Spring is in the air which means it’s time for our April Issue! This issue features two Applications and two Practical Tools articles, as well as methods for quantifying macronutrient content in invertebrates, mapping forest leaf area density, classifying avian vocal activity and much more! Plus, read on to discover more about our intriguing cover image.
Continue reading “April Issue Out Now!”
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. Arthur Porto has been shortlisted for his article ‘ML‐morph: A fast, accurate and general approach for automated detection and landmarking of biological structures in images’. In this blog, Arthur discusses how his paper came to be and describes development of the ML-morph pipeline.
Continue reading “The need to quantify complex shapes”
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. Femke Batsleer has been shortlisted for her article ‘The neglected impact of tracking devices on arthropods‘. In this blog, Femke discusses how her paper came to be and the outcomes of the review.
Continue reading “The next step for tagging insects: we can’t keep ignoring the impact”
Acoustic indices are increasingly being used when analysing soundscapes to gain information on biodiversity. However, inconsistent results and lack of consensus on best practices has hampered their application in conservation and land‐use management contexts. In this post, Oliver Metcalf talks about his Methods in Ecology and Evolution article ‘Acoustic indices perform better when applied at ecologically meaningful time and frequency scales’, where he highlights the need to calculate acoustic indices at ecologically appropriate time and frequency bins to reduce signal masking effects.
Continue reading “Unmasking Acoustic Indices”
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. Raphaëlle Momal has been shortlisted for her article ‘Tree‐based inference of species interaction networks from abundance data’. In this blog, Raphaëlle discusses how her paper came to be and the applications of the R package developed in her study.
Continue reading “Species association networks: a bridge between sciences”
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 2020 award, based on articles published in Volume 11 – in the coming weeks we will hear from the shortlisted authors with the stories behind their articles. A big congratulations to all the authors for their impressive work!
Continue reading “Robert May Prize 2020 – The Shortlist”Earlier this year, the BES Movement Ecology Special Interest Group held a competition to find the best animal movement maps in four categories: ‘pretty’, ‘nerdy’, ‘dynamic’ and ‘RMap’ (for maps produced entirely using R).
The results of the vote are in, and the winner of the RMap Category is Pratik Gupte from the University of Groningen, who used R to create this beautiful map of elephant movements across thermal landscapes. Here, we asked Pratik for the story behind the elephant map.
Continue reading “Mapping Animal Movement in R: The Science and the Art”
Forests, across all ecozones and in all shapes and sizes, are essential for life on earth. Around 80% of the world’s land-based biodiversity call forests home and over 1 billion people, including more than 2,000 Indigenous cultures, rely on forests for food, shelter, energy and income. As with many other ecosystems, forests worldwide are under increasing threat from human activities, with the current rate of deforestation estimated at 13 million hectares per year.
Continue reading “International Day of Forests: Generation Restoration”
“A challenged world is an alert world. Individually, we’re all responsible for our own thoughts and actions – all day, every day.” This is a quote from the International Women’s Day 2021 website, where this year, the campaign theme is #ChooseToChallenge.
International Women’s Day is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. The day also marks a call to action for accelerating women’s equality. This year, Associate Editor Chloe Robinson has selected her top four women-led Methods in Ecology and Evolution blog posts from 2020 and highlights the author’s contributions to the MEE blog.
Continue reading “International Women’s Day 2021: Top Women-Led Posts from 2020”We are looking for an engaging researcher with expertise in the fields of evolutionary biology and ecology and a passion for communicating new methods. They will work with our current Editor to continue delivering high-quality content on the blog. The Editor will gain excellent experience in commissioning, writing and editing – as well as having early access to articles on the most cutting-edge methods in … Continue reading Blog Associate Editor Wanted!
Methods Blog 