Tag Archives: applications

Policy on Publishing Code Virtual Issue

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In January 2018, Methods in Ecology and Evolution launched a Policy on Publishing Code. The main objective of this policy is to make sure that high quality code is readily available to our readers. set out four key principles to help achieve this, as well as explaining what code outputs we publish, giving some examples of things that make it easier to review code, and giving some advice on how to store code once it’s been published.

To help people to understand how to meet the guidelines and principles of the new policy, a group of our Applications Associate Editors (Nick Golding, Sarah Goslee, Tim Poisot and Samantha Price) have put together a Virtual Issue of Applications articles published over the past couple of years that have followed at least one aspect of the guidelines particularly well. Continue reading →

Senior Editor Vacancy at Methods in Ecology and Evolution

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Issue 6.7_Kakadu FloodplainsThe British Ecological Society (BES) is a thriving learned society established in 1913 whose vision is a world inspired, informed and influenced by ecology. It publishes five successful journals, and a quarterly newsletter, the Bulletin, that is distributed to its 5,000 members worldwide. At present, the BES is seeking an outstanding ecologist to join the team of Senior Editors on Methods in Ecology and Evolution.

Methods in Ecology and Evolution (MEE) is a high-profile broad-scope journal which promotes the development of new methods in ecology and evolution and facilitates their dissemination and uptake by the research community. It brings together papers from previously disparate sub-disciplines to provide a single forum for tracking methodological developments in all areas. The journal has excellent citation metrics including a current Impact Factor of 6.34 and an active social media presence.

Submissions to MEE are growing and we are seeking an Senior Editor to strengthen and complement the editorial team and to continue raising the journal’s profile worldwide. The journal’s editorial team currently consists of three Senior Editors who are supported by an international board of around 60 Associate Editors and dedicated editorial office personnel. The Editors work together to determine journal strategy and to increase the reputation and quality of the journal, in addition to making decisions on around 800 manuscripts submitted each year. Further details about the Journal and its current editorial team can be found at www.methodsinecologyandevolution.org. Continue reading →

What is Methods in Ecology and Evolution?

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In a new Methods in Ecology and Evolution podcast, the Senior Editors – Rob Freckleton, Bob O’Hara and Jana Vamosi – discuss the past, present and future of the journal. They talk about what sets it apart from other journals, their favourite articles and the kinds of papers that they would like to see more of. If you’re thinking about submitting to Methods in Ecology and Evolution, they have some advice for you as well.

Articles Mentioned by the Editors:

To find out more about Methods in Ecology and Evolution, read our Aims and Scope and Author Guidelines. 

New Associate Editors

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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

Samantha Price

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 large clades of vertebrates. To work at this macro-scale I tap the reserves of scientific data in museum collections, published literature, as well as online databases using data and techniques from across ecology, evolution, organismal biology, palaeobiology and data science. ”

Samantha will be joining the Board as our sixth Applications Editor. In July, she had an article titled ‘The Impact of Organismal Innovation on Functional and Ecological Diversification‘ published in Integrative and Comparative Biology. The paper introduces a framework for studying biological innovations in an evolutionary context. Earlier in the year, Sam was the first author of the article ‘A promising future for integrative biodiversity research: An increased role of scale-dependency and functional biology‘, published in Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B Biological Sciences. In this article, the authors argue that, given its direct relevance to the current biodiversity crisis, greater integration is needed across biodiversity research.

Andrés Baselga

Andres Baselga

Andres Baselga

“I am broadly interested in biodiversity. My background includes a PhD on beetle taxonomy. Later on I focused on biogeography and macroecology, particularly on beta diversity patterns and their underlying processes. This has led me to develop novel methods to quantify the dissimilarity between assemblages, aiming to improve our ability to infer the driving processes. With this objective, I am also interested in the integration of phylogenetic information to quantify macroecological patterns at multiple hierarchical levels (from genes to species, i.e. multi-hierarchical macroecology).”

Andrés has been an active author and reviewer for Methods in Ecology and Evolution over the past few years. He was the lead author of the article ‘Comparing methods to separate components of beta diversity‘,  which tested whether the replacement components derived from the BAS and POD frameworks are independent of richness difference. This article was also the basis for one of the most popular posts we have ever had on this blog: ‘What is Beta Diversity?‘. In addition to this, Andrés was the lead author of ‘Multi-hierarchical macroecology at species and genetic levels to discern neutral and non-neutral processes‘, published in Global Ecology and Biogeography in 2015. The paper proposed that the patterns emerging across multiple hierarchical levels can be used to discern the effects of neutral and non-neutral macroecological processes, which otherwise have proven difficult to separate.

We are thrilled to welcome Samantha and Andrés to the Associate Editor Board and we look forward to working with them over the coming years.

rotl Paper Published

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THIS PIECE WAS ORIGINALLY POSTED ON THE ROPENSCI BLOG.

We (Francois Michonneau, Joseph Brown and David Winter) are excited to announce a paper describing rotl, our package for the Open Tree of Life data, has been published. The full citation is:

Michonneau, F., Brown, J. W., Winter, D. J. (2016), rotl: an R package to interact with the Open Tree of Life data. Methods in Ecology and Evolution. doi: 10.1111/2041-210X.12593

The paper, which is freely available, describes the package and the data it wraps in detail. Rather than rehash the information here, we will use this post to briefly introduce the goals of the package and thank some of the people that helped it come to be.

What Data Does Open Tree Have and How Can rotl Help You Get It?

The Open Tree of Life combines knowledge from thousands of scientific studies to produce a single source of information about the relationships among all species on earth. In addition to storing the trees and taxonomies that go into this project, the Open Tree provides a “synthesis tree” that represents this combined knowledge. The Open Tree data can be accessed via the web page linked above, and through an API. rotl takes advantage of this API to give R users the ability to search for phylogenetic information and import the results into their R sessions. The imported data can then be used with the growing ecosystem of packages for phylogenetic and comparative biology in R. Continue reading →

RPANDA: A Time Machine for Evolutionary Biologists

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Post provided by HÉLÈNE MORLON

Yesterday saw the start of this year’s annual Evolution meeting and to celebrate Hélène Morlon has written a blog post discussing the amazingly versatile RPANDA package that she is developing with her research group. A description of RPANDA was published in the journal earlier this year and, like all our Applications papers, is freely available to read in full.

If you are attending Evolution, as well as attending the fabulous talks mentioned by Hélène below, do stop by booth 125 to see our BES colleague Simon Hoggart. Simon is the Assistant Editor of Journal of Animal Ecology and would be happy to answer your questions about any of our journals or any of the other work we do here at the BES.

RPANDA: a time machine for evolutionary biologists

Imagine “Doc”, Marty’s friend in Back to the Future, trying to travel back millions of years in an attempt to understand the history of life. Instead of building a time machine from a DeLorean sports car powered by plutonium, he could dig fossils, or more likely, he would use molecular phylogenies.

Molecular phylogenies are family trees of species that can be built from data collected today: the genes (molecules) of present-day species (Fig 1). They are often thought of as trees, in reference to Darwin’s tree of life. The leaves represent the present: species that can be found on Earth today. The branches represent the past: ancestral species, which from time to time split, giving rise to two independent species. The structure of the tree tells us which species descend from which ancestors, and when their divergence happened.

birds_phylog

Fig 1: The phylogenetic tree of all birds (adapted from Jetz et al. 2012). Each bird order is represented by a single bird silloutter and a specific colour (the most abundant order of Passeriformes, for example is represented in dark orange). Each terminal leaf represents a present-day bird species, while internal branches represent the evolutionary relationships among these species.

Continue reading →

National Wildlife Day 2015

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Happy National Wildlife Day everyone!

Today is 10th National Wildlife Day. As we have done for a few awareness days this year (Bats, Biodiversity and Bees so far) we are marking the day by highlighting some of our favourite Methods in Ecology and Evolution articles on the subject. Obviously ‘wildlife’ is a pretty big topic, so we have narrowed our focus (slightly) to monitoring wildlife (with one or two additional papers that we didn’t want to leave out).

This list is certainly not exhaustive and there are many more wonderful articles on these topics in the journal. You can see more of them on the Wiley Online Library.

If you would like to learn more about National Wildlife Day, you may wish to visit the organisation’s website, follow them on Twitter and Facebook or check out today’s hashtag: #NationalWildlifeDay.

Without further ado though, please enjoy our selection of Methods articles for National Wildlife Day:

Integrating Demographic Data

Our National Wildlife Day celebration begins with an article from our EURING Special Feature. Robert Robinson et al. present an approach which allows important demographic parameters to be identified, even if they are not measured directly, in ‘Integrating demographic data: towards a framework for monitoring wildlife populations at large spatial scales‘. Using their approach they were able to retrieve known demographic signals both within and across species and identify the demographic causes of population decline in Song Thrush and Lawping.

 

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National Honey Bee Day 2015

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Happy National Honey Bee Day everyone!

As you may know, tomorrow (Saturday 22 August) is National Honey Bee Day in the USA. To mark the day we will be highlighting some of the best papers that have been published on bees and pollinators in Methods in Ecology and Evolution.

You can find out more about National Honey Bee Day (and about bees in general) HERE.

Without further ado though, here are a few of the best Methods papers related to Honey Bees:

Wildebeast graze on the cover of MEE 2.5Honey Bee Risk Assessment

Our Honey Bee highlights begin with Hendriksma et al.’s article ‘Honey bee risk assessment: new approaches for in vitro larvae rearing and data analyses‘. Robust laboratory methods for assessing adverse effects on honey bee brood are required for research into the issues contributing to global bee losses. To facilitate this, the authors of this article recommend in vitro rearing of larvae and suggest some appropriate statistical tools for the related data analyses. Together these methods can help to improve the quality of environmental risk assessment studies on honey bees and secure honey bee pollination. As this article was published over two years ago, it can be accessed for free by anyone.

Continue reading →

Advances in Phylogenetic Methods – The Applications Papers

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Original Image ©PLOS One Phylogeny

Original Image ©PLOS One Phylogeny

Timed to coincide with Evolution 2015, we have released a new Virtual Issue on Phylogenetic Methods. All of the articles in this Virtual Issue will be freely available for a limited period.

On Friday, we gave some more information about the research articles in this Virtual Issue. In this post, we will be focusing on the Applications papers.

Applications papers introduce new tools for research, which provide practitioners with an important source of information and background on the tools they use. In this Virtual Issue we have highlighted the newest Applications papers that describe how phylogenetic methods are contributing to the fields of ecology and evolution. These include tools with aims as diverse as phylogenetic tree reconstruction and analysing phylogenetic diversity in communities. All Applications papers, not just those in the Virtual Issue, are free to access.

You can see a little more information on each of the Applications Papers below.

Continue reading →

Latest issue and other articles

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A dragonfly

Cover image for issue 3.4 © Dennis Paulson.

Issue 3.4

Our latest issue covers an impressive array of subjects: from metabarcoding (with associated presentation), to population genetics and population monitoring (with video explaining a microphone array system). Modelling and monitoring dispersal also features heavily with four articles, one of which is accompanied by a video for a novel telemetry system to track wild animals. Articles also include topics such as transient dynamics, a review on hormone assay, phylogenetic comparative analysis, stable isotopes (featuring our cover article), plant physiology and finally, statistical methods.

About the cover

Stable-isotope ratios measured in migrating animals have proven to be of great value in understanding migration. For example, when a dragonfly emerges from the water, the isotope signature in that water body is fixed in its wing tissues, which thus provide information about its geographic origin. In A dragonfly (δ2H) isoscape for North America: a new tool for determining natal origins of migratory aquatic emergent insects,  Keith Hobson, David Soto, Dennis Paulson, Leonard Wassenaar and John Matthews compared the isotope value from dragonfly wings of known origin with spatially explicit isoscapes based on water isotopes in precipitation. The relationship was strong, confirming the value of the method to study dragonfly migration.

One of the species used in the analysis was Pachydiplax longipennis. This individual was photographed at Red Slough Wildlife Management Area, Oklahoma. Photo © Dennis Paulson.

Early View articles

Also, these recently accepted articles have appeared on Early View:

Rapid determination of comparative drought tolerance traits: using an osmometer to predict turgor loss point by Megan K. Bartlett, Christine Scoffoni, Rico Ardy, Ya Zhang, Shanwen Sun, Kunfang Cao and Lawren Sack

Free application: taxonstand: An r package for species names standardisation in vegetation databases by Luis Cayuela, Íñigo Granzow-de la Cerda, Fabio S. Albuquerque and Duncan J. Golicher

Projecting species’ range expansion dynamics: sources of systematic biases when scaling up patterns and processes by Greta Bocedi, Guy Pe’er, Risto K. Heikkinen, Yiannis Matsinos and Justin M. J. Travis

Review: Temporal dynamics and network analysis by Benjamin Blonder, Tina W. Wey, Anna Dornhaus, Richard James and Andrew Sih

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