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
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
This extra large issue contains seven Applications articles and three Open Access articles. These five papers are freely available to everyone, no subscription required.
–LSCorridors: LandScape Corridors considers stochastic variation, species perception and landscape influence on organisms in the design of ecological corridors. It lets you simulate corridors for species with different requirements and considers that species perceive the surrounding landscape in different ways.
–HistMapR: HistMapR contains a number of functions that can be used to semi-automatically digitize historical land use according to a map’s colours. Digitization is fast, and agreement with manually digitized maps of around 80–90% meets common targets for image classification. This manuscript has a companion video and was recommended by Associate Editor Sarah Goslee.
–vortexR: An R package to automate the analysis and visualisation of outputs from the population viability modelling software Vortex. vortexR facilitates collating Vortex output files, data visualisation and basic analyses (e.g. pairwise comparisons of scenarios), as well as providing more advanced statistics.
Protecting wildlife calls for a profound understanding of species’ habitat demands to guide concrete conservation actions. Quantifying the relationships between species and their environment using species distribution models (SDMs) has attracted tremendous attention over the past two decades. Usually these species-environment relationships are estimated on coarse spatial scales, using globally-interpolated long-term climate data sets. While they’re useful for studies on large-scale species distributions, these environmental predictors have limited applications for conservation management.
Climatic data were the first environmental information available with global coverage, but a wide range of Earth observation techniques have increased the availability of much finer environmental information. This allows us to quantify species-environment relationships in unprecedented detail. We can now shift the scale that SDMs operate at, resulting in more useful applications in conservation – SDMs now enter the matrix.
This shift in scale brings new challenges, especially for species using multiple distinct habitat types to survive. The landscape matrix, which has been negligible at the broad (global) scale, is hugely important at the fine (local) scale. It is not only that we need to quantify certain habitat types but also need to consider their arrangement in the landscape, which is basically what the landscape matrix is about. But as we enter the matrix, things become difficult. Continue reading “Multi-State Species Distribution Models: What to do When Species Need Multiple Habitats”
This issue contains three Applications articles (one of which is Open Access) and one additional Open Access article. These four papers are freely available to everyone, no subscription required.
– BioEnergeticFoodWebs: An implementation of Yodzis & Innes bio-energetic model, in the high-performance computing language Julia. This package can be used to conduct numerical experiments in a reproducible and standard way.
–Controlled plant crosses: Chambers which allow you to control pollen movement and paternity of offspring using unpollinated isolated plants and microsatellite markers for parents and their putative offspring. This system has per plant costs and efficacy superior to pollen bags used in past studies of wind-pollinated plants.
–The Global Pollen Project: The study of fossil and modern pollen assemblages provides essential information about vegetation dynamics in space and time. In this Open Access Applications article, Martin and Harvey present a new online tool – the Global Pollen Project – which aims to enable people to share and identify pollen grains. Through this, it will create an open, free and accessible reference library for pollen identification. The database currently holds information for over 1500 species, from Europe, the Americas and Asia. As the collection grows, we envision easier pollen identification, and greater use of the database for novel research on pollen morphology and other characteristics, especially when linked to other palaeoecological databases, such as Neotoma.
Today we are welcoming four new Associate Editors to Methods in Ecology and Evolution. Graziella Iossa (University of Lincoln) and Theoni Photopoulou (Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University) are joining as regular Associate Editors and Simon Jarman (Unversity of Porto) and Daniele Silvestro (University of Gothenburg) will be working on Applications articles. You can find out more about all of our new Associate Editors below. Graziella Iossa “I am … Continue reading New Associate Editors
Movement ecology is a cross-disciplinary field. Its main aim is to quantitatively describe and understand how movement relates to individual and population-level processes for resource acquisition and, ultimately, survival. Today the study of movement ecology hinges on two 21st century advances:
Animal-borne devices/tags (biologging science, Hooker et al., 2007) and/or remote sensing technology to quantify movement and collect data from remote or otherwise challenging environments
Computational power sufficient to manipulate, process and analyse substantial volumes of data
Although datasets often involve small numbers of individuals, each individual can have thousands – sometimes even millions – of data points associated with it. Study species have tended to be large birds and mammals, due to the ease of tag attachment. However, the trend for miniaturisation of tags and the development of remote detection technologies (such as radar, e.g. Capaldi et al., 2000), have allowed researchers to track and study ever smaller animals. Continue reading “Movement Ecology: Stepping into the Mainstream”
Post provided by THEONI PHOTOPOULOU, MEGAN MURGATROYD, VIANEY LEOS-BARAJAS Around the world there are concerns over the impacts of land use change and the developments (such as wind farms). These concerns have led to the implementation of tracking studies to better understand movement patterns of animals. Such studies have provided a wealth of high-resolution data and opportunities to explore sophisticated statistical methods for analysis of animal behaviour. We use … Continue reading Soaring with Eagles, Swimming with Sharks: Measuring Animal Behaviour with Hidden Markov Models
In case you haven’t seen them, this month we have published a new podcast and video so far. In our latest video, David Warton, The University of New South Wales, Australia, presents his ‘mvabund’ package on multivariate analysis. What makes this software different from other ones on multivariate analysis, is that it’s all about models that you can fit to your data. David explains how … Continue reading New podcast and video
In the past week, MEE has been at the ITN Speciation conference in Jyväskylä. As a result, journal updates have been slower than usual. So here is a quick overview of the new papers available online during the past week: Research papers: Movement ecology of human resource users: using net squared displacement, biased random bridges and resource utilization functions to quantify hunter and gatherer behaviour … Continue reading Latest papers online
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