Yesterday Thomson-Reuters finally released their impact factors for 2013. And ours is … 5.322 Which has gone down by 0.602 from last year. This also means we’ve moved down to 15th in the Ecology rankings. And what is worse is that the Journal of Ecology has overtaken us! Impact factors are notorious for only covering 2 years of citations, which is not a long time … Continue reading Our New Impact Factor (or why the five year impact factor is much much much more important)
Issue 5.7 is now available online, including papers on population ecology, landscape ecology, spatial ecology, community ecology and environmental ecology. This month there is a forum discussion by Murray Efford and Andy Royle, about the 2013 paper Integrating resource selection information with spatial capture–recapture. There are 2 open access papers on particle size distribution and optimal capture of aqueous macrobial eDNA, and measuring convergent evolution, … Continue reading Issue 5.7
David Warton interviews David Borchers, Reader in Statistics at the University of St Andrews, about his latest paper in MEE, “Continuous-time spatially explicit capture-recapture models, with an application to a jaguar camera-trap survey“: Continue reading An interview with David Borchers: Continuous-time SECR
Methods in Ecology and Evolution has been publishing papers on statistical ecology since its inception in 2010. Since the last ISEC meeting, we have published many more papers, of an increasing quality and influence. We have put together a Virtual Issue to showcase some of those papers (but it also misses out many more that will be just as interesting)!. The papers chosen show the … Continue reading Ecological statistics are methods too!
By Pat Backwell
Associate Editor, Methods in Ecology and Evolution
There is a lot of discussion about gender differences in the publication of scientific papers. A clear pattern is that men produce more papers than women. A less clear pattern is in citation rates: some studies show that females are cited less, some find no effect. Where biases are shown, many arguments are used to explain them. Two common arguments are (i) child rearing limits females from spending as much time publishing, applying for funding or advancing their careers; and (ii) self-promotion and overt competitiveness are more typically exhibited by males and are traits rewarded in the review process for publication, funding and promotion.
A paper of particular interest to me was published in 2006 (Symonds et al.). It looked at gender differences in publication outputs of Australian and British Evolutionary Biologists and Ecologists (I am an Australian behavioural ecologist). They showed that men published almost 40% more papers than women, and men were significantly more likely to win research funding; but there was no difference in the median number of citations per paper for males and females. While citation rates are not necessarily a good metric for research quality, they do crudely suggest that females produce work of equal quality to men.
What links tea bags, glove puppets, vandalism, and cheddar? Or catching birds, bug soup, criminal profiling, snow leopards and jaguars? Methods in Ecology and Evolution, obviously! We have now been publishing new methods for over 4 years, and the sheer variety of papers we have received is quite amazing: field, lab, statistics, simulations and computing. All areas of methodology have been covered, as have all … Continue reading Top methods in ecology and evolution
By Jana Vamosi How’s it going, eh? Yeah, that’s right. A Canadian has infiltrated the ranks as a new Senior Editor. I will be joining the esteemed Rob Freckleton and Bob O’Hara in directing manuscripts and developing the journal. My first challenge will be to master some of these modern communication tools, namely this “social media” fad I keep hearing so much about. A flash … Continue reading New Editor on the block…
Issue 5.6 is now available online, containing articles on Spatio-temporal methods, lightscapes, stable isotopes, foodwebs, tree-based methods, modelling biomass change and occupancy models. This issue includes the applications paper Fitting occupancy models with E-SURGE: hidden Markov modelling of presence–absence data, and 2 open access articles on improving species distribution models: the value of data on abundance and mapping artificial lightscapes for ecological studies. About the … Continue reading Issue 5.6
For many years, I believed I had a condition. Namely, a relatively short attention span, which prevented me from becoming fully engaged with series’ of talks at any given conference. Last month, however, I realised that there was a cure to this: being an organiser of the conference or symposium I attend. For the first time in my life, I was indeed able to sit and listen to talks from 9am to 5pm for two days in a row, without feeling the need to find excuses to disappear, or relying on coffee to keep me alert and engaged.
Like everybody else, I actually need my fix of “wow” moments, where you look at a slide or listen to a speaker and think “this is really cool”. What does it for me, it appears, is the combination of a good question, an “out-of-the-box” approach to tackle it, and an answer that has clear, applied implications. You can always rely on Conservation Biology to come up with loads of interesting questions whose answers have practical implications, and Remote Sensing as a science tends to provide fertile ground for developing unorthodox approaches – so having a symposium on Remote Sensing for Conservation was bound to get me my “wow” moments, and, indeed, I wasn’t disappointed.
Nathalie Pettorelli, Woody Turner and Martin Wegmann
When Woody Turner, Martin Wegmann and I submitted our proposal for a symposium to the Zoological Society of London nearly two years ago, our vision was to pack our event with examples of how Remote Sensing can support the Conservation agenda. Our idea was to organise these examples around the classical Pressure/State/Response framework adopted by the Convention on Biological Diversity, to highlight the versatility of Remote Sensing approaches in terms of scope and monitoring abilities.
Methods Blog 