Today we are welcoming four new Associate Editors to Methods in Ecology and Evolution. Graziella Iossa (University of Lincoln) and Theoni Photopoulou (Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University) are joining as regular Associate Editors and Simon Jarman (Unversity of Porto) and Daniele Silvestro (University of Gothenburg) will be working on Applications articles. You can find out more about all of our new Associate Editors below.
Graziella Iossa
“I am an evolutionary ecologist with broad interests in behavioural and population ecology. My research has explored reproductive strategies and the evolution of male and female reproductive traits in mammals and insects and I have used a range of techniques to study the behaviour and welfare of wildlife. I have just started to explore interdisciplinary approaches with the aim to improve our understanding of the value and role of ecosystem services in human health, specifically for antimicrobial resistance.”
Graziella’s most recent paper – Micropyle number is associated with elevated female promiscuity in Lepidoptera – investigates the evolution of the micropyle, a tiny canal which sperm use to fertilise eggs in insects. This is the first study to show that micropylar variation is driven by female promiscuity – the more micropyles her eggs have, the more choice she is likely to have over which male fathers her offspring. Also, Graziella currently holds a NERC Valuing Nature placement which aims to combine perspectives from evolutionary ecology, microbial ecology, epidemiology, ecosystem science and public health to develop a new, holistic way of understanding antimicrobial resistance
Simon Jarman
“Methods employing epigenetics, environmental DNA analysis or bioinformatics for ecological research are improving rapidly and have clear potential for future development. My research focuses on creating new methods in these areas and using them to study population biology and biodiversity. Epigenetic markers for physiological features such as biological age can be used to determine key features of population biology such as age class distribution. Environmental DNA can be used to measure species distributions; biodiversity in environmental samples; and animal diet composition. I am interested in the molecular biology and computational approaches that are required to implement these methods; as well as how they can be used to study specific ecological questions.”
In November 2016, Simon published an Open Access article in Methods in Ecology and Evolution. ‘Optimised scat collection protocols for dietary DNA metabarcoding in vertebrates‘ explains how to collect scat samples to optimise the detection of food DNA in vertebrate scat samples. More recently, Simon was the last author of ‘KrillDB: A de novo transcriptome database for the Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba)‘ – which introduces the most advanced genetic database on Euphausia superba, KrillDB, and includes comprehensive data sets of former and present transcriptome projects.
Theoni Photopoulou
“I am interested in the way biological and ecological phenomena change in space and over time. My special interest is animal movement ecology and the mechanisms behind the patterns of movement we observe. Most of the time I work on ecological questions about how animals use their environment and the resources in it, using data collected remotely with animal-attached instruments. Marine biology was my first love so I will always have a soft spot for marine systems, especially movement of large marine vertebrates, but I work on all sorts of tracking data and also some non-tracking data.”
Theoni has also recently been published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution. Her article ‘Analysis of animal accelerometer data using hidden Markov model‘ appeared in the February issue of the journal (and provided the cover image). In the paper, the authors provide the details necessary to implement and assess a hidden Markov Model in both the supervised and unsupervised learning contexts and discuss the data requirements of each case. Another of Theoni’s articles has just been accepted for publication in Frontiers in Zoology. ‘Evidence for a postreproductive phase in female false killer whales (Pseudorca crassidens)‘ investigates the evidence for postreproductive lifespan (PRLS) in the false killer whale, using a quantitative measure of PRLS and morphological evidence from reproductive tissue.
Daniele Silvestro
“I am a computational biologist and my research focuses on (macro)evolution and the development of new probabilistic models to better understand it. I am interested in the implementation of Bayesian algorithms to model evolutionary processes such as phenotypic trait evolution and species diversification and extinction. I am also interested in historical biogeography and in particular in the estimation of dispersal rates and biotic connectivity between geographic areas. A lot of my work involves developing new models and algorithms and implementing them in computer programs. I have been using both phylogenetic data and fossil occurrences to infer deep time evolutionary dynamics and I am keen to see an improved integration between paleontological and neontological data in evolutionary research.”
In his most recent article – ‘Bayesian estimation of multiple clade competition from fossil data‘ – Daniele and his co-authors explore the properties of the existing Multiple Clade Diversity Dependence implementation, which is based on Bayesian variable selection, and introduce an alternative parameterisation based on the Horseshoe prior. He was also one of the authors of ‘Mammal body size evolution in North America and Europe over 20 Myr: similar trends generated by different processes‘, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B earlier this year.
We are thrilled to welcome Simon, Graziella, Theoni and Daniele to the Associate Editor Board and we look forward to working with them over the coming years.
