Issue 9.2

Issue 9.2 is now online!

The February issue of Methods is now online!

This double-size issue contains six Applications articles (one of which is Open Access) and two Open Access research articles. These eight papers are freely available to everyone, no subscription required.

 Temperature Manipulation: Welshofer et al. present a modified International Tundra Experiment (ITEX) chamber design for year-round outdoor use in warming taller-stature plant communities up to 1.5 m tall.This design is a valuable tool for examining the effects of in situ warming on understudied taller-stature plant communities

 ZoonThe disjointed nature of the current species distribution modelling (SDM) research environment hinders evaluation of new methods, synthesis of current knowledge and the dissemination of new methods to SDM users. The zoon R package aims to overcome these problems by providing a modular framework for constructing reproducible SDM workflows.

 BEIN R Package: The Botanical Information and Ecology Network (BIEN) database comprises an unprecedented wealth of cleaned and standardised botanical data. The bien r package allows users to access the multiple types of data in the BIEN database. This represents a significant achievement in biological data integration, cleaning and standardisation.

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Why Simpler Models are Better

(this is the first in a possibly irregular series of posts about papers that catch my eye. I don’t intend to only cover MEE papers, but I had to start somewhere)

ResearchBlogging.orgA perennial worry for anyone building models for the real world is whether they actually represent the real world. If the whole process of finding and fitting a model has been done well, the model will represent the data. But the data is only part of the real world. How can we be sure our model will extrapolated beyond the data?
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Issue 3.2

About the issue With topics ranging from phylogenetic analysis to statistics and distribution modelling, conservation, citizen science, surveys, genetic and demographic models to avian biology, our issue 3.2 should be of interest to most ecologists and evolutionary biologists. The issue also contains 5 free applications. About the cover This very high-resolution image of a beech-dominated forest in central Germany was taken by an unmanned aerial … Continue reading Issue 3.2

Issue 2.6

Our last issue for 2011 is out. Issue 2.6 is packed with the latest methodological developments. We have four new articles on monitoring: from positional accuracy in the field by Mike Dodd to distance sampling butterflies by Nick Isaac and colleagues, to how to account for non-independent detection of individuals by Julien Martin and collaborators and, finally, to a class of spatial capture-recapture models for … Continue reading Issue 2.6

Modelling static and dynamic variables

Jessica Stanton discusses the problem of accounting for both static and dynamic variables in designing species distribution models under climate change in our newest author video. Related Read Combining static and dynamic variables in species distribution models under climate change by Jessica C. Stanton, Richard G. Pearson, Ned Horning, Peter Ersts and H. Reşit Akçakaya See other Methods in Ecology and Evolution author videos Continue reading Modelling static and dynamic variables

New species distribution modelling survey

Researchers from the Computational Ecology and Environmental Sciences  division of Microsoft Research Cambridge are carrying out a survey to help improve the way in which we develop software for species distribution modelling, and as part of wider research into how the software available to researchers affects the advancement of knowledge. It should take about 15 minutes of your time, and you don’t have to use … Continue reading New species distribution modelling survey

Some things are not the average

Issue 2.3 of Methods in Ecology and Evolution will be officially published online later this week, but in the meantime we’ve got a great new podcast accompanying one of the papers. Greg McInerny, of Microsoft Research, discusses the content of his recently co-authored paper addressing the issue of adequately accounting for inter-cell environmental variation when constructing species distribution models. The paper, Fine-scale environmental variation in … Continue reading Some things are not the average

Methods digest – update

A round up of recent methods-relevant research published recently: it is ages since we did this, largely because the journal has been so busy with papers coming in and being published. Do send through links to any new methods papers to me or to the journal, or post a comment below. In Evolution, Werthelm & Sanderson look at how estimates of diversification rates are influenced … Continue reading Methods digest – update

Methods digest – June 2010

Here is the methods digest update for June 2010 – do let me know if there is anything that you think I should feature. In Oikos Novak & Wooton have a paper on using indices to quantify the effects of comeptition and Landau & Ryan present new ‘null model tests for presence-absence data’ (NMTPAs). A paper in Conservation Letters by Michael Kearney et al. evaluates species … Continue reading Methods digest – June 2010