The May issue of Methods is now online! As well as four Application and two Practical Tools articles, the latest issue of Methods in Ecology and Evolution includes six Featured Articles handpicked by our editors – you can find out more about them below. Featured Articles Tree-based inference of species interaction networks from abundance data To be relevant, any network inference methodology needs … Continue reading Issue 11.5: Our May issue is now online!
Since I’ve been working from home and self-isolating for health reasons since the end of last summer, I thought that a post around the strategies that have helped me during this time might be useful.
So, first and foremost, your mental health. It’s really hard to concentrate on anything work-related if you’re not in the right mental state. Of course, these are not ordinary times, so making sure that family, friends and those we care about are doing well, would be my first step. When I feel anxious about the times ahead, the single most important thing that helps me to deal with anxiety is having those who I care for the most, close by. If that’s not possible because they’re self-isolating, keeping in touch remotely regularly is the next best thing. Developmental psychologists recognise that human motivation is linked to a hierarchy of needs: if the most basic needs are not met, more complex needs cannot be fulfilled. In a pandemic, it’s likely that our priorities will change and we need to adapt to them, this might take a while and that’s to be expected.
Climate change is threatening biodiversity and ecosystems around the world. We urgently need to better understand how species and ecosystems respond to these changes. There are already thousands of climate change experiments and observational studies out there that could be used to synthesise findings across systems and regions. But it turns out that making meaningful syntheses isn‘t always so straightforward!
The Need for Standardised Methods and Reporting
There are two major challenges (and some minor ones too) for synthesising data across different experiments. First, the data are not always available. This problem arises because key study information – such as metadata, covariates or methodological details – are often not adequately or consistently reported across studies.
The second problem is that scientists use different protocols. This leads to a diversity of ways of measuring and quantifying the same variables. Different protocols may measure or report the same variables in slightly different ways, so the data are not compatible. Consistency in measurements and protocols is one reason why working in large networks – such as ITEX, Herbivory, or NutNet – to name only a few, is so powerful. In these networks, experiments and observations are repeated across large regions or worldwide using strict protocols for experimental design and measurements. Continue reading “Standardising Methods in Climate Change Experiments: A Community Effort”
You can find out more about our Featured Articles (selected by the Senior Editor) below. We also discuss this month’s Open Access and freely available papers we’ve published in our latest issue (Practical Tools and Applications articles are always free to access, whether you have a subscription or not) .
There’s more information below on the Featured Articles selected by the Senior Editor. We also give you a taste of the Open Access and freely available papers (Applications articles are always free to access for everyone upon publication, whether you have a subscription or not) we’ve published in our November issue. Continue reading “Issue 10.11: Demography, Image Analysis, eDNA and More”
As many of you will already know, this week is Peer Review Week (16-20 September). Peer Review Week is a global event celebrating the vital work that is done by reviewers in all disciplines. Throughout the week, we’ve been looking back at some of the peer review advice and guidance that we’ve published on the blog. The theme for this year’s Peer Review Week is … Continue reading Thank You to All of Our Reviewers: Peer Review Week 2019
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.
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 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 “Revisiting Past Biodiversity with the divDyn R Package”
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.
Methods Blog 