Today we are welcoming three new Associate Editors to Methods in Ecology and Evolution: Nick Golding (University of Melbourne, Australia), Rachel McCrea (University of Kent, UK) and Francesca Parrini (University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa). They have all joined on a three-year term and you can find out more about them below.

Nick Golding

Nick Golding

“I develop statistical models and software for mapping the distributions of species and diseases. I’m particularly interested in tools that make it easy for researchers to add more mechanistic structure into their correlative models (and vice versa) so that they can use all available information when making predictions. I also develop software and other tools to bring research communities together and help them advance ecology by enabling and incentivising reproducible and extensible research.”

Nick has recently had an article published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution (currently in Early View). In ‘Fast and flexible Bayesian species distribution modelling using Gaussian processes‘ Nick and his co-author (Bethan Purse) introduce Gaussian process (GP) models and their application to species distribution modelling (SDM), illustrate how ecological knowledge can be incorporated into GP SDMs via Bayesian priors and formulate a simple GP SDM that can be fitted efficiently. The article is Open Access, so it’s freely available to everyone.

Rachel McCrea

Rachel McCrea

“I am a NERC research fellow and lecturer in statistics at the University of Kent.  My particular areas of interest include capture-recapture modelling, multistate models, modelling population dynamics and methods of model assessment.  My research is motivated by interesting discussions with ecologists and I strive to find innovative, but practical statistical solutions to ecological questions.”

Rachel is one of the authors of Analysis of Capture-Recapture Data (along with Byron Morgan). The book covers the many modern developments of capture-recapture (and related) methods and will be of interest to researchers and graduate students in statistics, ecology and demography. It contains 130 exercises designed to complement and extend the text and help readers to assimilate the material.

Francesca Parrini

Francesca Parrini

“My broad research interests lie in the ecology and behaviour of mammalian herbivores, their interaction with biotic and abiotic factors and the integration of factors governing decisions at the small foraging scale and factors governing decisions at the landscape level. As such, my research lies at the interface of remote sensing, behavioural ecology and conservation. Recently I have become interested in the application of graph theory and network analysis to ecological settings, in particular to study the spatio-temporal structure of animal movement patterns.”

Last year Francesca had her article (co-authored with Maria Miranda) ‘Congruence between species phylogenetic and trophic distinctiveness‘ published in Biodiversity and Conservation. In this paper the authors investigate the relationship between species’ phylogenetic history and patterns of resource use. They show that there is congruence between species phylogenetics and interaction distinctiveness and propose that this relationship could provide a possible novel approach to the conservation of ecosystem diversity.

We are thrilled to welcome Nick, Rachel and Francesca to the Associate Editor Board and we look forward to working with them over the coming years.