Category: Journal updates

Journal updates

Issue 8.9

Issue 8.9 is now online!

The September issue of Methods is now online!

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

– qfasar: A new R package for diet estimation using quantitative fatty acid signature analysis methods. It also provides functionality to evaluate and potentially improve the performance of a library of prey signature data, compute goodness-of-fit diagnostics, and support simulation-based research.

– biomass: An r package designed to compute both AGB/AGC estimate and its associated uncertainty from forest plot datasets, using a Bayesian inference procedure. The package builds upon previous work on pantropical and regional biomass allometric equations and published datasets by default, but it can also integrate unpublished or complementary datasets in many steps.

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Journal updates

Issue 8.8

Issue 8.8 is now online!

The August issue of Methods is now online!

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

– Paco: An R package that assesses the phylogenetic congruence, or evolutionary dependence, of two groups of interacting species using both ecological interaction networks and their phylogenetic history.

– Open MEE: Open Meta-analyst for Ecology and Evolution (Open MEE) addresses the need for advanced, easy-to-use software for meta-analysis and meta-regression.It offers a suite of advanced meta-analysis and meta-regression methods for synthesizing continuous and categorical data, including meta-regression with multiple covariates and their interactions, phylogenetic analyses, and simple missing data imputation.

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Methods papers, Online extras

Conditional Occupancy Design Explained

Occupancy surveys are widely used in ecology to study wildlife and plant habitat use. To account for imperfect detection probability many researchers use occupancy models. But occupancy probability estimates for rare species tend to be biased because we’re unlikely to observe the animals at all and as a result, the data aren’t very informative. In their new article – ‘Occupancy surveys with conditional replicates: An … Continue reading Conditional Occupancy Design Explained

Unknown's avatarHarriet Rhodes5 Comments
Journal updates

Issue 8.7

Issue 8.7 is now online!

© Paula Matos

The July issue of Methods is now online!

This issue contains three Applications articles (one of which is Open Access) and one additional Open Access article. These four papers are freely available to everyone, no subscription required.

– BioEnergeticFoodWebs: An implementation of Yodzis & Innes bio-energetic model, in the high-performance computing language Julia. This package can be used to conduct numerical experiments in a reproducible and standard way.

– Controlled plant crosses: Chambers which allow you to control pollen movement and paternity of offspring using unpollinated isolated plants and microsatellite markers for parents and their putative offspring. This system has per plant costs and efficacy superior to pollen bags used in past studies of wind-pollinated plants.

– The Global Pollen Project: The study of fossil and modern pollen assemblages provides essential information about vegetation dynamics in space and time. In this Open Access Applications article, Martin and Harvey present a new online tool – the Global Pollen Project – which aims to enable people to share and identify pollen grains. Through this, it will create an open, free and accessible reference library for pollen identification. The database currently holds information for over 1500 species, from Europe, the Americas and Asia. As the collection grows, we envision easier pollen identification, and greater use of the database for novel research on pollen morphology and other characteristics, especially when linked to other palaeoecological databases, such as Neotoma.

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Methods papers, Online extras

Why Soft Sweeps from Standing Genetic Variation are More Likely than You May Think

We coined the term “soft sweeps” in 2005. The term has since become widely used, though not everyone uses the term in the same way. As part of the ‘How to Measure Natural Selection‘ Special Feature in Methods in Ecology and Evolution, we attempt to clarify what “soft sweep” means and doesn’t mean. For example, not every sweep from standing genetic variation is necessarily a … Continue reading Why Soft Sweeps from Standing Genetic Variation are More Likely than You May Think

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Journal updates, Methods papers

Issue 8.6: How to Measure Natural Selection

Issue 8.6 is now online!

The April issue of Methods, which includes our latest Special Feature – ‘How to Measure Natural Selection‘ – is now online!

Understanding how and why some individuals survive and reproduce better than others, the traits that allow them to do so, the genetic basis of those traits, and the signatures of past and present selection in patterns of variation in the genome remain at the top of the research agenda for evolutionary biology. This Special Feature – Guest Edited by Jeff Conner, John Stinchcombe and Joanna Kelley – draws together a collection of seven papers that highlight new methodological and conceptual approaches to meeting this agenda.

Three of the ‘How to Measure Natural Selection’ papers – Franklin and Morrissey, Thomson and Hadfield, and Hadfield and Thomson – clarify unresolved aspects of the literature in meaningful and important ways. Following on from this Hermisson and Pennings; Lotterhos et al.; and Villanueva‐Cañas et al. tackle the genomic results of evolution by natural selection: namely, how we can detect natural selection from genomic data? Finally, Wadgymar et al. address the issue of how much we know about the underlying loci or agents of selection.

To use the Editors’ own words, the articles in this issue “deal with how we can detect selection in a way that can be used to predict evolutionary responses, how selection affects the genome, and how selection and genetics underlie adaptive differentiation.”

All of the articles in the ‘How to Measure Natural Selection‘ Special Feature will be freely available for a limited time.
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Methods papers, Online extras

‘Size’ and ‘Shape’ in the Measurement of Multivariate Proximity

Ordination and clustering methods are widely applied to ecological data that are non-negative (like species abundances or biomasses). These methods rely on a measure of multivariate proximity that quantifies differences between the sampling units (e.g. individuals, stations, time points), leading to results such as: Ordinations of the units, where interpoint distances optimally display the measured differences Clustering the units into homogeneous clusters Assessing differences between … Continue reading ‘Size’ and ‘Shape’ in the Measurement of Multivariate Proximity

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Methods papers, Online extras

Assessment of Stream Health with DNA Metabarcoding

Following on from last week’s press release ‘How Clean are Finnish Rivers?’, Vasco Elbrecht et al. have produced a video to explain the methods in ‘Assessing strengths and weaknesses of DNA metabarcoding-based macroinvertebrate identification for routine stream monitoring‘. In this video, the authors explore the potential of DNA metabarcoding to access stream health using macroinvertebrates. They compared DNA and morphology-based identification of bulk monitoring samples from … Continue reading Assessment of Stream Health with DNA Metabarcoding

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Editor Profiles, Journal updates

New Associate Editors

Today we are welcoming four new Associate Editors to Methods in Ecology and Evolution. Graziella Iossa (University of Lincoln) and Theoni Photopoulou (Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University) are joining as regular Associate Editors and Simon Jarman (Unversity of Porto) and Daniele Silvestro (University of Gothenburg) will be working on Applications articles. You can find out more about all of our new Associate Editors below. Graziella Iossa “I am … Continue reading New Associate Editors

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Journal updates

Issue 8.5

Issue 8.5 is now online!

The May issue of Methods is now online!

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

– MatlabHTK: A software interface to a popular speech recognition system making it possible for non-experts to implement hidden Markov models for bioacoustic signal processing.

– PrimerMiner: The R package PrimerMiner batch downloads DNA barcode gene sequences from BOLD and NCBI databases for specified target taxonomic groups and then applies sequence clustering into operational taxonomic units to reduce biases introduced by the different number of available sequences per species.

– BarcodingR: An integrated software package that provides a comprehensive implementation of species identification methods, including artificial intelligence, fuzzy-set, Bayesian and kmer-based methods, that are not readily available in other packages.

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