New Associate Editor: Laura Graham

Posted on January 7, 2019 by India Stephenson

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

Laura Graham

“I’m a quantitative ecologist interested in how anthropogenic changes such as climate change and habitat loss affect global ecosystems, and how this in turn affects human well-being. I develop computational methods for spatial ecology to facilitate the reproducible analysis of social-ecological systems and ecosystem services. I’m interested in using novel statistical methods and heterogeneous sources of data to answer applied and theoretical questions.” Continue reading →

Also of Interest… Journal of Applied Ecology

Posted on August 3, 2018 by India Stephenson

Post provided by Aaron M. Ellison

The Struggle is Real: Finding Interesting and Relevant Articles

Where to start? We are awash in data, information, papers, and books. There are hundreds of ecological and environmental journals published regularly around the world; the British Ecological Society alone publishes five journals and is now accepting submissions for a sixth (more information on People and Nature here).

None of us has time even to click on the various articles flagged by alerts, feeds, or keywords, and few even browse tables of contents (which are becoming irrelevant as we move to DOIs and immediate-online publication). Increasingly, we rely on our friends, colleagues, students, and mentors to point us towards papers we might find interesting – further evidence, I suppose, of the importance of good networks for knowledge creation and scientific understanding.

Regular readers of Methods in Ecology and Evolution or this Methods blog may not realise how many methodological papers are published routinely in our BES sister journals. In this inaugural posting of Also of interest…, I highlight three papers recently published in Journal of Applied Ecology that introduce and apply new, model-based methodology to interesting ecological questions. The specific methods are like many seen in the pages of Methods in Ecology and Evolution and suggest general approaches for modelling and studying complex ecological and environmental phenomena. Continue reading →

Statistical Ecology Virtual Issue

Posted on July 2, 2018 by India Stephenson

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 →

State-and-Transition Models: An Interview with Marie-Josee Fortin

Posted on July 18, 2016 by India Stephenson

David Warton (University of New South Wales) interviews Marie-Josee Fortin (University of Toronto) about a recent article on state-and-transition models from her group in Methods in Ecology and Evolution. David and Marie-Josee also discuss what motivated her career to date in spatial ecology, and what she sees as the main advances in this area and current challenges in the field.

Continue reading →

Issue 6.10

Posted on October 14, 2015 by India Stephenson

Issue 6.10 is now online!

The October issue of Methods is now online!

This month’s issue contains two Applications articles and one Open Access article, all of which are freely available.

– letsR: A package for the R statistical computing environment, designed to handle and analyse macroecological data such as species’ geographic distributions and environmental variables. It also includes functions to obtain data on species’ habitat use, description year and current as well as temporal trends in conservation status.

– Cleaning Oil from Seabirds: The authors assess the efficacy of sea water as an alternative to fresh water for cleaning oil from seabirds’ feathers. Results indicate that for oiled feathers, a sea water wash/rinse produced clean, low BAI/unclumped feathers with minimal particulate residue.

Stefano Canessa et al. provide this month’s only Open Access article. In ‘When do we need more data? A primer on calculating the value of information for applied ecologists‘ the authors guide readers through the calculation of Value of Information (VoI) using two case studies and illustrate the use of Bayesian updating to incorporate new information. Collecting information can require significant investments of resources; VoI analysis assists managers in deciding whether these investments are justified. The authors also wrote a blog post on VoI which you can find here.

Our October issue also features articles on Niche Modelling, Population Ecology, Spatial Ecology, Conservation, Monitoring and much more. Continue reading →

Issue 6.3

Posted on March 19, 2015 by India Stephenson

Issue 6.3 is now online!

The March issue of Methods is now online!

We have three freely available Applications articles in this issue. Anyone can access these with no subscription required and no charge to download.

– TR8: This R package was built to provide plant scientists with a simple tool for retrieving plant functional traits from freely accessible online traitbases.

– StereoMorph: A new R package for the rapid and accurate collection of 3D landmarks and curves using two standard digital cameras.

– MotionMeerkat: A new standalone program that identifies motion events from a video stream. This tool reduces the time needed to review videos and accommodates a variety of inputs.

This month we have a total of FIVE Open Access articles. That makes eight articles in this issue of Methods in Ecology and Evolution that you can read for free!