The latest issue of Methods in Ecology and Evolution is now online!
Senior Editor Aaron Ellison has selected six Featured Articles this month. You can find out about all of them below. We also have eight Applications articles and seven Practical Tools articles in the November issue that are freely available to everyone – no subscription required!
Continue reading “November Issue Out Now!”
This Halloween, our Blog and Associate Editor Chloe Robinson explains the meaning of ghost and guest authorship, and speaking from her own experiences, the harm they cause to Early Career Researchers
From a young age, we grow up understanding that authors are people that have conceived and written something, most often a book. They do the required background research, thoughtfully lay out the plot and physically complete the main task that makes a book a book – the writing. Sure, they may have editors, cover producers, social media gurus, etc. to help make their book a success, but their name is the one on the front.
Continue reading “Halloween Special: The Ghosts and Guests of Academia”
Black History Month is a UK-wide celebration that takes place every October, acknowledging and raising awareness of the contribution that Black African and Caribbean communities have made in Britain and across the globe. We are excited to promote and profile the work of Black ecologists and evolutionary biologists across the British Ecological Society blogs.
My name is Dr. Samniqueka Halsey, and I am a computational ecologist. I use modelling and statistics to answer questions about the way the world works. In particular, I try to inform management actions about disease emergence and conservation with my models. I have worked on projects regarding Lyme disease, Chronic Wasting Disease and a dune thistle that is threatened by habitat fragmentation. I realized that I genuinely wanted to become an ecologist starting in my junior year of college when I took an ecology course. This class exposed me to the joys of fieldwork, going outside, and collecting data. Combined with a few more courses such as aquatic ecology where I could go out to streams and lakes to collect water samples and then go back to the lab to analyze, it was fascinating. I was even able to be a field technician in Arizona, where I helped to trap prairie dogs to collect blood and ectoparasites to test for the plague.
Continue reading “Dr. Samniqueka Halsey: Informing Disease Management Actions through Modelling”
To celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the launch of Methods in Ecology and Evolution, we are highlighting an article from each volume to feature in the Methods.blog. For Volume 6, we have selected ‘Nondestructive estimates of above-ground biomass using terrestrial laser scanning‘ by Calders et al. (2014).
In this post, the authors discuss the background and key concepts of the article, and changes in the field that have happened since the paper was published.
Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) calculates 3D locations by measuring the speed of light between a transmitted laser pulse and its return. Firing hundreds of thousands of pulses per second, these instruments can represent the surroundings in detailed 3D, displaying them as virtual environments made up of high density points. The main applications of commercial instruments in the early 2000s were engineering or mining, but their application in natural forested environments was in its infancy. Forest ecosystems are structurally complex; clear reference points used to register multiple scans are rare and trees move due to wind creating artefacts in the data.
Continue reading “10th Anniversary Volume 6: Nondestructive estimates of above‐ground biomass using terrestrial laser scanning”
To celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the launch of Methods in Ecology and Evolution, we are highlighting an article from each volume to feature in the Methods.blog.
For Volume 5, we have selected ‘Statistics for citizen science: extracting signals of change from noisy ecological data’ by Isaac et al. (2014). In this post, the authors discuss the background and key concepts of the article, and the application of the article for assessing biodiversity occurrence datasets.
To celebrate our 10th Anniversary, we are highlighting a key article from each of our volumes. For Volume 3, we selected ‘paleotree: an R package for paleontological and phylogenetic analyses of evolution‘ by David W. Bapst (2012).
In this post, three of our Associate Editors with expertise in phylogenetics Simone Blomberg, Will Pearse and Michael Matschiner share their favourite MEE papers in the field of phylogenetics and beyond.
Continue reading “10th Anniversary Volume 3: Phylogenetics Editor’s Choice”To celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the launch of Methods in Ecology and Evolution, we are highlighting an article from each volume to feature on the Methods.blog. For Volume 3, we have selected ‘paleotree: an R package for paleontological and phylogenetic analyses of evolution‘ by David W. Bapst (2012). In this post, David discusses the background to the Application he wrote as a graduate student, and how the field has changed since.
I was a fourth year graduate student when I first had the idea to make an R package. Quite a few people thought it was a bit silly, or a bit of a time-waste, but I thought it was the right thing to do at the time, and I think it has proven to be the right decision in hindsight.
Continue reading “10th Anniversary Volume 3: paleotree: A Retrospective”
Methods Issue 11.10 is now online!
We have a larger issue of 17 articles this month, featuring the ethics of wild animal research, an eco-acoustic monitoring network, a programmable optomotor and much more.
Senior Editor Rob Freckleton has selected six featured articles – find out about them below.
We also have three Applications, one Practical Tools and seven articles that are freely available to everyone – no subscription required!
Continue reading “October Issue out now!”
Continue reading “Sharing is Caring: Working With Other People’s Data”
The September issue of Methods is now online! 
We have a larger issue of 14 articles this month, featuring methods for individual bird recognition, zooplankton sampling, coral health assessment and much more.
Senior Editor Lee Hsiang Liow has selected five featured articles – find out about them below. We also have three Applications, three Practical Tools articles and 11 articles that are freely available to everyone – no subscription required!
Methods Blog 