Category: Practical Tools

Ecology, Field Methods, Practical Tools

Goby gummies: the fish ‘lolly’ that provides a window to study predation underwater

Post provided by Christopher Hemingson Close your eyes and picture a predation event. Personally, I default to the Planet Earth series’ “Mountains” episode, in which a snow leopard acrobatically chases a mountain goat across near-vertical cliffs in an adrenaline-inducing pursuit. While iconic, predation sequences like this one generally represent the minority. More often than not, predation events occur on the order of split seconds – … Continue reading Goby gummies: the fish ‘lolly’ that provides a window to study predation underwater

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Practical Tools

Why we built a new approach to field sampling for soil eDNA

Post provided by Karen Dyson and Kayla Aburida When we first started using soil environmental DNA (eDNA) to understand how sustainable farming practices affect biodiversity, we thought the hard parts would be in the lab or the analysis. We were wrong. Instead, one of the biggest challenges came much earlier: in the field when collecting data. Soil eDNA is patchy, shaped by microhabitats, plant cover, … Continue reading Why we built a new approach to field sampling for soil eDNA

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Practical Tools

From video to behaviour: new tool for automated nest monitoring

Post provided by Liliana Silva Why we developed this automation framework Observing animal behaviour is one of the most widely used methods in ecology. But anyone who has spent hours viewing video footage knows how quickly behavioural analysis becomes overwhelming. A single nest camera can generate hundreds of hours of recordings, and turning those videos into behavioural data often means endless manual annotation. As a … Continue reading From video to behaviour: new tool for automated nest monitoring

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Practical Tools

The future of natural history specimen 3D digitization is here with COPIS

Post provided by Jeremy D. Pustilnik and Genevieve S. Rios Natural history museums around the world collectively hold over one billion specimens in their collections, from animal skins and fossils to pressed plants, minerals, and cultural heritage artifacts. Only a small fraction of these objects is ever placed on public display, while most remain in collection cabinets where they are studied by scientists, but rarely … Continue reading The future of natural history specimen 3D digitization is here with COPIS

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Ecology, Practical Tools

What a national marine dataset taught us about the power of quality control and collaboration

Post provided by Brooke Bond (Gibbons) Ecologists often dream about big datasets—Combining observations from multiple studies across space and time could reveal patterns that would otherwise be impossible to detect. But anyone who has tried to merge datasets from different sources knows the reality is often less glamorous. My first job involved synthesising Baited Remote Underwater Video (BRUV) datasets from across Australia. BRUV systems use … Continue reading What a national marine dataset taught us about the power of quality control and collaboration

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Practical Tools

From First Clicks to Building Esperdyne: A Personal Journey into Bat Bioacoustics.

Post provided by Ravi Umadi. On a humid, warm evening—close to 40 °C—in Mohali, India, I stood outside holding a bat detector, listening for something I had never heard before. Although I had never previously heard bat echolocation calls, bats themselves were not unfamiliar to me. One of my earliest memories from primary school is of a dark corner of my village school that housed … Continue reading From First Clicks to Building Esperdyne: A Personal Journey into Bat Bioacoustics.

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Field Methods, Practical Tools

Peering through the shell: tracking stress with heartbeats

Post provided by Lima F. P.; Pereira F. L.; Loureiro B.; Humet M.; Seabra R. How can we tell when an animal is stressed, long before it dies? For marine invertebrates like mussels, limpets, oysters, or crabs, one of the clearest signals comes from their hearts. Heart rate can vary in response to changes in the environment (such as temperature or oxygen), offering a non-invasive … Continue reading Peering through the shell: tracking stress with heartbeats

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Practical Tools

Making heatwaves in the wild: lessons from extreme fieldwork

Post provided by Pieter Arnold, Xuemeng Mu, James King We are a team of ecologists in Australia with keen interest in how plants and ecosystems will respond to climate change. Conducting research on the effects of forecasted climate change, and particularly extreme events like heatwaves, is extremely challenging to do in the field. We had to first convince ourselves that it would be possible to … Continue reading Making heatwaves in the wild: lessons from extreme fieldwork

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Ecology, Practical Tools

Smart cameras in the wild: A centralised solar-powered Raspberry Pi system for automated animal observation and environmental monitoring

Post provided by Marçal Pou-Rossell Many studies of animal behaviour – especially parental care – rely on short, fragmented observations. Whether due to battery limitations, human resources, or remote field conditions, collecting continuous data throughout an entire reproductive cycle is often just not feasible. As a result, key behaviours can go undocumented, and our understanding of how animals make decisions across time remains incomplete. We … Continue reading Smart cameras in the wild: A centralised solar-powered Raspberry Pi system for automated animal observation and environmental monitoring

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Ecology, Methods papers, Practical Tools

Capturing diversity below the species level using HyRAD : a nuclear-DNA enrichment-based capture method (HyRAD) applied to environmental DNA.

Post provided by Stéphanie Manel. Why use HyRAD for eDNA capture? Traditional population genetics approaches require sampling tissue from individuals, which is problematic in aquatic environments where specimen collection is often challenging. Filtering water allows researchers to collect environmental DNA (eDNA), genetic material shed by organisms into their surroundings. Unlike approaches targeting a single DNA barcode, HyRAD allows for the capture of multiple nuclear DNA … Continue reading Capturing diversity below the species level using HyRAD : a nuclear-DNA enrichment-based capture method (HyRAD) applied to environmental DNA.

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