Tag: Ecology

Methods papers, Online extras

How Can We Quantify the Strength of Migratory Connectivity?

Technological advancements in the past 20 years or so have spurred rapid growth in the study of migratory connectivity (the linkage of individuals and populations between seasons of the annual cycle). A new article in Methods in Ecology and Evolution provides methods to help make quantitative comparisons of migratory connectivity across studies, data types, and taxa to better understand the causes and consequences of the seasonal distributions … Continue reading How Can We Quantify the Strength of Migratory Connectivity?

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Methods papers, Online extras

Improved and Harmless Demethylation Method for Ecological Epigenetic Experiments

In a new Methods in Ecology and Evolution video, Javier Puy outlines a new method of experimental plant DNA demethylation for ecological epigenetic experiments. While the traditionally-used approach causes underdeveloped root systems and high mortality of treated plants, this new one overcomes the unwanted effects while maintaining the demethylation efficiency. The authors demonstrate its application for ecological epigenetic experiments: testing transgenerational effects of plant–plant competition. … Continue reading Improved and Harmless Demethylation Method for Ecological Epigenetic Experiments

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General, Meetings

Solving YOUR Ecology Challenges with R: Ecology Hackathon in Ghent

Scientific software is an increasingly important part of scientific research, and ecologists have been at the forefront of developing open source tools for ecological research. Much of this software is distributed via R packages – there are over 200 R packages for ecology and evolution on CRAN alone. Methods regularly publishes Application articles introducing R packages (and other software) that enable ecological research, and we’re … Continue reading Solving YOUR Ecology Challenges with R: Ecology Hackathon in Ghent

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Evolution, Methods papers

The Power of Infinity: Using 3D Fractal Geometry to Study Irregular Organisms

Post provided by Jessica Reichert, André R. Backes, Patrick Schubert and Thomas Wilke

The Problem with the Shape

More than anything else, the phenotype of an organism determines how it interacts with the environment. It’s subject to natural selection, and may help to unravel the underlying evolutionary processes. So shape traits are key elements in many ecological and biological studies.

The growth form of corals is highly variable. ©Jessica Reichert
The growth form of corals is highly variable. ©Jessica Reichert

Commonly, basic parameters like distances, areas, angles, or derived ratios are used to describe and compare the shapes of organisms. These parameters usually work well in organisms with a regular body plan. The shape of irregular organisms – such as many plants, fungi, sponges or corals – is mainly determined by environmental factors and often lacks the distinct landmarks needed for traditional morphometric methods. The application of these methods is problematic and shapes are more often categorised than actually measured.

As scientists though, we favour independent statistical analyses, and there’s an urgent need for reliable shape characterisation based on numerical approaches. So, scientists often determine complexity parameters such as surface/volume ratios, rugosity, or the level of branching. However, these parameters all share the same drawback: they are delineated to a univariate number, taking information from one or few spatial scales and because of this essential information is lost. Continue reading “The Power of Infinity: Using 3D Fractal Geometry to Study Irregular Organisms”

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Methods papers, Online extras

In Situ Measurements of Wildlife

Measurements of morphological features are important for ecological studies, especially on free-ranging wild animal species. Conventionally, specimens either dead or in captivity are used for morphometric studies, which is difficult in the case of wild species for several reasons.‘In situ measurements of animal morphological features: a non-invasive method’ presents a new way to estimate an individual’s morphometric measurements using metadata from digital photographs. Dr. Mylswamy Mahendiran and … Continue reading In Situ Measurements of Wildlife

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Journal updates

Issue 8.8

Issue 8.10 is now online!

The October issue of Methods is now online!

This double-sized issue contains three Applications articles and two Open Access articles. These five papers are freely available to everyone, no subscription required.

– Phylogenetic Trees: The fields of phylogenetic tree and network inference have advanced independently, with only a few attempts to bridge them. Schliep et al. provide a framework, implemented in R, to transfer information between trees and networks.

– Emon: Studies, surveys and monitoring are often costly, so small investments in preliminary data collection and systematic planning of these activities can help to make best use of resources. To meet recognised needs for accessible tools to plan some aspects of studies, surveys and monitoring, Barry et al. developed the R package emon, which includes routines for study design through power analysis and feature detection.

– Haplostrips: A tool to visualise polymorphisms of a given region of the genome in the form of independently clustered and sorted haplotypes. Haplostrips is a command-line tool written in Python and R, that uses variant call format files as input and generates a heatmap view.

Continue reading “Issue 8.8”

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Journal updates

Issue 8.8

Issue 8.8 is now online!

The August issue of Methods is now online!

This issue contains two Applications articles and two Open Access articles. These four papers are freely available to everyone, no subscription required.

– Paco: An R package that assesses the phylogenetic congruence, or evolutionary dependence, of two groups of interacting species using both ecological interaction networks and their phylogenetic history.

– Open MEE: Open Meta-analyst for Ecology and Evolution (Open MEE) addresses the need for advanced, easy-to-use software for meta-analysis and meta-regression.It offers a suite of advanced meta-analysis and meta-regression methods for synthesizing continuous and categorical data, including meta-regression with multiple covariates and their interactions, phylogenetic analyses, and simple missing data imputation.

Continue reading “Issue 8.8”

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Methods papers, Online extras

Conditional Occupancy Design Explained

Occupancy surveys are widely used in ecology to study wildlife and plant habitat use. To account for imperfect detection probability many researchers use occupancy models. But occupancy probability estimates for rare species tend to be biased because we’re unlikely to observe the animals at all and as a result, the data aren’t very informative. In their new article – ‘Occupancy surveys with conditional replicates: An … Continue reading Conditional Occupancy Design Explained

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Journal updates

Issue 8.7

Issue 8.7 is now online!

© Paula Matos

The July issue of Methods is now online!

This issue contains three Applications articles (one of which is Open Access) and one additional Open Access article. These four papers are freely available to everyone, no subscription required.

– BioEnergeticFoodWebs: An implementation of Yodzis & Innes bio-energetic model, in the high-performance computing language Julia. This package can be used to conduct numerical experiments in a reproducible and standard way.

– Controlled plant crosses: Chambers which allow you to control pollen movement and paternity of offspring using unpollinated isolated plants and microsatellite markers for parents and their putative offspring. This system has per plant costs and efficacy superior to pollen bags used in past studies of wind-pollinated plants.

– The Global Pollen Project: The study of fossil and modern pollen assemblages provides essential information about vegetation dynamics in space and time. In this Open Access Applications article, Martin and Harvey present a new online tool – the Global Pollen Project – which aims to enable people to share and identify pollen grains. Through this, it will create an open, free and accessible reference library for pollen identification. The database currently holds information for over 1500 species, from Europe, the Americas and Asia. As the collection grows, we envision easier pollen identification, and greater use of the database for novel research on pollen morphology and other characteristics, especially when linked to other palaeoecological databases, such as Neotoma.

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Journal updates, Methods papers

Issue 8.6: How to Measure Natural Selection

Issue 8.6 is now online!

The April issue of Methods, which includes our latest Special Feature – ‘How to Measure Natural Selection‘ – is now online!

Understanding how and why some individuals survive and reproduce better than others, the traits that allow them to do so, the genetic basis of those traits, and the signatures of past and present selection in patterns of variation in the genome remain at the top of the research agenda for evolutionary biology. This Special Feature – Guest Edited by Jeff Conner, John Stinchcombe and Joanna Kelley – draws together a collection of seven papers that highlight new methodological and conceptual approaches to meeting this agenda.

Three of the ‘How to Measure Natural Selection’ papers – Franklin and Morrissey, Thomson and Hadfield, and Hadfield and Thomson – clarify unresolved aspects of the literature in meaningful and important ways. Following on from this Hermisson and Pennings; Lotterhos et al.; and Villanueva‐Cañas et al. tackle the genomic results of evolution by natural selection: namely, how we can detect natural selection from genomic data? Finally, Wadgymar et al. address the issue of how much we know about the underlying loci or agents of selection.

To use the Editors’ own words, the articles in this issue “deal with how we can detect selection in a way that can be used to predict evolutionary responses, how selection affects the genome, and how selection and genetics underlie adaptive differentiation.”

All of the articles in the ‘How to Measure Natural Selection‘ Special Feature will be freely available for a limited time.
Continue reading “Issue 8.6: How to Measure Natural Selection”

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