Tag Archives: Quantitative Ecology

Ideas Brought to Life Through BES Hackathon

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Post provided by Tom August

Introduction to the Hackathon

Hackathon participants with their awards.

Hackathons have become a regular feature in the data-science world. Get a group of people with a shared interest together, give them data, food, and a limited amount of time and see what they can produce (often with prizes to be won). Translated into the world of academia as research hackathons, these events are a fantastic way to foster collaboration, interdisciplinary working and skills sharing.

The Quantitative Ecology hackathon was an intense day of coding resulting in creative and innovative research ideas using social and ecological data. Teams worked through the day to develop their ideas with support from experts in R, open science and statistics. We ended up with five projects addressing questions from, ‘Who has the least access to nature?’ to ‘Where should citizen scientists go to collect new data?’.

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New Associate Editor: Saras Windecker

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Today, we are pleased to announce the latest new member of the Methods in Ecology and Evolution Associate Editor Board. Saras Windecker joins us from the University of Melbourne, Australia as an Applications Editor. You can find out a little more about her below.

Saras Windecker

“I’m a quantitative ecologist who started out as a wetland ecologist. I’m interested in developing and applying models for a range of applied and theoretical questions, spanning decomposition, species distributions, and more recently, public health forecasting. I’m interested in software development for scientists and thinking about how we develop literate programming skills and promote open science in ecology.” Continue reading →

All You (Possibly) Ever Wanted to Know about ‘Trap Nests’

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Post provided by Michael Staab

What are ‘Trap Nests’ and What are They Good For?

Females are attracted to the hollow material in trap nests.

Females are attracted to the hollow material in trap nests.

When thinking of bees and wasps, most people have social insects living in colonies in mind. But most species are actually solitary. In these species, every female builds her own nest and does not care for the offspring once nest construction is completed. Most of those species nest in the ground. Several thousand species of bees and wasps use pre-existing above-ground cavities though (such as hollow twigs and stems, cracks under bark, or empty galleries of wood-boring insects).

To keep you in suspense, I’ll resolve the importance of studying cavity-nesting species later in this blog post. First, I’ll introduce you to one of the more elegant research methods in ecology: trap nests. To study and collect these cavity-nesting species, you can take advantage of their nesting preferences. By exposing artificial cavities and offering access to an otherwise restricted nesting resource, you can attract females searching for suitable nesting sites.

Building these trap nests is simple, but the design can vary greatly. Many designs and materials can be used to build the artificial nesting sites, such as drilling holes in wooden blocks or packing hollow plant material (e.g. reeds) in plastic tubes. Once females find the trap nest and finish their nest construction, the developing offspring are literally ‘trapped’ in their nests. They can then be collected, their trophic interactions (e.g. food and natural enemies) observed, and the specimens can be reared for identification. Continue reading →

Statistical Ecology Virtual Issue

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To celebrate the International Statistical Ecology Conference and British Ecological Society Quantitative Ecology Annual Meeting, Laura Graham and Susan Jarvis have compiled a virtual issue celebrating all things statistical and quantitative in ecology.

Statistical and quantitative methods within ecology have increased substantially in recent years. This rise can be attributed both to the growing need to address global environmental change issues, as well as the increase in data sources to address these challenges. Continue reading →

The BES Quantitative Ecology SIG: Who We Are, What We Do and What to Look Out for at #EAB2017

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Post provided by Susan Jarvis and Laura Graham

Ecologists are increasingly in need of quantitative skills and the British Ecological Society Quantitative Ecology Special Interest Group (QE SIG) aims to support skills development, sharing of good practice and highlighting novel methods development within quantitative ecology. We run events throughout the year, as well as contributing to the Annual Meeting and providing a mailing list to share events, jobs and quantitative news.

Ecology Hackathon

The run up to the Ecology Across Borders joint Annual Meeting in Ghent this month is an exciting time for the SIG as we look forward to catching up with existing members as well as hopefully meeting some new recruits! Several of our SIG committee members will be in attendance and if you’ve been lucky enough to get a place at the Hackathon on the Monday you’ll meet most of us there. The Hackathon has been jointly developed by us and two of our allied groups; the GfÖ Computational Ecology Working Group and the NecoV Ecological Informatics SIG and is being sponsored by Methods in Ecology and Evolution. We’ll be challenging participants to work together to produce R packages suggested by the ecological community. You can see the list of package suggestions here. If you weren’t able to book a place at the Hackathon, but are interested in writing your own packages, you may be interested in the new Guide to Reproducible Code from the BES. Continue reading →

Learn to be a Reviewer: Peer Reviewer Mentoring Scheme

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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 →