What the Past Can Tell Us About the Future: Notes from Crossing the Palaeontological – Ecological Gap

Posted on September 18, 2018 by Chris Grieves

Post provided by Karen Bacon

I had the pleasure of delivering one of the plenary talks at the first (hopefully of many) Crossing the Palaeontological – Ecological Gap meeting held in the University of Leeds on August 30^th and 31^st. I’m a geologist and a botanist, so this is a topic that’s close to my heart and my professional interests.

How Palaeoecology Can Help Us Today

©Gail Hampshire

As we move into an ecologically uncertain future with pressures of climate change, land-use change and resource limitations, the fossil record offers the only truly long-term record of how Earth’s ecosystems respond to major environmental upheaval driven by climate change events. The fossil record is, of course, not without its problems – there are gaps, not everything fossilises in the same way or numbers, and comparisons to today’s ecology are extremely difficult. It’s these difficulties (and other challenges) that make the uniting of palaeontology and ecology essential to fully address how plants, animals and other organisms have responded to major changes in the past. Perhaps uniting them could give us an idea of what to expect in our near-term future, as carbon dioxide levels return to those not previously experienced on Earth since the Pliocene, over 2 million years ago. Continue reading →

Crossing the Palaeontological-Ecological Gap

Posted on August 30, 2018 by Chris Grieves

Today is the first day of the Crossing the Palaeontological-Ecological Gap (CPEG) conference. The aim of the conference is to open a dialogue between palaeontologists and ecologists who work on similar questions but across vastly different timescales. This splitting of temporal scales tends to make communication, data integration and synthesis in ecology harder. A lot of this comes from the fact that palaeontologists and ecologists tend to publish in different journals and attend different meetings.

Methods in Ecology and Evolution is one of few ecological journals that attracts submissions from both ecologists and palaeontologists. To highlight this, we’ve released a Virtual Issue, also called Crossing the Palaeontological-Ecological Gap. Continue reading →

Integrating Evolution and Ecology

Posted on August 20, 2018 by Chris Grieves

©H. Zell

The latest Methods in Ecology and Evolution Virtual Issue – ‘Integrating Evolution and Ecology‘ – is in honour of the late Isabelle Olivieri (1957-2016): an international, interdisciplinary and ground-breaking biologist. It was edited by Louise Johnson and James Bullock and features papers on topics she researched, and in many cases pioneered. But it might perhaps have been more difficult to find 15 Methods papers on areas outside of Isabelle’s research interests!

Isabelle was the first Professor of Population Genetics at Montpellier, a past President of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (2007-2009), and a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization. She spanned subject boundaries as easily as she collaborated across geographical borders. Her publications range through metapopulation and dispersal ecology, host-parasite coevolution, life history, invasive species and conservation ecology. In keeping with this breadth of interests, she also combined theory easily with experiment, and worked with a wide range of study systems from mites to Medicago. Continue reading →

Virtually Trekking Across the Pond with the Newest Senior Editor: Aaron M. Ellison

Posted on April 30, 2018 by Chris Grieves

Post Provided by Aaron Ellison

I’m delighted to be the newest member of the diverse team of Senior and Associate Editors who have made Methods in Ecology and Evolution one of the premier journals in the field. After 15 years working on the lead editorial teams of Ecology and Ecological Monographs, I’m really looking forward to applying my editorial energies to the ESA’s friendly competitor on the other side of the ‘pond’.

My background includes:

an undergraduate degree in East Asian Philosophy
a PhD in evolutionary ecology
research and teaching on the natural history and population, community, and landscape ecology of plants and animals (mostly invertebrates) in the marine intertidal and subtidal, among salt marshes and mangroves, tropical and temperate forests, and carnivorous plant bogs
extensive forays into statistics, mathematics, and software engineering
increasing attention to the history and practice of art and architecture and their relationship to ecological theory
a quirky social-media persona
and more than two decades of work in editing and publishing journals with scientific societies.

All of these things contribute to my open, catholic approach to scientific research, teaching, and publishing, and their relationship to the broader world.

The editors of Methods are always interested in seeing papers on methodological advances and approaches that lead to new directions. We love reading about creative solutions for new challenges in ecological and evolutionary research and applications in the broadest sense. As a new Senior Editor, I’m especially hoping to encourage more papers in three areas: field methods (about which I’ve published two of my own papers in Methods), reproducibility, and science communication. Continue reading →

2017 Robert May Prize Winner: Jonathan Henshaw

Posted on April 16, 2018 by Chris Grieves

The Robert May Prize is awarded annually for the best paper published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution by an Early Career Researcher. We’re delighted to announce that the 2017 winner is Jonathan Henshaw, for his article ‘A unified measure of linear and nonlinear selection on quantitative traits‘.

The standard approach to quantifying natural selection, developed by Lande and Arnold, does not allow for comparable metrics between linear (i.e. selection on the mean phenotype) and nonlinear (i.e. selection on all other aspects of the phenotypic distribution, including variance and the number of modes) selection gradients. Jonathan Henshaw’s winning submission provides the first integrated measure of the strength of selection that applies across qualitatively different selection regimes (e.g. directional, stabilizing or disruptive selection). Continue reading →

Who to Trust? The IDEA Protocol for Structured Expert Elicitation

Posted on March 27, 2018 by Chris Grieves

Post provided by Victoria Hemming and Mark Burgman

Expert judgement is used to predict current and future trends for Koala populations across Australia

New technologies provide ecologists with unprecedented means for informing predictions and decisions under uncertainty. From drones and apps that capture data faster and cheaper than ever before, to new methods for modelling, mapping and sharing data.

But what do you do when you don’t have data (or the data you have is incomplete or uninformative), but decisions need to be made?

In ecology, decisions often need to be made with imperfect or incomplete data. In these circumstances, expert judgement is relied upon routinely. Some examples include threatened species listing decisions, weighing up the cost and benefit of management actions, and environmental impact assessments.

We use experts to answer questions such as:

How many koalas are there in Australia?
What will the density of Crown of Thorns Starfish be on coral reefs?
What will happen if we implement Management Action A versus Management Action B
Will seagrass recover to its current extent after a port development?

These are questions about facts in the form of quantities and probabilities for which we simply can’t collect the data. Continue reading →

Resolving Conservation Conflicts: The Nominal Group Technique

Posted on February 16, 2018 by Chris Grieves

Post provided by Jean Hugé

Conservation conflicts are actually conflicts among people with different priorities.

Conservation issues seem to be getting ever more complex and challenging. Practitioners and society at large agree on the need to gather – and somehow use – as much information as possible before making any conservation-related decisions. Talking to all kinds of people, ranging from local villagers, fishermen and hunters to international experts, community leaders and environmentalists, is now common practice in conservation research. Not everyone will agree on the eventual conservation decisions, but the idea is that decisions should only be made after (almost) everyone’s opinion has been heard.

So far so good. The calls for inclusive conservation are being acknowledged, and we should be ready to move on and make better decisions, right? Well, it’s not always that easy. Conservation conflicts are actually conflicts among people with different priorities and values. Just calling for dialogue and hoping that consensus and effective conservation action will just follow isn’t enough. Continue reading →

Issue 9.2

Posted on February 13, 2018 by Chris Grieves

Issue 9.2 is now online!

The February issue of Methods is now online!

This double-size issue contains six Applications articles (one of which is Open Access) and two Open Access research articles. These eight papers are freely available to everyone, no subscription required.

– Temperature Manipulation: Welshofer et al. present a modified International Tundra Experiment (ITEX) chamber design for year-round outdoor use in warming taller-stature plant communities up to 1.5 m tall.This design is a valuable tool for examining the effects of in situ warming on understudied taller-stature plant communities

– Zoon: The disjointed nature of the current species distribution modelling (SDM) research environment hinders evaluation of new methods, synthesis of current knowledge and the dissemination of new methods to SDM users. The zoon R package aims to overcome these problems by providing a modular framework for constructing reproducible SDM workflows.

– BEIN R Package: The Botanical Information and Ecology Network (BIEN) database comprises an unprecedented wealth of cleaned and standardised botanical data. The bien r package allows users to access the multiple types of data in the BIEN database. This represents a significant achievement in biological data integration, cleaning and standardisation.

Continue reading →

Issue 9.1: Qualitative Methods for Eliciting Judgements for Decision Making

Posted on January 11, 2018 by Chris Grieves

Issue 9.1 is now online!

Our first issue of 2018, which includes our latest Special Feature – “Qualitative methods for eliciting judgements for decision making” – is now online!

This new Special Feature is a collection of five articles (plus an Editorial from Guest Editors Bill Sutherland, Lynn Dicks, Mark Everard and Davide Geneletti) brings together authors from a range of disciplines (including ecology, human geography, political science, land economy and management) to examine a set of qualitative techniques used in conservation research. They highlight a worrying extent of poor justification and inadequate reporting of qualitative methods in the conservation literature.

As stated by the Guest Editors in their Editorial “these articles constitute a useful resource to facilitate selection and use of some common qualitative methods in conservation science. They provide a guide for inter-disciplinary researchers to gauge the suitability of each technique to their research questions, and serve as a series of checklists for journal editors and reviewers to determine appropriate reporting.”

All of the articles in the ‘Qualitative methods for eliciting judgements for decision making‘ Special Feature are all freely available.
Continue reading →

Satellite Data Fusion for Ecologists and Conservation Scientists

Posted on January 10, 2018 by Chris Grieves

What is satellite data fusion, and how can it benefit ecologists and conservation scientists? In a new Methods in Ecology and Evolution video, Henrike Schulte-to-Bühne answers this question using whiteboards and questionable drawing skills.

The availability and accessibility of multispectral and radar satellite remote sensing (SRS) imagery are at an unprecedented high. However, despite the benefits of combining multispectral and radar SRS data, data fusion techniques, including image fusion, are not commonly used in biodiversity monitoring, ecology and conservation. To address this, the authors provide an overview of the most common SRS data fusion techniques, discussing their benefits and drawbacks, and pull together case studies illustrating the added value for biodiversity research and monitoring.

This video is based on the review article ‘Better together: Integrating and fusing multispectral and radar satellite imagery to inform biodiversity monitoring, ecological research and conservation science‘ by Schulte to Bühne and Pettorelli.

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