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
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.
Continue reading “Revealing the hidden lives of cryptic mountain lions using GPS data and a Moving-Resting Motion model”
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”Post provided by Lee Hsiang Liow. We are very sad to say that Lee Hsiang Liow is leaving, having done an amazing job as Senior Editor on MEE since 2017. In this blog post, Lee Hsiang says goodbye to the journal and discusses the importance of limiting commitments in order to prevent work overload and maintain a healthy work-life balance…and learn as many of Bach’s … Continue reading Less is more
Check out the latest episode of our new podcast, MEEin3! Here we interview Roland Kays from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and North Carolina State University to learn about the Movebank database featured in his recent article ‘The Movebank system for studying global animal movement and demography‘. What were the inspirations and challenges in developing this home for animal tracking data? Listen now! … Continue reading MEEin3: The Movebank System
Many biodiversity studies, covering a wide range of goals, need species records. These records are becoming readily available online, however there is minimal standardisation for these records at this stage, therefore requiring final users to spend a significant amount of time formatting records prior to using data. To overcome this, Renato Lima et al. have created plantR – an open-source package that provides a comprehensive toolbox to manage species records from biological collections. In this blog post, Renato discusses the workflow of the package and describes how this package can help researchers better assess data quality and avoid data leakage.
Continue reading “plantR: Managing species records from biological collections”Our January issue is now online! Our first issue of the year contains 17 brilliant articles about the latest methods in ecology and evolution. This month we have methods for testing publication bias in meta-analyses, managing uncertainty in systematic conservation planning and much more! Read on to find out about this month’s featured articles. Featured Articles Methods for testing publication bias (open access) Publication bias threatens the … Continue reading January 2022 Issue Out Now!
We are pleased to share the latest episode of MEEin3 with you! Listen now to this episode, where we interview Dr Josh Cullen about their recent publication titled “Identifying latent behavioral states in animal movement with M4, a non-parametric Bayesian method“. You can find more about Josh’s research by visiting their personal webpage and scholar page. Continue reading MEEin3: Identifying latent behavioral states in animal movement
Liliana D’Alba of Naturalis Biodiversity Center explores how feather colouration can affect bird’s body temperature and even make flying more efficient. This blog is part of our colourful countdown to the holiday season where we’re celebrating the diversity and beauty of the natural world. Click here to read the rest of the Colour Countdown series. In nature we constantly see examples of animals that use the colour of their … Continue reading Can colours make animals warmer or cooler?
Post provided by Daniel Thomas
Many biologists dedicate their careers to finding out why life has taken the shape it has. Darwinian natural selection gives us the how, but researchers are deeply interested in why we find particular morphologies amongst certain organisms, when these morphologies arose, and what these morphologies mean for the organisms and the communities in which they reside. In this post, Daniel Thomas (Massey University, New Zealand) describes the philosophy behind the new morphoBlocks package for R. The package is presented in a new paper within the ‘Realising the promise of large data and complex models’ Special Feature for Methods in Ecology and Evolution. Researchers interested in exploring the morphoBlocks package are encouraged to try these three vignettes.
Continue reading “A Multiple-Part Morphospace”
Methods Blog 