Category Archives: Uncategorized

Could We Be Treating Invertebrates More Ethically?

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Post provided by ELEANOR DRINKWATER

©Joaquim Alves Gaspar

For ecology to stay ethical and maintain public support, we need to revisit invertebrate ethics in research.  With our recent advances in understanding invertebrate cognition and shifts in public opinion, an ethical re-examination of currently used methodologies is needed. In our article – ‘Keeping invertebrate research ethical in a landscape of shifting public opinion’ – that’s exactly what we aim to do.

Invertebrate Cognition

Recent work, particularly on lobsters, has raised questions about whether invertebrates can experience suffering. In lobsters for example, noxious stimuli can induce long term changes in behaviour, and these changes can be inhibited by adding analgesic. While these findings can be interpreted as evidence for pain perception in crustaceans, the question of invertebrate suffering is still hotly debated, and a firm consensus is still to be reached. But these studies, coupled with recent public concern about the ethics of large-scale sampling projects, highlight the need for discussion on invertebrate ethics in ecology research. Continue reading →

Analysing Big Datasets while Answering Big Ecological Questions: #BESQuantMove2019

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Post provided by LAURA GRAHAM and THEONI PHOTOPOULOU

Last week we heard about the importance of small conferences from Natalie Cooper. Hopefully she inspired you to look into smaller meetings going on this summer. If so, how about joining the Quantitative and Movement Special Interest Groups in Sheffield on 9 and 10 July for our back-to-back annual meetings?

This joint meeting will take advantage of shared strengths as well as shared challenges between the two groups and foster links between them. Both days will be a mix of keynotes, short contributed talks, poster sessions and discussion. Plus lots of all-important networking.

The meeting will be along the common theme of analysing big datasets while answering big ecological questions and the challenges associated with it. We welcome submissions of talks and posters. There will also be discussions on general issues with computation; integrating different datasets; and propagating uncertainty in ecological analyses.

The registration deadline is FRIDAY 7 JUNE – just three days away at the time of posting! Attendees will have the opportunity to attend one, or both annual meetings. A quick insider tip for registration: it’s cheaper to join the BES as a member and register for a BES member ticket, than to register for the non-BES member ticket. Continue reading →

Revisiting Past Biodiversity with the divDyn R Package

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Post provided by ÁDÁM T. KOCSIS

The source of occurrence data: fossil collections (Early Jurassic ammonites in the collection of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, photo by Konstantin Frisch)

The source of occurrence data: fossil collections (photo by Konstantin Frisch).

To find out about changes in ancient ecosystems we need to analyse fossil databases that register the taxonomy and stratigraphic (temporal) positions of fossils. These data can be used to detect changes of taxonomic diversity and to draft time series of originations and extinctions.

The story would be so simple if it wasn’t the effects of heterogeneous and incomplete sampling: the white spots in our understanding of where and when species lived exactly. This phenomenon decreases the fidelity of face-value patterns extracted from the fossil record, making them less reliable. It must be considered if we want to get a glimpse into the biology or the distribution of life in space and time. Naturally, several metrics have been proposed to overcome this problem, each claiming to accurately depict the patterns of ancient life. Continue reading →

Citizen Science Projects Have a Surprising New Partner – The Computer

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Below is a press release about the Methods in Ecology and Evolution article ‘Identifying animal species in camera trap images using deep learning and citizen science‘ taken from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.

The computer’s accuracy rates for identifying specific species, like this warthog, are between 88.7 percent and 92.7 percent. Image credit: ©Panthera

The computer’s accuracy rates for identifying specific species, like this warthog, are between 88.7 percent and 92.7 percent. ©Panthera

For more than a decade, citizen science projects have helped researchers use the power of thousands of volunteers who help sort through datasets that are too large for a small research team. Previously, this data generally couldn’t be processed by computers because the work required skills that only humans could accomplish.

Now, computer machine learning techniques that teach the computer specific image recognition skills can be used in crowdsourcing projects to deal with massively increasing amounts of data—making computers a surprising new partner in citizen science projects.

Continue reading →

Using Dual RNA-seq to Investigate Host-Pathogen Systems When Genomic Resources are Limited

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Post provided by KAYLEIGH O’KEEFFE

Tall fescue infected with fungal pathogen, Rhizoctonia solani. ©Brooklynn Newberry

Tall fescue infected with fungal pathogen, Rhizoctonia solani. ©Brooklynn Newberry

Pathogens and the infectious diseases that they cause can have devastating impacts on host individuals and populations. To better understand how pathogens are able to cause disease, we can investigate the genetic mechanisms underlying the infection process. Hosts may respond to infection by upregulating defence pathways. Pathogens, in turn, evade these host immune responses as they infect and cause disease. As this process unfolds and each organism responds to the other, gene expression changes in both the host and the pathogen. These gene expression changes can be captured by dual RNA‐seq, which simultaneously captures the gene expression profiles of a host and of a pathogen during infection. Continue reading →

Advances in Modelling Demographic Processes: A New Cross-Journal Special Feature

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Analysis of datasets collected on marked individuals has spurred the development of statistical methodology to account for imperfect detection. This has relevance beyond the dynamics of marked populations. A couple of great examples of this are determining site occupancy or disease infection state.

EURING Meetings

The regular series of EURING-sponsored meetings (which began in 1986) have been key to this development. They’ve brought together biological practitioners, applied modellers and theoretical statisticians to encourage an exchange of ideas, data and methods.

This new cross-journal Special Feature between Methods in Ecology and Evolution and Ecology and Evolution, edited by Rob Robinson and Beth Gardner, brings together a collection of papers from the most recent EURING meeting. That meeting was held in Barcelona, Spain, 2017, and was hosted by the Museu de Ciènces Naturals de Barcelona. Although birds have provided a convenient focus, the methods are applicable to a wide range of taxa, from plants to large mammals. Continue reading →

The BES Macroecology (& Macroevolution) SIG: Who We Are, What We Do and What to Look Out for at #BES2018

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Post provided by Natalie Cooper

Defining macroecology should be easy; it’s just ecology at large spatial scales, right? In reality though, it’s a little more complex than that. No-one agrees on exactly how large the spatial scale should be, and many studies that could be macroecology may also be defined as biogeography, landscape ecology, community ecology etc. Working at large spatial scales can also mean working at large temporal scales, often in deep-time. So there’s a lot of overlap with studies of macroevolution both on living and extinct species too.

This breadth of definitions means the BES Macroecology Special Interest Group (or BES Macro as we usually call it) has members with interests across ecology, evolution and palaeontology. Probably the most common statement at any of our events is “I’m not a macroecologist but…”. So, if you’re interested in broad-scale ecology and evolution, in a living or palaeo context, the SIG is for you, even if you don’t identify as a macroecologist! Continue reading →

Speed Review at the BES Annual Meeting: Get a Senior Editor’s Opinion on YOUR Manuscript

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Coming to the BES Annual Meeting? Planning to submit a paper to a BES journal? Then you should sign up for the Speed Review Session on Monday 17 December! (sign-up sheets will be on the BES Stand in the Exhibition Hall.) Find out more about this session below.

What is a Speed Review Session?

©schlagzahluhren.de

©schlagzahluhren.de

Essentially, Speed Review is a chance for you to get a Senior Editor’s opinion on your manuscript. All you need to do is sign-up and bring along a figure or a key finding from your research to centre the discussion on. Each session will be limited to five minutes, so try to have a succinct summary of your manuscript ready as well. The Editor you speak to will let you know what they think of your paper and try to give you some advice about any areas to highlight or any potential concerns that they might have about it. Continue reading →

Biodiversity Monitoring by Plant Proxy is Cheap and Easy: Here’s How and Why

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Post provided by Rasmus Ejrnæs, Ane Kirstine Brunbjerg & Hans Henrik Bruun

Could we use the plants in this swamp forest to predict the diversity of other species?

Local communities and regional biotas are built of hundreds, if not thousands, of species. Most of these species are small-bodied and discreet lifeforms. So it’s no wonder that naturalists have almost always focused their attention on conspicuous species of their particular liking. Why plants then? Well, plants are practical and efficient. They “stand still and wait to be counted”, as the eminent population biologist John Harper put it. No matter the weather, from spring to autumn. There are enough plant species to show contrasts between sites, and yet they can usually be identified to species level in the field.

You Can’t Predict the Diversity of Beetles from Lichens… Can You?

Unfortunately, the overwhelming scientific consensus seems to be that any particular taxonomic group won’t adequately represent the biodiversity of other taxonomic groups. The idea of surrogacy seems to hit the same hard wall as most attempts to provide generally working models for variation in biodiversity at local and regional scales. Biodiversity remains one of the largest scientific research questions without good general answers. Continue reading →

Crossing the Palaeontological-Ecological Gap

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Today is the first day of the Crossing the Palaeontological-Ecological Gap (CPEG) conference. The aim of the conference is to open a dialogue between palaeontologists and ecologists who work on similar questions but across vastly different timescales. This splitting of temporal scales tends to make communication, data integration and synthesis in ecology harder. A lot of this comes from the fact that palaeontologists and ecologists tend to publish in different journals and attend different meetings.

Methods in Ecology and Evolution is one of few ecological journals that attracts submissions from both ecologists and palaeontologists. To highlight this, we’ve released a Virtual Issue, also called Crossing the Palaeontological-Ecological Gap. Continue reading →