Tag: Ecology

Editor Profiles, Journal updates

Welcoming new Associate Editors to Methods in Ecology and Evolution

Following an open call for applicants at the beginning of 2026, we are pleased to welcome 44 new Associate Editors to Methods in Ecology and Evolution. The researchers joining us span 18 different countries. We are really delighted to have further expanded the expertise on our board so that we can continue to promote the development of new methods in ecology and evolution. Welcome aboard! … Continue reading Welcoming new Associate Editors to Methods in Ecology and Evolution

Unknown's avatarHarriet RhodesLeave a comment
Practical Tools

Developing the Mothbox automated light trap

Blog post provided by Hubert A. Szczygieł Origins Back in 2022, I was in Panama working on landscape-scale biodiversity monitoring. The system I was testing included a lot of standard approaches – for example trail cameras for mammals, point counts and passive acoustic monitoring for birds, and Gentry transects for trees. However, I realized that none of the standard insect monitoring methodologies work for large-scale … Continue reading Developing the Mothbox automated light trap

Unknown's avatarHarriet RhodesLeave a comment
Methods papers

Forking anatomy: borrowing software’s best idea to build 3D atlases together

Post provided by A. Murat Maga Picture a graduate student who has just spent eighty hours tracing the individual bones of a fish skull, slice by slice, through a high-resolution microCT scan. The result is a beautiful, richly labelled 3D dataset. And then? Too often it lands on a hard drive, or gets flattened into a static 3D model that no one else can edit, … Continue reading Forking anatomy: borrowing software’s best idea to build 3D atlases together

Unknown's avatarHarriet RhodesLeave a comment
Ecology, Field Methods, Practical Tools

Goby gummies: the fish ‘lolly’ that provides a window to study predation underwater

Post provided by Christopher Hemingson Close your eyes and picture a predation event. Personally, I default to the Planet Earth series’ “Mountains” episode, in which a snow leopard acrobatically chases a mountain goat across near-vertical cliffs in an adrenaline-inducing pursuit. While iconic, predation sequences like this one generally represent the minority. More often than not, predation events occur on the order of split seconds – … Continue reading Goby gummies: the fish ‘lolly’ that provides a window to study predation underwater

Unknown's avatarplydtantheraLeave a comment
Ecology

Can extinction risk be reliably estimated even with limited data?

Post provided by Hiroshi Hakoyama. Rethinking extinction probability as a conservation endpoint Thinking about conservation in terms of species extinction as an endpoint underpins how priorities are set in the IUCN Red List and CITES. At their core, these frameworks are about deciding which populations or taxa should be prioritised for conservation effort. Yet Population Viability Analysis (PVA), which aims to quantify extinction probability itself, … Continue reading Can extinction risk be reliably estimated even with limited data?

Unknown's avatarkhanyilenomthiLeave a comment
Ecology, Lab Methods, Methods papers

A longer read on microbes: Why bigger fragments matter in Earth’s harshest habitats

Post provided by Xi Peng When I first started analysing metagenomic data from cold seeps and hot springs, I didn’t expect to spend quite so much time staring at confusing lines of code and fragmented sequences. Yet these digital traces—broken fragments of DNA scattered across a matrix of microbial complexity—hold the fingerprints of life in Earth’s most extreme habitats. In this work, we developed an … Continue reading A longer read on microbes: Why bigger fragments matter in Earth’s harshest habitats

Unknown's avatarplydtantheraLeave a comment
Journal updates, Peer Review

How to avoid a desk-rejection because your manuscript is the wrong type

Post provided by Dr. Aaron M. Ellison, Executive Editor at Methods in Ecology and Evolution You’ve worked for months, sometimes years, on developing and testing a new method, and spent a similar amount of time writing the manuscript. It’s finally finished and after navigating the online submission system and uploading and proofing your files, you press the “submit my manuscript” button. Back in the Dark … Continue reading How to avoid a desk-rejection because your manuscript is the wrong type

Unknown's avatarHarriet RhodesLeave a comment
What is series

What is acoustic spatial capture-recapture (aSCR)?

Post provided by Ané Cloete What is acoustic spatial capture-recapture (aSCR)? Estimating how many animals live in a given area is one of the most fundamental challenges in conservation. For species that are easy to see such as large mammals on open plains, for example, this is manageable. But for cryptic species that hide from view, counting them directly is often impossible. This is where … Continue reading What is acoustic spatial capture-recapture (aSCR)?

Unknown's avatarHarriet RhodesLeave a comment
Conferences and Meetings

Organising the BES Data and Code Hackathon

Post provided by Natalie Cooper, MEE Senior Editor In my last blog post I wrote generally about why and how to organise a hackathon. To help make those instructions a little clearer, below I provide an example from the BES Data and Code Hackathon we ran 29th-30th September 2025. Note that technically this was really a datathon rather than a hackathon! We followed the outline … Continue reading Organising the BES Data and Code Hackathon

Unknown's avatarHarriet RhodesLeave a comment
Conferences and Meetings

The What, Why and How of Hackathons

Post provided by Natalie Cooper, MEE Senior Editor In September 2025 we ran a hackathon to collect data for a paper on data- and code-sharing across the BES journals. After the event, we thought it might be nice to share what we learned about hackathons here on the MEE blog. Massive thanks to all the participants of the BES Data and Code Hackathon for their … Continue reading The What, Why and How of Hackathons

Unknown's avatarHarriet RhodesLeave a comment