Robert May Prize 2021 – The Shortlist

Each year, Methods in Ecology and Evolution awards the Robert May Prize to the best article by an early career researcher. Named for the late Lord May, the award recognises an outstanding ecologist or evolutionary biologist within five years of finishing their PhD. Today we announce the shortlisted papers for the 2021 award, based on articles published in Volume 12 – in the coming weeks we will hear from … Continue reading Robert May Prize 2021 – The Shortlist

India StephensonMarch 8, 2022Leave a comment

Conferences and Meetings

Register now for ISEC 2022!

Post provided by Dominic Henry, Res Altwegg & Jasper Slingsby Do you have a passion for biodiversity, and a flair for numbers? Would you like to network with like-minded individuals? Perhaps it’s time to find out more about cutting edge research at the interface of statistics and ecology? If the answer to any of these questions is “YES!”, then you need to check out ISEC2022. … Continue reading Register now for ISEC 2022!

India StephensonMarch 4, 2022Leave a comment

Journal Issues

March 2022 Issue Out Now!

Our March Issue is now online! Our third issue of the year contains 21 fantastic articles about the latest methods in ecology and evolution, including methods for recognition of taxonomic entities in literature, precipitating and purifying environmental and ancient DNA, estimating wildlife abundance in tropical forests and much more! Read on to find out about this month’s featured articles. Featured Articles ubms (Application) Obtaining unbiased … Continue reading March 2022 Issue Out Now!

India StephensonMarch 4, 2022Leave a comment

Field Methods, Practical Tools

How do you measure the movement of tiny insects?

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.

Ben WhittakerMarch 3, 2022Leave a comment

Statistical methods

Best practices for taxonomic harmonization, an overlooked yet crucial step in biodiversity analyses

Post provided by Matthias Grenié, Emilio Berti, Juan Carvajal-Quintero, Gala Mona Louise Dädlow, Alban Sagouis and Marten Winter.

Merging taxonomic datasets from diverse sources for use in macroecological studies can prove challenging, as there is no standardised methodology, taxonomic names often change over time, and even close colleagues can format the exact same data using different approaches. Researchers at iDiv, the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity, held a workshop to discuss strategies for harmonizing taxonomy which led to a review of best practice being published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution. In this post, Matthias Grenié and co-authors share insight on this process.

Ben WhittakerMarch 2, 2022Leave a comment

Conservation and management, Ecology, Field Methods, Methods papers

Insect tracking using retroreflective tags

Post provided by Michael Smith Tracking bee movement is anything but an easy task. Electronic tags are often too cumbersome and extensive electronic systems such as radars are costly to deploy. There is a need for a low-cost, low-impact tool, with high spatial resolution for tracking bees, to investigate how far they forage. In this blog post, Michael Smith discusses the development of retroreflective tags … Continue reading Insect tracking using retroreflective tags

Chloe V. RobinsonFebruary 10, 2022Leave a comment

Ecology, Field Methods, Methods papers, Practical Tools

Large drones make a big splash: Using smaller drones to conduct less disruptive wildlife surveys

Post provided by Kayla Kuhlmann

Hoary bat (*Lasiurus cinereus*). Credit: Veronica Zamora-Gutierrez.

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.

Chloe V. RobinsonFebruary 9, 2022Leave a comment

Journal Issues

February Issue Out Now

Our February issue is now online! Our second issue of the year contains 22 high-quality articles about the latest methods in ecology and evolution. This month we have methods for visualising the tree of life, estimating arthropod abundance and diversity, disentangling effects of climate and land use on biodiversity and much more! This issue also contains four Applications and two Practical Tools articles that are free to … Continue reading February Issue Out Now

India StephensonFebruary 3, 2022Leave a comment

Methods papers, Statistical methods

Revealing the hidden lives of cryptic mountain lions using GPS data and a Moving-Resting Motion model

Post provided by Mark Elbroch, Chaoran Hu, Tom Meyer, Vladimir Pozdnyakov & Jun Yan

Female mountain lion collared in Washington USA in late December 2021.

Information on how and even why terrestrial mammals move through their habitat landscapes is important for forming the foundation of how to manage and conserve species. For elusive mountain lions, GPS data is particularly vital for monitoring these important apex predators in relation to their ecosystems and the people they share the land with. In this blog post, the team discusses their novel motion model, published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution, which helps us understand the movement of mountain lions from GPS location data.

Chloe V. RobinsonJanuary 21, 2022Leave a comment

Conservation and management, Field Methods, Methods papers, Practical Tools

Non-invasive playback experiments allow for rigorous studies of wildlife interactions

Post provided by Meredith Palmer, Chris “Akiba” Wang, Jacinta Plucinski & Robert M. Pringle

The BoomBox ABR deployed with a Bushnell TrophyCam camera trap in Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique

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’.

Chloe V. RobinsonJanuary 20, 2022January 20, 20221 Comment