Our July Issue is now online! This issue contains 20 articles about the latest methods in ecology and evolution, including methods for characterising soil bacterial biodiversity, identifying fish species in fish markets using eDNA, standarising and cleaning biodiversity data and much more! Plus, read the editorial about our switch to a gold open access model this month. Read on to find out about this month’s featured articles … Continue reading July 2022 Issue Out Now!
The March issue of Methods is now online!
The latest issue of Methods in Ecology and Evolution is now online! This month’s issue is a little shorter than our last few. But, as they say, good things come in small packages!
Executive Editor Aaron Ellison has selected six Featured Articles this month. You can find out about all of them below. We’ve also got five Applications articles in the March issue that we’re going to cover.
On top of all that, the March issue includes articles on 3D modelling, estimating plant density and more.
Continue reading “Issue 11.3: Tracking, Slicing, Classifying, Modelling and More”
The February issue of Methods is now online!
The latest issue of Methods in Ecology and Evolution is now online!
Executive Editor Rob Freckleton has selected six Featured Articles this month. You can find out about all of them below. We’ve also got six Applications articles and five Open Access articles in the February issue – we’ll talk about all of those here too.
On top of all that, the February issue includes articles on population genetics, ecological assemblages, and reconstruction of protein sequences.
Continue reading “Issue 11.2: Stable Isotopes, in situ Monitoring, Image Analysis and more”
The January issue of Methods is now online!
It’s a new year and the new issue of Methods in Ecology and Evolution is now online!
We’re starting 2020 with a great issue – and ALL of the articles are completely free. And they’ll remain free for the whole year. No subscription required.
You can find out more about our Featured Articles (selected by the Senior Editor) below. We also discuss this month’s Open Access, Practical Tools and Applications articles. There are also articles on species distributions, biotic interactions, taxonomic units and much more.
Continue reading “Issue 11.1: Climate Change, Genomic Divergence, Bayesian Modelling and More”
The December issue of Methods is now online!
The final 2019 issue of Methods in Ecology and Evolution is online now.
To close out another brilliant year, we’ve got papers on invasive species, convolutional neural networks, rapid spatial risk modelling, species distribution models and much more.
You can find out more about our Featured Articles (selected by the Senior Editor) below. We also discuss this month’s Open Access and freely available papers we’ve published in our latest issue (Practical Tools and Applications articles are always free to access, whether you have a subscription or not) .
Continue reading “Issue 10.12: Statistical Ecology, UAVs, Invasive Species and More”
Quantitative syntheses of primary research studies (meta-analysis) are being used more and more in ecological and evolutionary research. So knowing the basics of how meta-analysis works is important for every researcher. Meta-analytical thinking also encourages us scientists to see each single primary research study as a substantial contribution to a larger picture.
To be included in a meta-analysis, relevant primary research studies must be easy to find and basic information about the methods and results must be thoroughly, clearly and transparently reported. Moreover, papers with accessible data are the most useful for meta-analyses. Many published papers provide this information, but it’s not unusual for essential data to be omitted. Studies that are missing these details can’t be used in meta-analyses, which limits their reach. Continue reading “Meta-Analysis: How to Increase the Reach of Your Research and Make it Longer Lasting”
Issue 9.1 is now online!
Our first issue of 2018, which includes our latest Special Feature – “Qualitative methods for eliciting judgements for decision making” – is now online!
This new Special Feature is a collection of five articles (plus an Editorial from Guest Editors Bill Sutherland, Lynn Dicks, Mark Everard and Davide Geneletti) brings together authors from a range of disciplines (including ecology, human geography, political science, land economy and management) to examine a set of qualitative techniques used in conservation research. They highlight a worrying extent of poor justification and inadequate reporting of qualitative methods in the conservation literature.
As stated by the Guest Editors in their Editorial “these articles constitute a useful resource to facilitate selection and use of some common qualitative methods in conservation science. They provide a guide for inter-disciplinary researchers to gauge the suitability of each technique to their research questions, and serve as a series of checklists for journal editors and reviewers to determine appropriate reporting.”
All of the articles in the ‘Qualitative methods for eliciting judgements for decision making‘ Special Feature are all freely available.
Continue reading “Issue 9.1: Qualitative Methods for Eliciting Judgements for Decision Making”
Issue 8.10 is now online!
The October issue of Methods is now online!
This double-sized issue contains three Applications articles and two Open Access articles. These five papers are freely available to everyone, no subscription required.
– Phylogenetic Trees: The fields of phylogenetic tree and network inference have advanced independently, with only a few attempts to bridge them. Schliep et al. provide a framework, implemented in R, to transfer information between trees and networks.
– Emon: Studies, surveys and monitoring are often costly, so small investments in preliminary data collection and systematic planning of these activities can help to make best use of resources. To meet recognised needs for accessible tools to plan some aspects of studies, surveys and monitoring, Barry et al. developed the R package emon, which includes routines for study design through power analysis and feature detection.
– Haplostrips: A tool to visualise polymorphisms of a given region of the genome in the form of independently clustered and sorted haplotypes. Haplostrips is a command-line tool written in Python and R, that uses variant call format files as input and generates a heatmap view.
Issue 8.5 is now online!
The May issue of Methods is now online!
This issue contains three Applications articles and two Open Access articles. These five papers are freely available to everyone, no subscription required.
– MatlabHTK: A software interface to a popular speech recognition system making it possible for non-experts to implement hidden Markov models for bioacoustic signal processing.
– PrimerMiner: The R package PrimerMiner batch downloads DNA barcode gene sequences from BOLD and NCBI databases for specified target taxonomic groups and then applies sequence clustering into operational taxonomic units to reduce biases introduced by the different number of available sequences per species.
– BarcodingR: An integrated software package that provides a comprehensive implementation of species identification methods, including artificial intelligence, fuzzy-set, Bayesian and kmer-based methods, that are not readily available in other packages.
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
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