New Technologies Could Help Conservationists Keep Better Track of Serengeti Wildebeest Herds

Posted on March 15, 2019 by Chris Grieves

Below is a press release about the Methods in Ecology and Evolution article ‘A comparison of deep learning and citizen science techniques for counting wildlife in aerial survey images‘ taken from the University of Glasgow.

A wildebeest herd in the Serengeti. ©Daniel Rosengren

Mathematicians and conservationists from the UK, Africa and the United States have used machine-learning and citizen science techniques to accurately count wildebeest in the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania more rapidly than is possible using traditional methods.

Evaluating wildebeest abundance is currently extremely costly and time-intensive, requiring manual counts of animals in thousands of aerial photographs of their habitats. From those counts, which can take months to complete, wildlife researchers use statistical estimates to determine the size of the population. Detecting changes in the population helps wildlife managers make more informed decisions about how best to keep herds healthy and sustainable. Continue reading →

Advances in Modelling Demographic Processes: A New Cross-Journal Special Feature

Posted on February 5, 2019 by Chris Grieves

Analysis of datasets collected on marked individuals has spurred the development of statistical methodology to account for imperfect detection. This has relevance beyond the dynamics of marked populations. A couple of great examples of this are determining site occupancy or disease infection state.

EURING Meetings

The regular series of EURING-sponsored meetings (which began in 1986) have been key to this development. They’ve brought together biological practitioners, applied modellers and theoretical statisticians to encourage an exchange of ideas, data and methods.

This new cross-journal Special Feature between Methods in Ecology and Evolution and Ecology and Evolution, edited by Rob Robinson and Beth Gardner, brings together a collection of papers from the most recent EURING meeting. That meeting was held in Barcelona, Spain, 2017, and was hosted by the Museu de Ciènces Naturals de Barcelona. Although birds have provided a convenient focus, the methods are applicable to a wide range of taxa, from plants to large mammals. Continue reading →

Monitoring Ecosystems through Sound: The Present and Future of Passive Acoustics

Posted on November 15, 2018 by Chris Grieves

Post provided by Ella Browning and Rory Gibb

AudioMoth low-cost, open-source acoustic sensor ©openacousticdevices.info

As human impacts on the world accelerate, so does the need for tools to monitor the effects we have on species and ecosystems. Alongside technologies like camera traps and satellite remote sensing, passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) has emerged as an increasingly valuable and flexible tool in ecology. The idea behind PAM is straightforward: autonomous acoustic sensors are placed in the field to collect audio recordings. The wildlife sounds within those recordings are then used to calculate important ecological metrics – such as species occupancy and relative abundance, behaviour and phenology, or community richness and diversity.

The Pros and Cons of Passive Acoustic Monitoring

Using sound to monitor ecosystems, rather than traditional survey methods or visual media, has many advantages. For example, it’s much easier to survey vocalising animals that are nocturnal, underwater or otherwise difficult to see. Also, because acoustic sensors capture the entire soundscape, it’s possible to calculate acoustic biodiversity metrics that aim to describe the entire vocalising animal community, as well as abiotic elements in the environment.

The use of PAM in ecology has been steadily growing for a couple of decades, mainly in bat and cetacean studies. But with sensor costs dropping and audio processing tools improving, there’s currently a massive growth in interest in applying acoustic methods to large-scale or long-term monitoring projects. As very low-cost sensors such as AudioMoth start to emerge, it’s becoming easier to deploy large numbers of sensors in the field and start collecting data. Continue reading →

Statistical Ecology Virtual Issue

Posted on July 2, 2018 by Chris Grieves

To celebrate the International Statistical Ecology Conference and British Ecological Society Quantitative Ecology Annual Meeting, Laura Graham and Susan Jarvis have compiled a virtual issue celebrating all things statistical and quantitative in ecology.

Statistical and quantitative methods within ecology have increased substantially in recent years. This rise can be attributed both to the growing need to address global environmental change issues, as well as the increase in data sources to address these challenges. Continue reading →

Can Opportunistically Collected Citizen Science Data Create Reliable Habitat Suitability Models for Less Common Species?

Posted on May 23, 2018 by Chris Grieves

Post provided by Ute Bradter, Mari Jönsson and Tord Snäll

Detta blogginlägget är tillgängligt på svenska

Opportunistically collected species observation data, or citizen science data, are increasingly available. Importantly, they’re also becoming available for regions of the world and species for which few other data are available, and they may be able to fill a data gap.

Siberian jay ©Ute Bradter

In Sweden, over 60 million citizen science observations have been collected – an impressive number given that Sweden has a population of about 10 million people and that the Swedish Species Observation System, Artportalen, was created in 2000. For bird-watchers (or plant, fungi, or other animal enthusiasts), this is a good website to bookmark. It will give you a bit of help in finding species and as a bonus, has a lot of pretty pictures of interesting species. Given the amount of data citizen science can provide in areas with few other data, it’s important to evaluate whether they can be used reliably to answer questions in applied ecology or conservation. Continue reading →

Solo: Developing a Cheap and Flexible Bioacoustic Tool for Ecology and Conservation

Posted on April 11, 2018 by Chris Grieves

Post provided by Robin Whytock

A Solo recorder in the field. ©Tom Bradfer-Lawrence

Ecologists have long been fascinated by animal sounds and in recent decades there’s been growing interest in the field of ‘bioacoustics’. This has partially been driven by the availability of high-definition digital audio recorders that can withstand harsh field conditions, as well as improvements in software technology that can automate sound analysis.

Sound recordings can be used to study many aspects of animal behaviour in a non-intrusive way, from studying the social dynamics of monkeys or even clownfish to detecting echolocating bats or singing birds. Some species can only reliably be separated in the field by the sounds that they make, such as common and soprano pipistrelle bats. Bat research in general has been revolutionised by commercially available acoustic loggers, with some amazing advances using artificial intelligence to automatically detect bat calls. Continue reading →

#EpicDuckChallenge Shows we can Count on Drones

Posted on February 20, 2018 by Chris Grieves

Below is a press release about the Methods in Ecology and Evolution article ‘Drones count wildlife more accurately and precisely than humans‘ taken from the University of Adelaide.

Lead author Jarrod Hodgson, University of Adelaide, standing in one of the replica colonies of seabirds constructed for the #EpicDuckChallenge.

A few thousand rubber ducks, a group of experienced wildlife spotters and a drone have proven the usefulness and accuracy of drones for wildlife monitoring.

A study from the University of Adelaide showed that monitoring wildlife using drones is more accurate than traditional counting approaches. This was published recently in the British Ecological Society journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution.

“For a few years now, drones have been used to monitor different animals that can be seen from above, including elephants, seals and nesting birds. But, until now, the accuracy of using drones to count wildlife was unclear,” says the study’s lead author, Jarrod Hodgson from the University’s Environment Institute and School of Biological Sciences. Continue reading →

Bottom-up Citizen Science and Biodiversity Statistics

Posted on June 6, 2017 by Chris Grieves

Post provided by Ditch Townsend and Robert Colwell

Different Paths to Science

Ditch Townsend on Exmoor in Devon, UK

DITCH: Amateur naturalists from the UK have a distinguished pedigree, from Henry Walter Bates and Marianne North, to Alfred Russel Wallace and Mary Anning. But arguably, the rise of post-war academia in the fifties displaced them from mainstream scientific discourse and discovery. Recently, there has been a resurgence of the ‘citizen scientist’, like me, in the UK and elsewhere – although the term may refer to more than one kind of beast.

To me, the ‘citizen scientist’ label feels a little patronising – conveying an image of people co-opted en masse for top-down, scientist-led, large-scale biological surveys. That said, scientist-led surveys can offer valid contributions to conservation and the documentation of the effects of climate change (among other objectives). They also engage the public (not least children) in science, although volunteers usually have an interest in natural history and science already. For me though, the real excitement comes in following a bottom-up path: making my own discoveries and approaching scientists for assistance with my projects.

Robert Colwell at the Boreas Pass in Colorado, USA

ROB: I grew up on a working ranch in the Colorado mountains, surrounded on three sides by National Forest and a National Wilderness Area. My mother, an ardent amateur naturalist, taught me and my sister the local native flora and fauna and our father instilled a respect for the land in us. For my doctoral research at the University of Michigan, I studied insect biodiversity in Colorado and Costa Rica at several elevations. The challenges of estimating the number of species (species richness) and understanding why some places are species-rich and others species-poor has fascinated me ever since. Continue reading →

Biogeography Virtual Issue

Posted on January 9, 2017 by Chris Grieves

To coincide with the International Biogeography Society’s 2017 conference in Tuscon, Arizona, we have compiled a Virtual Issue that shows off new Methods in Ecology and Evolution articles in the field from a diverse array of authors.

To truly understand how species’ distributions vary through space and time, biogeographers often have to make use of analytical techniques from a wide array of disciplines. As such, these papers cover advances in fields such as evolutionary analysis, biodiversity definitions, species distribution modelling, remote sensing and more. They also reflect the growing understanding that biogeography can include experiments and highlight the increasing number of software packages focused towards biogeography.

This Virtual Issue was compiled by Methods in Ecology and Evolution Associate Editors Pedro Peres-Neto and Will Pearse (both of whom are involved in the conference). All of the articles in this Virtual Issue are free for a limited time and we have a little bit more information about each of the papers included here: Continue reading →

Just snap it! Using Digital Cameras to Discover What Birds Eat

Posted on January 5, 2017 by Chris Grieves

Post provided by Davide Gaglio and Richard Sherley

Digital photography has revolutionised the way we view ourselves, each other and our environment. The use of automated cameras (including camera traps) in particular has provided remarkable opportunities for biological research. Although mostly used for recreational purposes, the development of user-friendly, versatile auto-focus digital single lens reflex (DSLR) cameras allows researchers to collect large numbers of high quality images at relatively little cost.

These cameras can help to answer questions such as ‘What does that species feed its young?’ or ‘How big is this population?’, and can provide researchers with glimpses of rare events or previously unknown behaviours. We used these powerful research tools to develop a non-invasive method to assess the diets of birds that bring visible prey (e.g. prey carried in the bill or feet) back to their chicks. Continue reading →

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