Issue 6.1 is now online! Our first issue of 2015 is now online! This month we include one freely available Applications article: – A biochemical approach for identifying plastics exposure in live wildlife We also have two wonderful Open Access papers, ‘Evaluation and management implications of uncertainty in a multispecies size-structured model of population and community responses to fishing‘ by Robert B. Thorpe, Will J. … Continue reading Issue 6.1
In this video Thomas Etherington shows how to use the NLMpy Python package to create neutral landscape models. The video demonstrates how the paper’s Supporting Information documentation, Python scripts, and GIS data can be used to create a the example neutral landscape models that are shown in the paper. Recognising that some ecologists may not be very familiar with Python, the authors have also created … Continue reading NLMpy: a python software package for the creation of neutral landscape models
Issue 5.11 is now online! This month we include 2 freely available application articles: – ENMeval: An R package for conducting spatially independent evaluations and estimating optimal model complexity for Maxent ecological niche models – enaR: An r package for Ecosystem Network Analysis We also have 4 interesting open access papers, ‘The accuracy of Fastloc-GPS locations and implications for animal tracking‘ by Antoine Dujon et … Continue reading Issue 5.11
By Charles M. Francis, Richard J. Barker, Evan G. Cooch This joint Special Feature (published in MEE and the open access journal Ecology and Evolution) brings together a series of papers presented at the EURING 2013 technical conference that, collectively, cover many of the latest developments in the analysis of data from marked individuals to estimate demographic parameters, such as survival, recruitment, nest success, density, population size … Continue reading Modelling Demographic Processes in Marked Populations: Proceedings of the EURING 2013 analytical meeting
Below is a press release and video about the Methods paper, ‘Nondestructive estimates of above-ground biomass using terrestrial laser scanning‘, taken from UCL News:
A terrestrial laser scanning technique that allows the structure of vegetation to be 3D-mapped to the millimetre is more accurate in determining the biomass of trees and carbon stocks in forests than current methods, according to new research involving UCL.
The research paper, an international collaboration led by Wageningen University, is published today in Methods in Ecology and Evolution and demonstrates the technique in Australian forests.
The study authors believe it could be an important development in the monitoring of carbon stocks for worldwide climate policy-making. Both above-ground biomass and carbon stocks are important details for UN-REDD, the United Nations initiative on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation that is striving to keep the destruction of forests in check and thereby preserve the uptake of carbon by trees.
Paper co-author Dr Mat Disney (UCL Geography) said: “This new paper shows how effectively we can now turn highly-accurate laser measurements, comprising millions of 3D laser points, into estimates of tree mass. Weighing trees is really hard – time Continue reading “Laser scanning accurately ‘weighs’ trees”
BY CHRISTOPHER DOYLE This article has been taken from ABC Environment. Scientists have developed a new technique to assess how much plastic a seabird has eaten. It involves a quick massage and a cotton swab. A TEAM OF AUSTRALIAN scientists has developed a new method for assessing how much plastic debris a seabird has eaten while foraging on the open ocean, leading to a better … Continue reading Seabirds’ plastic diet shows up in their feather oil
We’d like to welcome 4 new Associate Editors to the team! Patrick Jansen from Wageningen University, Nicolas Lecomte from Université de Moncton, John Reynolds from Simon Fraser University and Matt Schofield from the University of Otago. Read their profiles below to find out about their research interests: “I am an ecologist specializing in consumer-resource interactions, particularly those between predators and their prey and between herbivores … Continue reading New Associate Editors
In this video Francis Hui introduces boral, a new R package he developed for Bayesian analysis of multivariate data in ecology. It uses Bayesian MCMC estimation to fit latent variable models for unconstrained ordination (read the MEE paper, Model-based approaches to unconstrained ordination, for details), and for multi-species inference while accounting for inter-species correlation: Download boral from CRAN Read the MEE paper Model-based approaches to … Continue reading boral: R package for multivariate data analysis in Ecology
Originally posted on Animal Ecology in Focus:
In 2003 Milner-Gulland et al. wrote a paper on extreme adult sex ratios in saiga antelope. Males had become so rare in some years that the behavior of the system became dysfunctional and population performance suffered catastrophically. The only other environments where I know of heavily skewed adult sex ratios are university science faculties. Except here the skew… Continue reading Solving the skewed sex ratio problem in science
Issue 5.10 is now online! This month we include 4 freely available application articles: – agTrend: A Bayesian approach for estimating trends of aggregated abundance – MEMGENE: Spatial pattern detection in genetic distance data – mizer: an R package for multispecies, trait-based and community size spectrum ecological modelling – PyRate: a new program to estimate speciation and extinction rates from – incomplete fossil data We … Continue reading Issue 5.10
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