Tag Archives: open source software

Policy on Publishing Code: Encouraging Good Practice to Ensure Quality

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Following on from our sponsorship of the Guide to Reproducible Code in Ecology and Evolution and our collaboration with rOpenSci, we have now released a new policy on publishing code. The main objective of this policy is to make sure that high quality code is readily available to our readers.

We’ve set out four key principles to help achieve this, as well as explaining what code outputs we publish, giving some examples of things that make it easier to review code, and giving some advice on how to store code once it’s been published. Below is a summary of some highlights of the policy, but you can find it in full on the Methods in Ecology and Evolution website. Continue reading →

Introducing Biodiverse: Phylodiversity Made Easy

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Post provided by SHAWN LAFFAN and ANDREW THORNHILL

© Shawn Laffan

© Shawn Laffan

Phylodiversity indices are increasingly used in spatial analyses of biodiversity, driven largely by the increased availability of phylogenetic trees and the tools to analyse them. Such analyses are integral to understanding evolutionary history and deciding where to allocate conservation resources.

Phylogenetic Indices: The Current Favourites

The most commonly used phylogenetic index is Faith’s Phylogenetic Diversity (PD; Faith 1992). PD is the phylogenetic analogue of taxon richness and is expressed as the number of tree units which are found in a sample.

More recently developed phylodiversity indices adapt the calculation of PD by adjusting the branch lengths of a sample using the local lineage range sizes and abundances, for example Phylogenetic Endemism (PE) and Abundance weighted Evolutionary Diversity (AEDt). In PE the length of each branch in a sample is multiplied by the fraction of its total geographic range found in that sample. The AEDt index uses the same general approach, but weights each branch by the fraction of total abundances found in the sample. The weighting process is generic, so one can scale the branch lengths by any relevant factor, for example the threat status (Faith 2015). Continue reading →

Animal-eye view of the world revealed with new visual software

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Below is a press release about the Open Access Methods paper ‘Image calibration and analysis toolbox – a free software suite for objectively measuring reflectance, colour and pattern‘ taken from the University of Exeter:

New camera technology that reveals the world through the eyes of animals has been developed by University of Exeter researchers. The details are published today in the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution.

Echium angustifolium in Tenerife (Borage family). To us the flowers are a fairly uniform purple, but bees can see two UV absorbent patches at the top of the flower.

Echium angustifolium in Tenerife (Borage family). To us the flowers are a fairly uniform purple, but bees can see two UV absorbent patches at the top of the flower.

The software, which converts digital photos to animal vision, can be used to analyse colours and patterns and is particularly useful for the study of animal and plant signalling, camouflage and animal predation, but could also prove useful for anyone wanting to measure colours accurately and objectively.

The software has already been used by the Sensory Ecology group in a wide range of studies, such as colour change in green shore crabs, tracking human female face colour changes through the ovulation cycle, and determining the aspects of camouflage that protect nightjar clutches from being spotted by potential predators. Continue reading →