Post provided by Marta Skowron Volponi Has the buzzing sound of a wasp flying past your ear ever made you recoil in fear of being stung? What if these buzzes are a warning display aimed at potential predators, just like the bees’ and wasps’ bright colouration that sends a message: “don’t touch me, I’m dangerous”? Or perhaps they are audio messages meant for other wasps? … Continue reading The buzzOmeter: Recording buzzing insects in motion
Post provided by Violette Chiara and Sin-Yeon Kim There are many tools available to track and analyse animal movement. In this post, Violette Chiara and Sin-Yeon Kim share insights on how AnimalTA fills the niche of an accessible, user-friendly software for video analysis. Why AnimalTA? AnimalTA is a new tool to track and analyse animal movement in digital videos. When we began to develop AnimalTA, … Continue reading AnimalTA: an easy-to-use program for tracking and analysing animal movement
Post provided by Roberta L. C. Dayrell The knowledge of seed morphology is an essential resource for practitioners and scientists across diverse disciplines such as botany, agriculture, restoration, conservation, and archaeology. Morphological attributes can inform studies on topics such as seed dispersal, predation, longevity, and germination. This knowledge also has practical applications, including seed identification and assessments of quality and ripeness. But extracting meaningful information … Continue reading Seeds ‘exposed’! A method to automatically reveal seed morphological traits from images.
Post provided by Yash Sondhi, Hailey Dansby, Angela Nicoletti, Elina Barredo, and Samuel T. Fabian.
Studying animal behaviour or ecology can involve measuring movement patterns of small animals. Observing behaviours like foraging, pollination, circadian activity or predation is laborious because it involves long periods of waiting for the behaviour and triggering a camera or poring over hours of video footage to find the behaviour. Existing automated motion tracking tools for small animals are expensive and unsuitable for field use, or need specific conditions like bright light to work. In this blog post, Yash Sondhi and co-authors discuss their tool “Portable Locomotion Activity Monitor (pLAM)” which enables automated monitoring small animal motion tracking in a cost-effective manner, suitable for lab or field use and can track motion under any light environment.
Continue reading “How do you measure the movement of tiny insects?”
Ecologists have started looking into drones as new tools for wildlife surveys, but how can drone disturbance be minimized in order to produce accurate wildlife counts? In this post, Kayla Kuhlmann describes a drone practice to reduce disruption during acoustic bat surveys as featured in the paper “Miniaturization eliminates detectable impacts of drones on bat activity”, recently published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution.
Continue reading “Large drones make a big splash: Using smaller drones to conduct less disruptive wildlife surveys”
Camera traps are a valuable tool in ecological research, especially for capturing large quantities of information on the behaviour of an array of wildlife within an ecological community. Camera traps are seldom used to experimentally testing key animal behaviour hypotheses, despite the potential offered by the non-invasive technology. In this blog post, Dr. Meredith Palmer and co-authors discuss the application of the ‘BoomBox’ camera trap module that allows researchers to conduct a unique suite of manipulative experiments on free-living species in complex environments, as published in their Methods in Ecology and Evolution article ‘BoomBox: An Automated Behavioral Response (ABR) Camera Trap Module for Wildlife Playback Experiments’.
Continue reading “Non-invasive playback experiments allow for rigorous studies of wildlife interactions”Our Associate Editor Ryan Chisholm of the National University of Singapore tells us about the recent Practical Tools article he handled for MEE which presents a method for estimating canopy fuel load from hemispherical photographs. Fire is a natural process in many ecosystems, but large-scale intense fires can threaten biodiversity, as well as human life and property. Although the annual global area burnt has decreased … Continue reading Measuring canopy fuel loads in boreal forests accurately and efficiently using a smartphone
Got just five minutes to spare? Listen to our brand new podcast! In this episode, we interview Cassandra Konecny and Graham Brownlee about their recent publication “Adapting a propane turkey fryer to manipulate temperature in aquatic environments”. As the likelihood of extreme temperatures increases due to climate change, there is a growing need to better understand the potential impacts of altered thermal regimes on biodiversity … Continue reading MEEin3: Adapting a turkey fryer to manipulate water temperature
Post provided by Michael Rzanny & Jana Wäldchen
Species identification is an essential tool for recording biodiversity, especially in an era of habitat loss and climate change. Developing skills to correctly identify plants to a species or even a genus level can take many years of training, but a new app called Flora Incognita aims to empower citizens with botanical expertise while also collecting data for scientific analysis.
In this blog post, Michael Rzanny and Jana Wäldchen reveal the inspiration behind this new app and discuss highlights from their new paper “The Flora Incognita app – interactive plant species identification” recently published in Methods in Ecology & Evolution.
Continue reading “Flora Incognita – more than just a plant identification app”
For those not directly working with them, using wildlife detection dogs always sound like a new fancy idea that should be tested somehow. However, this method is neither new nor rare, and people working with wildlife detection dogs often call them their best method in finding their target species. In this post, Annegret Grimm-Seyfarth discusses her paper ‘Detection dogs in nature conservation: A database on their worldwide deployment with a review on breeds used and their performance compared to other methods’, which shows the broad and worldwide applications of wildlife detection dogs.
Continue reading “The worldwide use of wildlife detection dogs – and how they became part of our life”
Methods Blog 