There’s more information below on the Featured Articles selected by the Senior Editor and all of our freely available papers (Practical Tools and Applications articles are always free to access for everyone upon publication, whether you have a subscription or not). Continue reading “Issue 10.10: Conservation, Molecular Techniques, Stats and More”
Today, we’re pleased to announce that we’re launching a new article type for Methods in Ecology and Evolution: Practical Tools. Like our Applications articles, Practical Tools will be short papers(up to 3000 words). They’ll focus on new field techniques, equipment or lab protocols. From this point forward, our Applications papers will solely focus on software and code.
Practical tools need to clearly demonstrate how tools designed for specific systems or problems can be adapted for more general use. Online supporting information can include specific instructions, especially for building equipment. You can find some examples of Applications that would now fit into this article type here and here.
Time flies… in the blink of an eye! And even more so in science. The molecular lab work we were used to two decades ago seems like ancient history to today’s PhD students. The speed of change in sequencing technology is so overwhelming that imagination usually fails to foresee how our daily work will be in 10 years’ time. But in the field of biodiversity assessment, we have very good clues. Next Generation Sequencing is quickly becoming our workhorse for ambitious projects of species and genetic inventories.
One by One Approach to Studying Biodiversity
For decades, most initiatives measured biodiversity in the same way: collect a sample of many individuals in the field, sort the specimens, identify them to a Linnaean species one at a time (if there was a good taxonomist in the group which, unfortunately, it is kind of lucky these days!), and count them. Or, if identification was based on molecular data, the specimen was subject to DNA extraction, to sequence one (or several) short DNA markers. This involved countless hours of work that could be saved if, instead of inventorying biodiversity specimen-by-specimen, we followed a sample-by-sample approach. To do this now, we just have to make a “biodiversity soup”.
Biodiversity assessment based on morphological identification and/or Sanger sequencing (“The one-by-one approach”)
In a new Methods in Ecology and Evolution podcast, Georgina Brennan (Bangor University) interviews Simon Creer (Bangor University) about his article ‘The ecologist’s field guide to sequence-based identification of biodiversity‘. They talk about about where the idea for the paper came from, what it’s aim are and who will benefit from it. We hear how new sequences can improve and enhance current biomonitoring programmes (and make them … Continue reading The Field Guide to Sequence-Based Identification of Biodiversity: An Interview with Simon Creer
We’re a little lat on this post, but there’s another great issue of Methods in Ecology and Evolution online now.
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