The September issue of Methods is now online! 
We have a larger issue of 14 articles this month, featuring methods for individual bird recognition, zooplankton sampling, coral health assessment and much more.
Senior Editor Lee Hsiang Liow has selected five featured articles – find out about them below. We also have three Applications, three Practical Tools articles and 11 articles that are freely available to everyone – no subscription required!
Ignasi Bartomeus and colleagues share the story behind their recent Methods article ‘cxr: A toolbox for modelling species coexistence in R’.
This post recalls the journey on how we ended up developing cxr (acronym for CoeXistence relationships in R), an R package for quantifying interactions among species and their coexistence relationships. In other words, it provides tools for telling apart the situations in which different species can persist together in a community from the cases in which one species completely overcomes another.
Understanding how aquatic animals move is becoming increasingly important for protecting them. Knowing where they migrate, how long they stay, and what they do when they travel through changing marine environments provides us with key information on movement corridors, habitat hotspots, and changing population distributions. This information can then be used to help manage and conserve many different aquatic species, from developing guidelines for recreational fishing practices to defining marine spatial planning measures.
Sampling flower nectar from forest canopies is logistically challenging, as it requires physical access to the canopy at a height greater than can be achieved by hand. The most common solutions comprise the use of cherry pickers, cranes or tree climbers, however these techniques are generally expensive, complex to organise, and often involve additional safety risk assessment and specialised technicians.
Esta publicación también está disponible en español.
You spent months carefully collecting data from articles addressing your favorite scientific question, you have dozens of articles neatly arranged on a spreadsheet, you found software or code to analyze the data, and then daydream about how your publication will be the most cited in your field while making cool plots. If that sounds familiar, you have probably done a meta-analysis. Meta-analysis uses statistical models to combine data from different publications to answer a specific question.
What you may not have realized when going down the meta-analysis rabbit hole, is that small, seemingly inconsequential, choices can greatly affect your results. If you want to know about one of them lurking behind the scenes… read on!
Continue readingThis post is also available in English.
Pasaste meses laboriosamente colectando datos de artículos científicos acerca de tu pregunta favorita, tienes decenas de artículos perfectamente organizados en una base de datos, ya encontraste el programa o código para analizar los datos, y entonces imaginas como tu publicación va a ser la más citada en tu campo de investigación mientras haces unos gráficos lindísimos. Si esto te suena familiar, seguramente has hecho un meta-análisis. Un meta-análisis usa modelos estadísticos para combinar datos de distintas publicaciones para responder a una pregunta específica.
Lo que quizás no te diste cuenta mientras navegabas los pasos del meta-análisis, es que pequeñas decisiones (a veces pareciendo de muy poca importancia) pueden tener grandes efectos en los resultados. Si quieres saber más acerca de una de estas decisiones en particular… ¡sigue leyendo!
Continue readingThis year is our 10th Anniversary! To celebrate, we’ve made a timeline of highlights from the past decade, from the first paper ever submitted, to a top-cited article with 3,295 citations.
We’d like to give a big thanks our dedicated editors, plus all the authors and reviewers who are developing the fields of ecology and evolution with groundbreaking new methods. Here’s to 10 more years!
A very important ecological feature of a species is its geographic range, which can be described by its size, position and shape. Studying the geographic range can be useful to understand the ecological needs of a species and, thereby, to plan conservation strategies. In ecological studies, mathematical models are the new standard to reconstruct the distribution of living species on Earth because of their accuracy in predicting a species presence or absence at unsampled locations. These methods are able to reconstruct the climatic niche of a species and to project it onto a geographic domain in order to predict the species’ spatial distribution. To do this, besides the occurrences of a species, the models necessarily require the spatial maps of environmental variables, like temperature and precipitation, for all the study area.
Continue readingThe July issue of Methods is now online! 
This month’s issue features articles on evaluating biodiversity offsetting, managing remotely-collected data, quantifying log decay and much more.
Senior Editor Aaron Ellison has selected six featured articles this month – find out about them below. We also have three Applications and seven articles that are freely available to everyone – no subscription required!
落红不是无情物，化作春泥更护花。 –龚自珍(清)
“The fallen petals are not as cruel as they seem; they fertilize those in full bloom instead.” – Gong Zizhen (Qing Dynasty)
A decaying Douglas fir log
This picture shows a decomposing log of Douglas fir, Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco, in Schovenhorst, The Netherlands, which is one of the deadwood incubation sites of the LOGLIFE “tree cemetery” project. 25 angiosperm and gymnosperm species covering a diverse range of functional traits were selected and incubated in the “common garden experiment”. This project was founded in 2012, aiming to disentangle the effects of different species’ wood traits and site-related environmental drivers on decomposition dynamics of wood, and its associated diversity of microbial and invertebrate communities.
