Two More New Associate Editors

Posted on November 13, 2017 by Chris Grieves

Today we are welcoming two more Associate Editors to the Methods in Ecology and Evolution who were invited to work with the journal following our open call earlier this year. Jessica Royles joins from the University of Cambridge, UK and Simon Blomberg is coming to us from the University of Queensland, Australia. You can find out more about both of them below.

Simon Blomberg

“I am a statistician who started out as a lizard demographer. I am interested in all applications of statistics in evolutionary biology and systematics. It is my passion to see that good science gets done by everybody, and sound statistical methods are essential to reach that goal. My research involves the application of stochastic process models (predominantly Itoh diffusions) to the macroevolution of quantitative traits. I believe that evolution can be described by beautiful mathematics but theory must be tested with data. I have published widely on phylogenetic comparative methods. I use Bayesian methods, data augmentation, regularisation and other modern and traditional statistical methods. I am interested in how to treat missing data. I still like lizards. Also jazz.”

Simon has been working on stochastic process models for a couple of years. His most recent article ‘Beyond Brownian motion and the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process: Stochastic diffusion models for the evolution of quantitative characters‘ is now available on BioRxiv and he would welcome comments on it from the Methods community.

Jessica Royles

“I am interested in the impact of climate change on plant physiology and specialise in using stable isotopes as environmental markers. Having worked in Antarctica I have strong interests in polar biology, high latitude peatlands and fieldwork techniques. My current work focusses on temperate bryophytes and I am interested in using techniques including gas exchange and chlorophyll fluorescence at different spatial scales to link the leaf level to the ecosystem level.”

Jessica’s most recently published article – ‘Widespread Biological Response to Rapid Warming on the Antarctic Peninsula‘ – describes how she and her co-authors used moss cores to study Antarctic warming due to climate change. The article builds on her previous paper ‘Plants and Soil Microbes Respond to Recent Warming on the Antarctic Peninsula‘. Jessica is currently working on a Moss Ecophysiology project which aims to investigate the value of mosses as tools to understand past climate.

We are thrilled to welcome Simon and Jessica to the Associate Editor Board and we look forward to working with them over the coming years.

Issue 7.12

Posted on December 19, 2016 by Chris Grieves

Issue 7.12 is now online!

The final 2016 issue of Methods is now online!

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

– iNEXT: The R package iNEXT (iNterpolation/EXTrapolation) provides simple functions to compute and plot the seamless rarefaction and extrapolation sampling curves for the three most widely used members of the Hill number family (species richness, Shannon diversity and Simpson diversity).

– camtrapR: A new toolbox for flexible and efficient management of data generated in camera trap-based wildlife studies. The package implements a complete workflow for processing camera trapping data.

– rotl: An R package to search and download data from the Open Tree of Life directly in R. It uses common data structures allowing researchers to take advantage of the rich set of tools and methods that are available in R to manipulate, analyse and visualize phylogenies.

– Fluctuating-temperature chamber: A design for economical, programmable fluctuating-temperature chambers based on a relatively small commercially manufactured constant temperature chamber modified with a customized, user-friendly microcontroller.

Continue reading →

What is Methods in Ecology and Evolution?

Posted on November 16, 2016 by Chris Grieves

In a new Methods in Ecology and Evolution podcast, the Senior Editors – Rob Freckleton, Bob O’Hara and Jana Vamosi – discuss the past, present and future of the journal. They talk about what sets it apart from other journals, their favourite articles and the kinds of papers that they would like to see more of. If you’re thinking about submitting to Methods in Ecology and Evolution, they have some advice for you as well.

Articles Mentioned by the Editors:

To find out more about Methods in Ecology and Evolution, read our Aims and Scope and Author Guidelines.

Demography and Big Data

Posted on March 7, 2016 by Chris Grieves

Post provided by BRITTANY TELLER, KRISTIN HULVEY and ELISE GORNISH

Follow Brittany (@BRITTZINATOR) and Elise (@RESTORECAL) on Twitter

To understand how species survive in nature, demographers pair field-collected life history data on survival, growth and reproduction with statistical inference. Demographic approaches have significantly contributed to our understanding of population biology, invasive species dynamics, community ecology, evolutionary biology and much more.

As ecologists begin to ask questions about demography at broader spatial and temporal scales and collect data at higher resolutions, demographic analyses and new statistical methods are likely to shed even more light on important ecological mechanisms.

Population Processes

Midsummer Opuntia cactus in eastern Idaho, USA. © B. Teller.

Traditionally, demographers collect life history data on species in the field under one or more environmental conditions. This approach has significantly improved our understanding of basic biological processes. For example, rosette size is a significant predictor of survival for plants like wild teasel (Werner 1975 – links to all articles are at the end of the post), and desert annual plants hedge their bets against poor years by optimizing germination strategies (Gremer & Venable 2014).

Demographers also include temporal and spatial variability in their models to help make realistic predictions of population dynamics. We now know that temporal variability in carrying capacity dramatically improves population growth rates for perennial grasses and provides a better fit to data than models with varying growth rates because of this (Fowler & Pease 2010). Moreover, spatial heterogeneity and environmental stochasticity have similar consequences for plant populations (Crone 2016). Continue reading →

Measuring Survival Selection in Natural Populations: How important is recapture probability?

Posted on December 23, 2015 by Chris Grieves

Post Provided by John Waller

The “Lande-Arnold” Approach

Damselflies marked in the field, which will hopefully be recaptured later. This small insect at our field site had only about 10% recapture probability.

The quantification of survival selection in the field has a long history in evolutionary biology. A considerable milestone in this field was the highly influential publication by Russel Lande and Steve Arnold in the early 1980s.

The practical implementation of Lande and Arnold’s method involved simply fitting a linear model with standardized response (survival) and explanatory (trait) variables values with quadratic terms (multiplied by two). This straightforward method allowed evolutionary biologists to measure selection coefficients using commonly available statistical software and these estimates could be used directly within a quantitative genetic framework. Continue reading →

The Methods in Ecology and Evolution 5th Anniversary Impact Factor

Posted on June 24, 2015 by Bob O'H

Thomson-Reuters have just released this year’s Impact Factors. The Methods in Ecology and Evolution Impact Factor is now an astounding 6.554, up from a truly dismal 5.322 last year. We now have enough years of Impact Factors to make it worthwhile drawing a graph.

The Methods in Ecology and Evolution Impact Factor goes up and up (…except when it doesn’t).

This puts us ninth in Ecology, and we would be fifth in Evolutionary Biology if Thomson-Reuters thought we published stuff in Evolutionary Biology. We would also be top in Statistics and Substance Abuse if we could get ourselves into either of those categories. Continue reading →

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