As many of you will already know, this week is Peer Review Week (19-25 September). Peer Review Week is a global event celebrating the vital work that is done by reviewers in all disciplines. To mark the week, we will be having a series of blog posts about peer review. The theme for this year’s Peer Review Week is recognition for review and we’re starting … Continue reading Thank You to All of Our Reviewers: Peer Review Week 2016
Issue 7.9 is now online!
The September issue of Methods is now online!
This month’s issue contains two Applications articles and three Open Access articles, all of which are freely available.
– Arborist Throw-Line Launcher: A cost-effective and simple alternative for collecting leaves and seeds from tall trees. The authors have also provided some tutorial videos on YouTube.
– ctmm: An R package which implements all of the continuous-time stochastic processes currently in use in the ecological literature and couples them with powerful statistical methods for autocorrelated data adapted from geostatistics and signal processing.
Today, we are pleased to be welcoming a new member of the Methods in Ecology and Evolution Associate Editor Board. Marie Auger-Méthé joins us from Dalhousie University in Canada and you can find out a little more about her below.
“I am broadly interested in developing and applying statistical tools to infer behavioural and population processes from empirical data. My work tends to focus on marine and polar mammals, but the methods I develop are often applicable to a wide range of species and ecosystems. My recent work has centred on modelling animal behaviour using movement data and I generally analyse data with spatial and/or temporal structure.”
Marie has been reviewing for Methods in Ecology and Evolution for a few years and has contributed articles to some of the other journals of the British Ecological Society too. Earlier this month, her article titled ‘Evaluating random search strategies in three mammals from distinct feeding guilds‘ was published in the Journal of Animal Ecology. Continue reading “New Associate Editor: Marie Auger-Méthé”
Today we are welcoming two new Associate Editors to Methods in Ecology and Evolution: Samantha Price (University of California, Davis, USA) and Andrés Baselga (University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain). Samantha Price “My research seeks to answer the question ‘What regulates biodiversity?’. I use phylogenetic and comparative methods to investigate the abiotic and biotic drivers of global patterns of ecomorphological and lineage diversity over long periods of time and across … Continue reading New Associate Editors
David Warton (University of New South Wales) interviews Théo Michelot (University of Sheffield) about an article on his recent R package moveHMM in Methods in Ecology and Evolution. David and Théo also discuss the case study in the paper – on the understudied wild haggis – and what advances could be made to the package in future.
Exploring microbial diversity and relating it to ecosystem functions is one of the primary occupations of microbiologists and microbial ecologists worldwide. Unfortunately, recent studies have shown that the microbial census is far from complete and that it is heavily biased towards certain (host-associated) environments. With the Earth’s microbial diversity estimated at an impressive one trillion (1012) taxa, the search continues for new technologies and methodologies that may help us better describe, monitor and preserve the microbial diversity of our planet’s natural and engineered ecosystems.
Continue reading “Exploring Microbial Diversity: From the Sequence to the Cell”
Today, we are pleased to be welcoming a new member of the Methods in Ecology and Evolution Associate Editor Board. Michael Morrissey joins us from the University of St Andrews in Scotland and you can find out a little more about him below.
“I am an evolutionary quantitative geneticist. I am interested in the selection, genetics, and evolutionary trajectories of traits in natural populations. I typically work at the interface of statistics, evolutionary theory, and empirical problems.”
Michael has been an active reviewer for Methods for the past few years and has provided excellent comments and recommendations on a number of papers. He also had an article – ‘In search of the best methods for multivariate selection analysis‘ – published in the journal in 2014 (which will become freely available in October this year).
Continue reading “New Associate Editor: Michael Morrissey”
Below is a press release about the Methods paper ‘How to manipulate landscapes to improve the potential for range expansion‘ taken from the University of Liverpool.
Scientists at the University of Liverpool have developed a new ‘route planner’ tool that could help conservationists aid the movement of species as they adapt to a changing climate.
The environmental ranges of many animal and plant species are starting to alter with climate change, as temperatures change and force species to migrate to more suitable climes.
To be able to do this successfully, they will need sufficient habitat in their existing range, their future range, and any intermediate areas to enable populations to survive and thrive. Many conservation initiatives to restore habitats and increase connectivity are trying to address this issue. However, existing modelling tools mainly treat the landscape as static, and it is difficult to use these to plan restoration. Continue reading “Creating Bigger, Better and More Joined-up Habitat Networks”
David Warton (University of New South Wales) interviews James Thorson (NOAA) about his paper Model-based inference for estimating shifts in species distribution, area occupied and centre of gravity. The article is included in the August 2016 issue of Methods in Ecology and Evolution. They discuss how to estimate changes in distribution shifts accounting for changes in the spatial distribution of sampling intensity, James’ current workplace NOAA, his academic background and what trouble he is planning to get up to next.
Continue reading “Estimating Shifts in Species Distribution: An Interview with James Thorson”
Every species in the world has a unique geographic distribution. But many species have similar ranges. There are many things that can cause two (or more) species to have similar ranges – for example shared evolutionary histories, physical obstacles (mountains, oceans etc.) or ecological barriers limiting their dispersal. As a consequence, different regions of the globe are inhabited by different sets of living organisms.
In the mid-19th century ecologists recognised that the earth could be divided into different biogeographic regions. Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) played a key role in defining and recognising biogeographic regions. He improved the existing maps of biogeographic regions and provided basic rules to identify them. His observation that some of these regions are home to similar species, despite being far away from each other and separated by significant barriers was the inspiration for Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift. In more recent years regionalisation has been used to understand the spatial drivers of biological evolution and to protect those regions characterised by particularly unique flora and fauna.
Despite the long history of biological regionalisation, the methods to identify biogeographic regions are still being improved. We are currently working in this exciting field of research and recently published ‘A new procedure for extrapolating turnover regionalization at mid-small spatial scales, tested on British butterflies’ in Methods in Ecology and Evolution. Continue reading “Biogeographic Regions: What Are They and What Can They Tell Us?”
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