Issue 5.8

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

Are your analyses too fancy?

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?

Ecology in China

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

Kinect connects for mangroves research

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:


Motion sensing technology, best known in computer games, is vastly improving Queensland scientists’ ability to quantify habitat complexity in mangroves.

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”

Our New Impact Factor (or why the five year impact factor is much much much more important)

Yesterday Thomson-Reuters finally released their impact factors for 2013. And ours is … 5.322 Which has gone down by 0.602 from last year. This also means we’ve moved down to 15th in the Ecology rankings. And what is worse is that the Journal of Ecology has overtaken us! Impact factors are notorious for only covering 2 years of citations, which is not a long time … Continue reading Our New Impact Factor (or why the five year impact factor is much much much more important)

Issue 5.7

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

Ecological statistics are methods too!

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!

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