Tag: evolution

Journal updates, Methods papers

Issue 7.6: Methods in Ecology and Evolution 5th Anniversary Special Feature

Issue 7.6 is now online!

The June issue of Methods, which includes our latest Special Feature – “5th Anniversary of Methods in Ecology and Evolution” – is now online!

Our 5th Anniversary Special Feature is a collection of six articles (plus an Editorial from Executive Editor Rob Freckleton) that highlights the breadth and depth of topics covered by the journal so far. It grew out of our 5th Anniversary Symposium – a joint event held in London, UK and Calgary, Canada and live-streamed around the world in April 2015 – and contains papers by Associate Editors, a former Robert May prize winner and regular contributors to the journal.

The six articles are based on talks given at last May’s Symposium. They focus on:

In his Editorial for the Special Feature, Rob Freckleton looks to the future. In his words: “we hope to continue to publish a wide range of papers on as diverse a range of topics as possible, exemplified by the diversity of the papers in this feature”.

All of the articles in the Special Feature will be freely available for a limited time. In addition to this, two of the articles (Shedding light on the ‘dark side’ of phylogenetic comparative methods and Perturbation analysis of transient population dynamics using matrix projection models) are Open Access.
Continue reading “Issue 7.6: Methods in Ecology and Evolution 5th Anniversary Special Feature”

Unknown's avatarIndia Stephenson1 Comment
Evolution, Meetings, Methods papers, Phylogenetic analysis

RPANDA: A Time Machine for Evolutionary Biologists

Post provided by HÉLÈNE MORLON

Yesterday saw the start of this year’s annual Evolution meeting and to celebrate Hélène Morlon has written a blog post discussing the amazingly versatile RPANDA package that she is developing with her research group. A description of RPANDA was published in the journal earlier this year and, like all our Applications papers, is freely available to read in full.

If you are attending Evolution, as well as attending the fabulous talks mentioned by Hélène below, do stop by booth 125 to see our BES colleague Simon Hoggart. Simon is the Assistant Editor of Journal of Animal Ecology and would be happy to answer your questions about any of our journals or any of the other work we do here at the BES.

RPANDA: a time machine for evolutionary biologists

Imagine “Doc”, Marty’s friend in Back to the Future, trying to travel back millions of years in an attempt to understand the history of life. Instead of building a time machine from a DeLorean sports car powered by plutonium, he could dig fossils, or more likely, he would use molecular phylogenies.

Molecular phylogenies are family trees of species that can be built from data collected today: the genes (molecules) of present-day species (Fig 1). They are often thought of as trees, in reference to Darwin’s tree of life. The leaves represent the present: species that can be found on Earth today. The branches represent the past: ancestral species, which from time to time split, giving rise to two independent species. The structure of the tree tells us which species descend from which ancestors, and when their divergence happened.

birds_phylog
Fig 1: The phylogenetic tree of all birds (adapted from Jetz et al. 2012). Each bird order is represented by a single bird silloutter and a specific colour (the most abundant order of Passeriformes, for example is represented in dark orange). Each terminal leaf represents a present-day bird species, while internal branches represent the evolutionary relationships among these species.

Continue reading “RPANDA: A Time Machine for Evolutionary Biologists”

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Editor Profiles, Journal updates

New Associate Editor: Will Pearse

Today, we are pleased to be welcoming a new member of the Methods in Ecology and Evolution Associate Editor Board. Will Pearse joins us from McGill University in Canada and you can find out a little more about him below. Will Pearse “I am an evolutionary ecologist and use phylogeny to link the evolution of species’ traits with their ecological community assembly. I’m interested in phylogenetic methods, macro-evolution of species’ traits, community assembly … Continue reading New Associate Editor: Will Pearse

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Methods papers, Practical Tools

From Tree of Life to Web of Life: How Google Images Can Help Ecologists Study Evolution

Below is a press release about the Methods paper ‘Just Google it: assessing the use of Google Images to describe geographical variation in visible traits of organisms‘ taken from the British Ecological Society.

Black sparrowhawks are either completely dark or have a white breast. ©Oggmus
Black sparrowhawks are either completely dark or have a white breast. ©Oggmus

Animals caught on camera by amateur photographers and posted on the web could become an important new tool for studying evolution and other ecological questions, researchers from South Africa have found. Their study – the first of its kind – is published today in Methods in Ecology and Evolution.

Colour polymorphism – when a species has two or more colour types – has fascinated biologists since Darwin. The occurrence of these different colour types often varies geographically, providing a useful way of studying how different colour morphs – or phenotypes – evolve.

But the fieldwork needed to collect these data is time consuming and expensive, so Dr Arjun Amar and his student Gabriella Leighton from the University of Cape Town wondered if ecologists could use the thousands of animal images posted on the internet instead. Continue reading “From Tree of Life to Web of Life: How Google Images Can Help Ecologists Study Evolution”

Unknown's avatarIndia Stephenson1 Comment
Publishing Tips & Tricks

A Video is Worth a Million Words: Why You Should Make a Video about YOUR Article

Post provided by NATHALIE PETTORELLI & CHRIS GRIEVES

Why should you make a video about your article?
Why should you make a video about your article?

With impact being considered more and more in promotion applications and REF-style (Research Excellence Framework) exercises, science communication is becoming an integral part of a scientist’s job. The problem is: most of us academics aren’t exactly trained in science outreach and our communication styles are heavily biased towards anything written, as opposed to anything visual.

With technological advancements constantly making things easier, however, more and more scientists are taking the plunge and adventuring into the world of YouTube and Vimeo to disseminate their work. But why are they doing so? Is it easy? Do you need expert help or can you do it yourself easily?

This blog post aims to answer all the questions and worries you may have as a scientist thinking of making a video about your work for the first time. To address these worries and questions in the most comprehensive way, we asked 12 authors who recently produced a video about their paper (in some cases their first) if they could give us some insights on their experience, and detail for us the challenges and benefits of choosing this style of communication. Their stories are the background to our story. Continue reading “A Video is Worth a Million Words: Why You Should Make a Video about YOUR Article”

Unknown's avatarIndia Stephenson2 Comments
Methods papers

Stage-dependent Demographic Modelling at Your Finger Tips

Post provided by EELKE JONGEJANS and ROB SALGUERO- GÓMEZ

Soay sheep: an organism that can be modelled with two-sex dynamics. ©Julian Paren
Soay sheep: an organism that can be modelled with two-sex dynamics. ©Julian Paren

Typically, ecology courses contain at least a day of matrix population models. So most ecologists are somewhat familiar with how simple life cycles (and complex ones) can be depicted and analysed using matrix models. Briefly, these models represent what happens to individuals over a certain time interval (do they die? do they reproduce? if so, how much?). What individuals do in the context of these models can then be used to study the dynamics of a population.

Often, individuals are classified by size in matrix models, as small individuals tend to have different survival, growth and reproduction rates than large ones. But how many classes do you need to model the dynamics of a size-structured population properly? Instead of choosing arbitrary size class boundaries, Easterling, Ellner and Dixon (2000) came up with the idea of using continuous size variables and integrals to define a population model… and that’s how the first Integral Projection Model (‘IPM’ for us friends) came to be.

Naturally, for the development of a new demographic tool to prove useful to the scientific community, it must be flexible enough to be ‘one-size-fits-all’… and the needs of ecologists, evolutionary biologists and conservation biologists – who have to date used extensively size-based matrix models – are rather variable in size, colour and shape. Continue reading “Stage-dependent Demographic Modelling at Your Finger Tips”

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Journal updates

Issue 7.3

Issue 7.3 is now online!

The March issue of Methods is now online!

This month’s issue contains two Applications articles and two Open Access articles, all of which are freely available.

– METAGEAR: A comprehensive, multifunctional toolbox with capabilities aimed to cover much of the research synthesis taxonomy: from applying a systematic review approach to objectively assemble and screen the literature, to extracting data from studies, and to finally summarize and analyse these data with the statistics of meta-analysis.

– Universal FQA Calculator: A free, open-source web-based Floristic Quality Assessment (FQA) Calculator. The calculator offers 30 FQA data bases (with more being added regularly) from across the United States and Canada and has been used to calculate thousands of assessments. Its growing repository for site inventory and transect data is accessible via a REST API and represents a valuable resource for data on the occurrence and abundance of plant species. Continue reading “Issue 7.3”

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General, Journal updates, Methods papers, Robert May Prize, Society, Virtual Issues

2015 Robert May Prize Winner: Kim Calders

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 2015 winner is Kim Calders, for his article ‘Nondestructive estimates of above-ground biomass using terrestrial laser scanning‘.

Kim led the work on this article and had an international team of co-authors. They have developed a way to harness laser technology for use in measurements of vegetation structure of forests. The study is an important development in the monitoring of carbon stocks for worldwide climate policy-making. Continue reading “2015 Robert May Prize Winner: Kim Calders”

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Editor Profiles, General

International Women’s Day: Advice for Women Starting a Career in STEM

So far this week we’ve heard why some of our female Editors chose to pursue a career in science, what the problems the push for gender equality faces in STEM fields  and where things have been improved in recent years. To close International Women’s Day our posts from the Editors we asked: What advice would you give to female students or Early Career Researchers looking to make a career in academia?

SusanJohnston2Susan Johnston: Mentorship schemes: there are many benefits from being able to have transparent, open and reciprocal discussion on career development, as well as the unwritten rules and experiences of academia. In smaller or less diverse departments, supervisors could encourage their female students to contact potential mentors (male or female) from other institutions. A quick Skype conversation every few months can benefit both the mentee and the mentor.

Carolyn KurleCarolyn Kurle: Don’t be daunted by the idea of how challenging a position in academia might be and don’t remove yourself from the path of academia just because you might be afraid of the potential demands. More and more support exists for mixing successful academic lives with also being a present and fulfilled parent and having a full life outside of research. And the more we expect that to be the case, the more it will exist as reality. Continue reading “International Women’s Day: Advice for Women Starting a Career in STEM”

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Uncategorized

International Women’s Day: Improvements Towards Gender Equality in STEM?

Yesterday we heard about the barriers to gender equality in STEM, as well as a few things that we’re surprised haven’t been fixed yet and some ideas on how improvements could be made. Today, we’re looking at where things are getting better.

What Changes, Initiatives, Actions etc. Have You Seen that have Impressed You?

Louise Johnson: One notable change for the better is that it’s now unacceptable to invite only men as your symposium speakers – it still happens, but you’d get deservedly yelled at for it. That kind of culture change seems inevitable, but it wouldn’t have happened without a lot of people sticking their necks out and complaining (and often being ignored or called whiny or jealous), so we should thank those people. I see more childcare grants available for conference attendance too, which is great.

Luísa Carvalheiro: Important steps I have seen in some countries are extending time limits to apply to fellowships based on the number of babies a woman has had, and to provide paid maternity leave for those financially dependent on scholar/fellowships. These are steps absolutely necessary in the real world. In an ideal world though, both men and women would have the same societal pressures and benefits. Continue reading “International Women’s Day: Improvements Towards Gender Equality in STEM?”

Unknown's avatarIndia Stephenson1 Comment