Today, we are pleased to be the latest new member of the Methods in Ecology and Evolution Associate Editor Board. David Soto joins us from the University of Leuven in Belgium and you can find out a little more about him below. David Soto “I am an isotope ecologist with interests in developing new stable isotope methods and techniques for tracing spatio-temporal changes in food webs, and understanding … Continue reading New Associate Editor: David Soto
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 … Continue reading Two More New Associate Editors
Today we are welcoming another two Associate Editors to the Methods in Ecology and Evolution. Just like the seven AEs who joined last week, Michael Matschiner (of the University of Basel, Switzerland) and Tiago Bosisio Quental (of the University of São Paulo, Brazil) were both invited to work with the journal following our open call earlier this year. You can find out more about both of them … Continue reading More New Associate Editors
Today we are welcoming seven new people to the Methods in Ecology and Evolution Associate Editor Board. All of these new Associate Editors were invited to join the Board following our open call for applications a couple of months ago. You can find out more about them below.
“I am a plant ecologist and palaeoecologist with interests that span the present day to the Mesozoic. My particular interests include plant–atmosphere interactions, fossil plant taphonomy, mass extinctions, stable isotope ecology, and Anthropocene ecology. My current work focuses on the development of plant-based proxies to improve interpretations of plant responses to past environmental change and investigating plant functional traits that lead to success across environmental upheaval events in both the fossil record and present day.”
“I am a population/evolutionary ecologist with wide interests. My research has mostly been focused on variation in life-history traits and demographic rates within populations, and I have a strong interest in statistical modelling in this field. As an associate editor of Methods in Ecology and Evolution, I hope to promote novel papers that pay close attention to ecological/evolutionary theory in addition to study design and statistical modelling.” Continue reading “New Associate Editors”
Today is the first day of peer review week. One of the issues that many people bring up about the current system of peer review is that there is very little formal training. There are guidance documents available (including the BES Guide to Peer Review), workshops on peer review can be found at some conferences and some senior academics teach their PhD students or post-docs about the process. In general though, peer review training is fairly hard to come by.
This is something that people have told us (the BES publications team) at conferences and through surveys, so we’re doing something about it. From October 2017 until April 2018 Methods in Ecology and Evolution is going to be partnering with the BES Quantitative Ecology Special Interest Group to run a trial Peer Review Mentoring Scheme.
The trial scheme is going to focus on statistical ecology (as we receive a lot of statistical papers at Methods in Ecology and Evolution), but if it goes well, we’ll be looking at other areas of expertise too.
Applications for Mentor and Mentee positions are now open. If you’re an experienced statistical ecologist or evolutionary biologist or an Early Career Researcher in those fields, we’d love to receive an application from you. Continue reading “Learn to be a Reviewer: Peer Reviewer Mentoring Scheme”
An Asian, female Senior Editor under 45? Progressive! I have loved Methods in Ecology and Evolution since it appeared in 2010 and am thrilled to have been selected to join Rob, Bob and Jana to help with the journal’s continued development.
OK, so you want to know who the new Senior Editor on the MEE block is. I’m just another scientist, I guess. On the outside, we look different but on the inside, we’re all the same. (OK, perhaps we are a little different, even on the inside, but that makes life and research interesting, right?)
Here’s my academic life history: I did my Bachelors thesis on the systematics/phylogenetics of an obscure group of marine pulmonate slugs with one of the greatest Icelandic biologists I know, Jon Sigurdsson, at the National University of Singapore. I followed this up with an almost-half-year stint at the Museum of Natural Science in Berlin as a “nobody”, digitizing data. Then I won the academic lottery and headed up to Uppsala to do my masters in conservation biology on tropical pollinator diversity, (un)supervised by two amazing supervisors that never met each other, the late Navjot Sodhi (National University of Singapore) and Thomas Elmqvist, now at Stockholm University. Continue reading “At Last, a Paleobiologist is a Senior Editor for Methods in Ecology and Evolution!”
Today we are welcoming two new people to the Methods in Ecology and Evolution Associate Editor Board. Pierre Durand is joining us from the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa) and Andrew Mahon joins from Central Michigan University (USA). You can find out more about Pierre and Andrew below. Pierre Durand “My research is broadly focussed on the evolution of complexity. Many of my projects are related to the evolutionary … Continue reading New Associate Editors
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.
The British Ecological Society (BES) is a thriving learned society established in 1913 whose vision is a world inspired, informed and influenced by ecology. It publishes five successful journals, and a quarterly newsletter, the Bulletin, that is distributed to its 5,000 members worldwide. At present, the BES is seeking an outstanding ecologist to join the team of Senior Editors on Methods in Ecology and Evolution.
Methods in Ecology and Evolution (MEE) is a high-profile broad-scope journal which promotes the development of new methods in ecology and evolution and facilitates their dissemination and uptake by the research community. It brings together papers from previously disparate sub-disciplines to provide a single forum for tracking methodological developments in all areas. The journal has excellent citation metrics including a current Impact Factor of 6.34 and an active social media presence.
Submissions to MEE are growing and we are seeking an Senior Editor to strengthen and complement the editorial team and to continue raising the journal’s profile worldwide. The journal’s editorial team currently consists of three Senior Editors who are supported by an international board of around 60 Associate Editors and dedicated editorial office personnel. The Editors work together to determine journal strategy and to increase the reputation and quality of the journal, in addition to making decisions on around 800 manuscripts submitted each year. Further details about the Journal and its current editorial team can be found at www.methodsinecologyandevolution.org. Continue reading “Senior Editor Vacancy at Methods in Ecology and Evolution”
Issue 7.11 is now online!
The November 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.
– moveHMM: This R package allows ecologists to process GPS tracking data into series of step lengths and turning angles, and to fit a hidden Markov model to these data, allowing, in particular, for the incorporation of environmental covariates.
– BORIS: An open-source and multiplatform standalone program that allows a user-specific coding environment to be set for a computer-based review of previously recorded videos or live observations. Being open to user-specific settings, the program allows a project-based ethogram to be defined that can then be shared with collaborators, or can be imported or modified.
– inbreedR: An R package that provides functions to measure variance in inbreeding – through the strength of correlation in heterozygosity across marker loci – based on microsatellite and SNP markers with associated P-values and confidence intervals. Within the framework of Heterozygosity–fitness correlation theory, inbreedR also estimates the impact of inbreeding on marker heterozygosity and fitness.
– Terrestrial Precipitation Analysis: This package is comprised of the Precipitation Trends (P-Trend), Precipitation Attributes (P-Att) and Precipitation Manipulation (P-Man) tools. Combined, these web tools allow researchers to easily calculate fundamental precipitation statistics for past, present and projected future precipitation regimes for any terrestrial location in the world.
Methods Blog 