Charles Darwin House, London, UK: 10:00 – 18:00 (GMT) Alberta Room, Dining Centre, University of Calgary, Canada: 08:30 – 17:00 (MST) 22 April 2015 Methods in Ecology and Evolution, the British Ecological Society’s youngest journal, turns five this year. To celebrate we will be holding a joint Symposium – beginning in the UK and concluding in Canada. We will be hearing what’s in store for … Continue reading Our 5th Anniversary Symposium
The following is a press release about the Methods paper ‘An examination of index-calibration experiments: counting tigers at macroecological scales‘ taken from the University of Oxford News and Events page:
Flaws in a method commonly used in censuses of tigers and other rare wildlife put the accuracy of such surveys in doubt, a new study suggests.
A team of scientists from the
University of Oxford, Indian Statistical Institute, and Wildlife Conservation Society exposes, for the first time, inherent shortcomings in the ‘index-calibration’ method that means it can produce inaccurate results. Amongst recent studies thought to be based on this method is India’s national tiger survey (January 2015) which claimed a surprising but welcome 30 percent rise in tiger numbers in just four years.
The team urges conservation practitioners to guard against these sources of error, which could mislead even the best conservation efforts, and suggests a constructive way forward using alternative methods of counting rare animals that avoid the pitfalls of the index-calibration approach.
A report of the research is published this week in the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution.
Issue 6.2 is now online! The February issue of Methods is now online! This month we have two applications articles. Both are free to access, no subscription required. – NLMpy: A PYTHON software package for the creation of neutral landscape models (there are also two videos associated to this paper on our Youtube channel) – BAT – an R package for the measurement and estimation of … Continue reading Issue 6.2
Issue 6.1 is now online! Our first issue of 2015 is now online! This month we include one freely available Applications article: – A biochemical approach for identifying plastics exposure in live wildlife We also have two wonderful Open Access papers, ‘Evaluation and management implications of uncertainty in a multispecies size-structured model of population and community responses to fishing‘ by Robert B. Thorpe, Will J. … Continue reading Issue 6.1
In this video Thomas Etherington shows how to use the NLMpy Python package to create neutral landscape models. The video demonstrates how the paper’s Supporting Information documentation, Python scripts, and GIS data can be used to create a the example neutral landscape models that are shown in the paper. Recognising that some ecologists may not be very familiar with Python, the authors have also created … Continue reading NLMpy: a python software package for the creation of neutral landscape models
About the issue Issue 3.3 contains an amazing number of extra features: three videos, one podcast and one Powerpoint presentation. The topics in the issue range from DNA barcoding, surveys, measuring diversity, population and movement modelling and includes five free applications. About the cover Recently developed light-weighed tracking devices for positioning through light intensity pattern (‘geolocation’) have begun to greatly improve our knowledge of animal … Continue reading Issue 3.3
About the issue With topics ranging from phylogenetic analysis to statistics and distribution modelling, conservation, citizen science, surveys, genetic and demographic models to avian biology, our issue 3.2 should be of interest to most ecologists and evolutionary biologists. The issue also contains 5 free applications. About the cover This very high-resolution image of a beech-dominated forest in central Germany was taken by an unmanned aerial … Continue reading Issue 3.2
We have been very busy in the past couple of weeks and we have a whole range of recently accepted articles: A novel digital telemetry system for tracking wild animals: a field test for studying mate choice in a lekking tropical bird Dan Mennill, Stéphanie Doucet, Kara-Anne Ward, Dugan Maynard, Brian Otis and John Burt A general theory of multimetric indices and their properties Donald … Continue reading Recently accepted articles
Today we look at part 2 of our most cited papers in Methods in Ecology and Evolution in 2011. Plant monitoring and modelling Comparison of seedling emergence and seed extraction techniques for estimating the composition of soil seed banks Jodi N. Price, Boyd R. Wright, Caroline L. Gross, Wal R. D. B. Whalley Stable isotope ecology Sensitivity of stable isotope mixing models to variation in … Continue reading 2011 top cited papers – part 2
Methods in Ecology and Evolution will be receiving its first Impact Factor in summer 2012 and we are very impressed with how well our articles are being cited. For those of you who have been following Methods from the start, you will notice some papers that we have already mentioned last year in our top cited blog posts. These are still going strong! Over the … Continue reading 2011 top cited papers – part 1
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