A round-up of methods papers published in the last month. If there are any papers that you think should be featured, email me or leave a comment and I will add them.
Liam Revell has a paper in Evolution on size correction and principal components analysis of phylogenetic comparative data. Olivier Gimenez and colleagues also have a paper in the same issue on generating fitness landscapes using mark-recapture data.
Systematic Biology has a number of papers with interesting methods: Campbell & Lapointe have a paper on the use and validity of composite taxa in phylogenetic analysis; Fitzjohn et al. have a nice paper on estimating trait-dependent speciation and extinction rates in phylogenies that are not complete; Bui Quang Minh and colleages present an algorithm for efficiently estimating phylogenetic diversity; Michael D. Pirie, Aelys M. Humphreys, Nigel P. Barker, and H. Peter Linder present an approach for dealing with implications of conflicting gene trees on inferences of evolutionary history above the species level.
In Conservation Biology, Angelia Vanderlaan and Christopher Tagaart describe how a voluntary scheme for ships to avoid cetain areas has worked in preventing lethal strikes on right whales.
In Ecological Applications, Cang Hui and colleagues compare approaches for extrapolating population sizes from abundance-occupancy relationships. Matthew Etterson et al. look at the problem of estimating population trends when there is detection heterogeneity and overdipsersion in the data. Paul Beier and co-workers use a case study to examine the use of least-cost modelling to design wildlife corridors.
Oscar Puebla and colleagues describe in Ecology a study that estimates dispersal using genetic distances in a coral reef fish. Sean Connolly et al. have a new bootstrap approach for testing species abudance models in the same issue. Andy Royle et al. present Bayesian method for estimating population sizes using camera trap data. David G. Angeler, Olga Viedma, and JoséM. Moreno present a critique of time lag analysis in time series modelling. David Carslake et al. have a paper presenting useful review of constraints and rules for elasticity analysis in matrix modelling. Finally in that same issue Paul Stapp and Daniel J. Salkeld look at the use of stable isotopes in studying host-parasite interactions.
Finally for this month in Animal Conservation, Heidy Kikillus et al. look at minimising false negatives in predicting distributions of invasive species. (Thanks to Andrew Tyre for pointing this one out).
This month we’re thinking about hierarchical Bayesian models and Approximate Bayesian Computation, improving ecological niche models, and learning how to make our own Environmental Microcontroller Units (more on that below). We’ve got articles on Phylogenetics, Space (not outer space), Camera Traps and much more. Plus, there are six papers that are completely free to everybody, no subscription required!
