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Listen Up! Using Passive Acoustic Monitoring to Help Forest Elephant Conservation

Post provided by Peter H. Wrege

Forest elephant in Gabon
Forest elephant in Gabon

Heard but not seen, populations of forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) are rapidly declining due to ivory poaching. As one of the largest land mammals in the world, this species is surprisingly difficult to observe in the dense forests of Central Africa, but their low frequency rumbles can be recorded. With the autonomous recording afforded by passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) though, we have a window onto forest elephant ecology and behaviour that’s providing data critical to their conservation and survival.

The diverse ways that PAM can contribute to conservation outcomes is growing and while still underappreciated, the availability of relatively inexpensive recorders, increased power efficiency, and powerful techniques to automate the detection of signals have led to an explosion in use. In 2007 there were only about 20 published papers using PAM techniques, but since then over 400 papers have appeared in peer-reviewed journals.

Spectrogram of two forest elephant rumbles. Horizontal line shows the limit of human hearing.
Spectrogram of two forest elephant rumbles. Horizontal line shows the limit of human hearing.

Essentially, PAM is the automatic recording of sounds in a given environment, often for long periods. The trick, and often greatest challenge, is to find the signals of interest (bird calls, elephant rumbles, gunshots) within the recordings. With these signals we can quantify abundance, occupancy and spatial or temporal patterns of activity. Particularly in landscapes or ecosystems where visual observation is difficult (e.g. oceans, rainforests, nocturnal environments) PAM may be uniquely capable of delivering informative and unbiased data. Because PAM is a relatively new method but of considerable interest across the disciplines of ecology, behaviour and conservation, there is huge interest in refining the sampling and statistical methods needed to deal with the peculiarities of acoustic data. Continue reading “Listen Up! Using Passive Acoustic Monitoring to Help Forest Elephant Conservation”

India Stephenson2 Comments
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At Last, a Paleobiologist is a Senior Editor for Methods in Ecology and Evolution!

Post provided by Lee Hsiang Liow

An Asian, female Senior Editor under 45? Progressive! I have loved Methods in Ecology and Evolution since it appeared in 2010 and am thrilled to have been selected to join Rob, Bob and Jana to help with the journal’s continued development.

OK, so you want to know who the new Senior Editor on the MEE block is.  I’m just another scientist, I guess. On the outside, we look different but on the inside, we’re all the same. (OK, perhaps we are a little different, even on the inside, but that makes life and research interesting, right?)

Here’s my academic life history: I did my Bachelors thesis on the systematics/phylogenetics of an obscure group of marine pulmonate slugs with one of the greatest Icelandic biologists I know, Jon Sigurdsson, at the National University of Singapore. I followed this up with an almost-half-year stint at the Museum of Natural Science in Berlin as a “nobody”, digitizing data. Then I won the academic lottery and headed up to Uppsala to do my masters in conservation biology on tropical pollinator diversity, (un)supervised by two amazing supervisors that never met each other, the late Navjot Sodhi (National University of Singapore) and Thomas Elmqvist, now at Stockholm University. Continue reading “At Last, a Paleobiologist is a Senior Editor for Methods in Ecology and Evolution!”

India StephensonLeave a comment
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Tiny Grains, Big Data: The Global Pollen Project

Post Provided by Andrew Martin

A drawer from the Oxford Long-Term Ecology Lab (OxLEL) pollen reference collections, which has been digitised into the Global Pollen Project reference set.
A drawer from the Oxford Long-Term Ecology Lab (OxLEL) pollen reference collections, which has been digitised into the Global Pollen Project reference set.

The Global Pollen Project is a new, online, freely available tool developed to help people identify and disseminate palynological resources. Palynology – the study of pollen grains and other spores – is used across many fields of study modern and fossil vegetation dynamics, forensic sciences, pollination, beekeeping, and much more. This platform helps to facilitate cross/multi-disciplinary integration and discussion, outsourcing identifications, expertise and the sharing of knowledge.

Pollen’s Role in Plant Conservation

Successful conservation of rare, threatened, and valuable plants is dependent on an understanding of the threats that they face. Also, conservationists must prioritise species and populations based on their value to humans, which may be cultural, economic, medicinal, etc. The study of fossil pollen (palaeoecology), deposited through time in sediments from lakes and bogs, can help inform the debate over which species to prioritise: which are native, and when did they arrive? How did humans impact species richness? By establishing such biodiversity baselines, policymakers can make more informed value judgements over which habitats and species to conserve, especially where conservation efforts are weighted in favour of native and/or endemic flora. Continue reading “Tiny Grains, Big Data: The Global Pollen Project”

India Stephenson4 Comments
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Generating New Ideas in a Conference Setting

Post provided by David Warton

This guy had his eureka moment in the bath (although I have had more success in the shower). ©Dun.can
This guy had his eureka moment in the bath (although I have had more success in the shower). ©Dun.can

A few leading reasons for going to a conference are: to present your work and get feedback on it, to find out what others are doing, to meet collaborators and to network. But a conference can also be a great setting for generating completely new ideas. I find that conferences are one of my most likely places for a “eureka moment”.

Surrounded by researchers working on a range of different problems in interesting and often original ways, I’m encouraged to think about things from a different angle. Idea generation is perhaps one of the main benefits of going to a conference – but is the typical conference format is the best way to facilitate that? Or does it focus too much on giving researchers a platform to report on previous research ideas? Continue reading “Generating New Ideas in a Conference Setting”

India StephensonLeave a comment
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How Should Biologists Measure Climate Change?

Post provided by Christopher Nadeau

Climate change could cause the extinction of one in six species and change the abundance and distribution of those that remain (Urban, 2015). This doesn’t necessarily mean that one in six species in your backyard will go extinct though. Climate change impacts will vary greatly around the globe, with some regions seeing disproportionate effects.

The degree to which climate change will affect species in your region depends on many factors (e.g., land use and species traits), but the amount of climate change that species experience in your region – known as climate change exposure – will certainly be important. For that reason, measuring and mapping climate change exposure is critical for predicting where climate change will have the biggest impacts. Yet, biologists have no agreed upon method to measure exposure and different methods can produce dramatically different results.

A Simple Measure of Exposure and its Limitations

Climate can be defined as a statistical description of weather (e.g., temperature, precipitation) over the course of a long time period, usually 30 years. Most often climate is reduced to the average value of a particular weather variable over a 30-year period of interest. Climate change is then measured as the difference between the averages in two time periods; say the predicted average between 2070-2099 minus the average between 1971-2000.

Projected changes in annual average temperature between 1971-2000 and 2070-2099
Projected changes in annual average temperature between 1971-2000 and 2070-2099.

For example, the map to the left shows projected exposure to changes in average annual temperature. This map suggests that species in the arctic will be exposed to the most temperature change while species in the southern hemisphere will experience the least change. However, there are many problems with this interpretation. Continue reading “How Should Biologists Measure Climate Change?”

India Stephenson3 Comments
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Peer Review Week: Should we use double blind peer review? The evidence…

Non-blind Peer Review Monster

This week is Peer Review Week, the slightly more popular academic celebration than pier review week. Peer review is an essential part of scientific publication and is – like Churchill’s democracy – the worst system to do it. Except for all of the others. The reason it’s imperfect is mainly that it’s done by people, so there is a natural desire to try to improve it.

One suggestion for improvement is to us double blind reviews. At the moment most journals (including Methods in Ecology and Evolution) use single blind reviewing, where the author isn’t told the identity of the reviewers. The obvious question is whether double blind reviewing does actually improve reviews: does it reduce bias, or improve quality? There have been several studies in several disciplines which have looked at this and related questions. After having looked at them, my summary is that double blind reviewing is fairly popular, but makes little or no difference to the quality of the reviews, and reviewers can often identify the authors of the papers.

Continue reading “Peer Review Week: Should we use double blind peer review? The evidence…”

Bob O'H12 Comments
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Peer review week: Encouraging collaborative peer review

Originally posted on Journal of Ecology Blog:
Post from Managing Editor Emilie Aimé. Check out the methods.blog later in the week for some of the Methods in Ecology and Evolution Associate Editors’ perspective on collaborative peer review. It’s Peer Review Week 2016 and the BES journals are celebrating with a series of blog posts on how much we value our reviewers. Here at the BES we love… Continue reading Peer review week: Encouraging collaborative peer review

India StephensonLeave a comment
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Thank You to All of Our Reviewers: Peer Review Week 2016

As many of you will already know, this week is Peer Review Week (19-25 September). Peer Review Week is a global event celebrating the vital work that is done by reviewers in all disciplines. To mark the week, we will be having a series of blog posts about peer review. The theme for this year’s Peer Review Week is recognition for review and we’re starting … Continue reading Thank You to All of Our Reviewers: Peer Review Week 2016

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A Model Approach to Weed Management

Post provided by VANESSA ADAMS

Vanessa Adams in the field with gamba grass in the Batchelor region, NT. ©Amy Kimber (NERP Northern Australia Hub)
Vanessa Adams in the field with gamba grass in the Batchelor region, NT.
©Amy Kimber (NERP Northern Australia Hub)

Invasive weeds cause environmental and economic harm around the world. Land managers bear a heavy responsibility for the control of infestations in what is often a time-consuming and costly battle.

Fortunately, an increasing number of research-based solutions are giving land managers an advantage. This includes tools to determine the distribution of weeds and also the development of modelling approaches to predict their spread.

Understanding the current and future distribution of an invasive species allows managers to better direct their limited resources. However, the direct and strategic management of weeds is tricky and that’s why population models (in particular spatial dispersal models that can be applied without much data) are needed to inform and facilitate action on the ground. Continue reading “A Model Approach to Weed Management”

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