Our July Issue is now online! This issue contains 20 articles about the latest methods in ecology and evolution, including methods for characterising soil bacterial biodiversity, identifying fish species in fish markets using eDNA, standarising and cleaning biodiversity data and much more! Plus, read the editorial about our switch to a gold open access model this month. Read on to find out about this month’s featured articles … Continue reading July 2022 Issue Out Now!
Pride Month is almost over, and to round off this year’s wonderful Rainbow Research blog series we are pleased to host this post from Lewis Bartlett announcing the launch of the ALDER Network: the British Ecological Society’s relaunched LGBTQIA+ Network. Hello readers! Welcome to my second year in a row getting to write a Rainbow Research blog post for the BES, and this Pride month … Continue reading Another year ALDER, another year wiser.
…but also opportunities! Hidden Markov models (HMMs) and their extensions are attractive methods for analysing ecological data. In recent years, a variety of extensions of the basic model have been proposed, yielding great opportunities for ecological inference. Yet, as these models become more complex and challenging to understand, it is important to consider what pitfalls these methods have and what opportunities there are for future … Continue reading Hidden Markov models have pitfalls…
Post provided by Valerie Steen
Each year Methods in Ecology and Evolution awards the Robert May Prize to the best paper published in the journal by an author at the start of their career. Ten Early Career Researchers made the shortlist for this year’s prize, including Valerie Steen who is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Oregon State University in the USA. In this interview, Valerie shares insights on her paper ‘Spatial thinning and class balancing: Key choices lead to variation in the performance of species distribution models with citizen science data’.
Continue reading “Spatial thinning and class balancing: Key choices lead to variation in the performance of species distribution models with citizen science data”
The cover of our March issue shows a female Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra), with its young kit bringing a crab to shore before eating it. The photographer, Alan Seymour, had been watching the otter from a distance, while laying low behind a large boulder. Direct observations of trophic interactions take a lot of time and skill, especially concerning cryptic species (e.g., semi-aquatic mammals, small invertebrates). Accurately and precisely identifying prey items is mostly impossible by observation. Molecular methods, such as DNA metabarcoding, offer a sensitive approach for investigating trophic interactions of cryptic species; however, this high sensitivity can introduce errors. In this post, the authors discuss potential sources of errors in dietary metabarcoding datasets, and how to use minimum sequence copy thresholds to carefully remove them, detailed in their Methods in Ecology and Evolution article “An assessment of minimum sequence copy thresholds for identifying and reducing the prevalence of artefacts in dietary metabarcoding data”.
Continue reading “Cover Stories: Cleaning up false positives with minimum sequence copy thresholds”Our February issue is now online! Our second issue of the year contains 22 high-quality articles about the latest methods in ecology and evolution. This month we have methods for visualising the tree of life, estimating arthropod abundance and diversity, disentangling effects of climate and land use on biodiversity and much more! This issue also contains four Applications and two Practical Tools articles that are free to … Continue reading February Issue Out Now
Many biodiversity studies, covering a wide range of goals, need species records. These records are becoming readily available online, however there is minimal standardisation for these records at this stage, therefore requiring final users to spend a significant amount of time formatting records prior to using data. To overcome this, Renato Lima et al. have created plantR – an open-source package that provides a comprehensive toolbox to manage species records from biological collections. In this blog post, Renato discusses the workflow of the package and describes how this package can help researchers better assess data quality and avoid data leakage.
Continue reading “plantR: Managing species records from biological collections”Natasha Howell of Bristol University unearths the mystery of striking colouration in mammals and what skunks and bees have in common. This blog is part of our colourful countdown to the holiday season where we’re celebrating the diversity and beauty of the natural world. Click here to read the rest of the colour countdown series. The vast majority of mammal species are not known for their striking colouration. Compared to other … Continue reading Why are some mammals black and white?
Almut Kelber, Professor at Lund University, takes us on a sweeping tour of the complex array of bird vision – from chickens to owls – to unravel how their ecology affects the way they see the world. This blog is part of our colourful countdown to the holiday season in which we’re celebrating the diversity and beauty of the natural world. Click here to read the rest of … Continue reading How do birds see the world?
Our October Issue is out now! It’s a bumper issue, with 26 articles presenting the latest methods in ecology and evolution. We have methods for measuring temporal change in alpha diversity, aerial imaging of field plots, analysing 3D morphology images and more, plus four Applications and five Practical Tools articles for your reading. Find out more below! Featured Articles The potential and practice of arboreal … Continue reading October Issue Out Now!
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