Rainbow Research: Nature

Post provided by Natalie Yoh

To celebrate UK Pride Month, the British Ecological Society journal blogs are posting a ‘Rainbow Research’ series, which aims to promote visibility of STEM researchers from the LGBTQ+ community. Each post will be connected to a theme represented by one of the colours shown in the Progress Pride flag. In this post, Natalie Yoh discusses their bat conservation research under the flag theme of ‘Nature’.

streamdnaJune 1, 2021Leave a comment

LGBTQ+

Rainbow Research: Contribute to our Pride Month Blog Series!

We are inviting contributions from LGBTQ+ ecologists and evolutionary biologists for a series of blog posts across the British Ecological Society journals for UK Pride Month, which takes place in June. The series, called Rainbow Research, aims to promote visibility and inclusion of researchers from the LGBTQ+ community with posts promoting them and their research. Each post will be connected to a theme represented by one … Continue reading Rainbow Research: Contribute to our Pride Month Blog Series!

India StephensonMay 11, 2021May 11, 2021Leave a comment

Journal Issues

May Issue Out Now

The May Issue of Methods in Ecology and Evolution is now online! This issue includes five Featured Articles selected by our Senior Editor Aaron Ellison, highlighting methods for identifying flow modules in ecological networks, detecting rare terrestrial mammals, assessing functional diversity in plants and more! We also have 12 articles, including one Practical Tools and two Applications, which are completely free to read. Find out … Continue reading May Issue Out Now

India StephensonMay 5, 2021Leave a comment

Conservation and management, Ecology, Field Methods, Practical Tools

Flora Incognita – more than just a plant identification app

Post provided by Michael Rzanny & Jana Wäldchen

Species identification is an essential tool for recording biodiversity, especially in an era of habitat loss and climate change. Developing skills to correctly identify plants to a species or even a genus level can take many years of training, but a new app called Flora Incognita aims to empower citizens with botanical expertise while also collecting data for scientific analysis.

In this blog post, Michael Rzanny and Jana Wäldchen reveal the inspiration behind this new app and discuss highlights from their new paper “The Flora Incognita app – interactive plant species identification” recently published in Methods in Ecology & Evolution.

Ben WhittakerApril 29, 2021April 28, 20211 Comment

Conservation and management, Lab Methods, Robert May Prize

Ultrasound for trees? Using focused ultrasound technology as a new method of DNA extraction

Post provided by Hal Holmes

Each year Methods in Ecology and Evolution awards the Robert May Prize to the best paper in the journal by an author at the start of their career. Hal Homes has been shortlisted for their article ‘Focused ultrasound extraction (FUSE) for the rapid extraction of DNA from tissue matrices’. In this blog, Hal discusses how their paper came to be and the future applications of FUSE technology.

Ben WhittakerApril 28, 2021April 28, 20211 Comment

Methods papers, Statistical methods

FuzzyQ: The Commonness of Rarity

Post provided by Juan A. Balbuena

Most species in ecological communities are rare, whereas only a few are common. This distributional paradox has intrigued ecologists for decades, but the interpretation of species abundance distributions remains elusive. In this blog post, lead author Juan A. Balbuena discusses how their recently published Methods in Ecology and Evolution paper and R package ‘Fuzzy quantification of common and rare species in ecological communities (FuzzyQ)’, is a potentially valuable analytical tool in community ecology and conservation biology.

streamdnaApril 26, 2021April 22, 2021Leave a comment

Special Features

Call for Proposals: Leveraging Natural History Collections to Understand the Impacts of Global Change

Associate Editor Natalie Cooper introduces our exciting new cross-journal Special Feature ‘Leveraging Natural History Collections to Understand the Impacts of Global Change‘. Below you can find out all about the scope of the Special Feature and how to submit your manuscript proposal.

India StephensonApril 22, 2021April 22, 2021Leave a comment

Robert May Prize

The quest for a sharp definition of function in biological networks

Robert May Prize Shortlisted Article

Post provided by Alberto Pascual-García

Each year Methods in Ecology and Evolution awards the Robert May Prize to the best paper in the journal by an author at the start of their career. Alberto Pascual has been shortlisted for his article ‘functionInk: An efficient method to detect functional groups in multidimensional networks reveals the hidden structure of ecological communities’. In this post, Alberto discusses the application of the functionInk (functional linkage) package for distinguishing modules and guilds from large multidimensional networks.

streamdnaApril 22, 2021April 22, 2021Leave a comment

International Days, Methods papers

International Bat Appreciation Day: Giving thanks to the real superheroes of the sky

Post provided by Chloe Robinson

Mexican greater funnel-eared bat (*Natalus mexicanus*). Credit: Veronica Zamora-Gutierrez.

Bat Conservation International (BCI), founded in 1982, aims to conserve bats and their habitats through a combination of education, conservation, and research. Bats worldwide contribute towards controlling pests, create rich fertilizer for landowners, and pollinate fruit and flowers. BCI introduced International Bat Appreciation Day to increase awareness about bats and what they do for our environment.

In this post, associate editor Chloe Robinson will be summarising the various MEE published methods for bat monitoring and how technological developments have allowed us to further look and listen into the lives of these incredible creatures.

streamdnaApril 16, 2021April 16, 2021Leave a comment

Methods papers, Robert May Prize, Statistical methods

A new evolutionary simulation R package sheds light on the metaphor of genomic islands of divergence

Robert May Prize Shortlisted Article

Post provided by Claudio S. Quilodrán and Ashley T. Sendell-Price

Nesting eggs of silvereyes (Zosterops lateralis). Heron Island, Australia. Picture: Erik Sandvik.

Each year Methods in Ecology and Evolution awards the Robert May Prize to the best paper in the journal by an author at the start of their career. Claudio S. Quilodrán has been shortlisted for his article ‘The multiple population genetic and demographic routes to islands of genomic divergence’. In this blog, Claudio and co-author Ashley T. Sendell-Price discuss how their paper came to be and how their individual‐based simulation can be used to explore the dynamics of diverging genomes.

streamdnaApril 12, 2021April 12, 2021Leave a comment