New Associate Editor: Johan Kotze

Today, we are pleased to be welcoming a new member of the Methods in Ecology and Evolution Associate Editor Board. Johan Kotze joins us from the University of Helsinki, Finland and you can find out a little more about him below. Johan Kotze “I am an entomologist with a broad interest in all things urban. In particular, my research focuses on beetles (and other insect communities) in urban … Continue reading New Associate Editor: Johan Kotze

Methods in Ecology and Evolution 2017: The Year in Review

Happy New Year! We hope that you all had a wonderful Winter Break and that you’re ready to start 2018. We’re beginning the year with a look back at some of our highlights of 2017. Here’s how last year looked at Methods in Ecology and Evolution.

The Articles

We published some amazing articles in 2017, too many to mention them all here. However, we would like to take a moment to thank all of the Authors, Reviewers and Editors who contributed to the journal last year. Your time and effort make the journal what it is and we are incredibly grateful. THANK YOU for all of your hard work!

Technological Advances at the Interface between Ecology and Statistics

Our first Special Feature of the year came in the April issue of the journal. The idea for Technological Advances at the Interface between Ecology and Statistics  came from the 2015 Eco-Stats Symposium at the University of New South Wales and the feature was guest edited by Associate Editor David Warton. It consists of five articles based on talks from that conference and shows how interdisciplinary collaboration help to solve problems around estimating biodiversity and how it changes over space and time.

Continue reading “Methods in Ecology and Evolution 2017: The Year in Review”

New Associate Editor: Edward Codling

Today, we are pleased to be the latest new member of the Methods in Ecology and Evolution Associate Editor Board. Edward Codling joins us from the University of Essex, UK and you can find out a little more about him below. Edward Codling “My research is focused on using new mathematical and computational techniques to study problems in biology and ecology. In particular, I’m interested in movement ecology, and … Continue reading New Associate Editor: Edward Codling

New Associate Editor: David Soto

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

Two More New Associate Editors

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

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

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.

Karen Bacon

Karen Bacon
Karen Bacon

“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.”

Torbjørn Ergon

Torbjørn Ergon

“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”

Learn to be a Reviewer: Peer Reviewer Mentoring Scheme

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”

At Last, a Paleobiologist is a Senior Editor for Methods in Ecology and Evolution!

Post provided by Lee Hsiang Liow

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!”

New Associate Editors

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