describes the main elements of the method he has recently published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution. The method aims at decoupling and combining functional trait and phylogenetic dissimilarities between organisms. This allows for a more effective combination of non-overlapping information between phylogeny and functional traits. Decoupling trait and phylogenetic information can also uncover otherwise hidden signals underlying species coexistence and turnover, … Continue reading Decoupling Functional and Phylogenetic Dissimilarity between Organisms

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Editor Profiles, Journal updates

New Associate Editors

Today we are welcoming two new people to the Methods in Ecology and Evolution Associate Editor Board. Pierre Durand is joining us from the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa) and Andrew Mahon joins from Central Michigan University (USA). You can find out more about Pierre and Andrew below. Pierre Durand “My research is broadly focussed on the evolution of complexity. Many of my projects are related to the evolutionary … Continue reading New Associate Editors

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Journal updates, Methods papers, Online extras

The Field Guide to Sequence-Based Identification of Biodiversity: An Interview with Simon Creer

In a new Methods in Ecology and Evolution podcast, Georgina Brennan (Bangor University) interviews Simon Creer (Bangor University) about his article ‘The ecologist’s field guide to sequence-based identification of biodiversity‘. They talk about about where the idea for the paper came from, what it’s aim are and who will benefit from it. We hear how new sequences can improve and enhance current biomonitoring programmes (and make them … Continue reading The Field Guide to Sequence-Based Identification of Biodiversity: An Interview with Simon Creer

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Journal updates

Issue 8.3

Issue 8.3 is now online!

The March issue of Methods is now online!

This issue contains two Applications articles and one Open Access article. These three papers are freely available to everyone, no subscription required.

– Solo: Solo audio recorders are inexpensive, easy to construct and record audible sound continuously for around 40 days. The paper also has a video tutorial explaining how to assemble the required hardware and comes with a companion website with more information.

– The third dimension: A novel design to obtain three-dimensional data on the movements of aquatic organisms at depths of up to 140m. The set-up consists of two synchronised high-speed cameras fixed to two articulated arms and can be used for any underwater applications that require synchronized video recordings of medium- to large-sized animals.

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Journal updates

Issue 8.2

Issue 8.2 is now online!

The February issue of Methods is now online!

This issue contains four(!) Applications articles and two Open Access articles. These six papers are freely available to everyone – no subscription required.

– Earth Mover’s Distance: The Earth Mover’s Distance (or EMD) is a method commonly used in image retrieval applications. The authors of this paper propose its use to calculate similarity in space use in the framework of movement ecology. This will be helpful for many questions regarding behavioural ecology, wildlife management and conservation.

– warbleR: The R package warbleR is a new package for the analysis of animal acoustic signal structure. It offers functions for downloading avian vocalisations from the open-access online repository Xeno-Canto, displaying the geographic extent of the recordings, manipulating sound files, detecting acoustic signals or importing detected signals from other software, and much more.

– meteR: The open-source R package, meteR directly calculates all of Maximum entropy theory of ecology’s (METE’s) predictions from a variety of data formats; automatically handles approximations and other technical details; and provides high-level plotting and model comparison functions to explore and interrogate models.

– Noise Egg: The Noise Egg is a device that can produce a low-frequency sound, which can be used as an experimental source of noise both in aquaria and in the field. It was developed to study the effects of noise on communication and behaviour in small aquatic animals; however, it could be used for other purposes, such as testing the propagation of certain frequencies in shallow-water habitats.

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Journal updates

Issue 8.1

Issue 8.1 is now online!

The January issue of Methods is now online!

All of the articles in this month’s issue of Methods in Ecology and Evolution are free for the whole year. You will not need a subscription to access or download any of them throughout 2017.

Our first issue of this year contains three Applications articles and two Open Access articles. These five papers will be freely available permanently.

– CDMetaPOP: Cost–Distance Meta-POPulation provides a novel tool for questions in landscape genetics by incorporating population viability analysis, while linking directly to conservation applications.

– Rphylopars: An R implementation of PhyloPars, a tool for phylogenetic imputation of missing data and estimation of trait covariance across species (phylogenetic covariance) and within species (phenotypic covariance). Rphylopars provides expanded capabilities over the original PhyloPars interface including a fast linear-time algorithm, thus allowing for extremely large data sets (which were previously computationally infeasible) to be analysed in seconds or minutes rather than hours.

– ggtree: An R package that provides programmable visualisation and annotation of phylogenetic trees. ggtree can read more tree file formats than other software and allows colouring and annotation of a tree by numerical/categorical node attributes, manipulating a tree by rotating, collapsing and zooming out clades, highlighting user selected clades or operational taxonomic units and exploration of a large tree by zooming into a selected portion.

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Journal updates

Issue 7.12

Issue 7.12 is now online!

The final 2016 issue of Methods is now online!

This month’s issue contains four Applications articles and two Open Access articles, all of which are freely available.

– iNEXT: The R package iNEXT (iNterpolation/EXTrapolation) provides simple functions to compute and plot the seamless rarefaction and extrapolation sampling curves for the three most widely used members of the Hill number family (species richness, Shannon diversity and Simpson diversity).

– camtrapR: A new toolbox for flexible and efficient management of data generated in camera trap-based wildlife studies. The package implements a complete workflow for processing camera trapping data.

– rotl: An R package to search and download data from the Open Tree of Life directly in R. It uses common data structures allowing researchers to take advantage of the rich set of tools and methods that are available in R to manipulate, analyse and visualize phylogenies.

– Fluctuating-temperature chamber: A design for economical, programmable fluctuating-temperature chambers based on a relatively small commercially manufactured constant temperature chamber modified with a customized, user-friendly microcontroller.

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