Post provided by Mateusz Iskrzyński Would you like to quickly get a clear picture of the food web you are modelling or analysing? Have you thought about including its visualisation in your paper? Or maybe you wanted to show your students or general audience how interconnected food webs are in real ecosystems? Or just wondered how matter flows through an ecosystem? To help you with … Continue reading Visualising the flow of matter within ecosystems
The cover of our March issue shows a female Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra), with its young kit bringing a crab to shore before eating it. The photographer, Alan Seymour, had been watching the otter from a distance, while laying low behind a large boulder. Direct observations of trophic interactions take a lot of time and skill, especially concerning cryptic species (e.g., semi-aquatic mammals, small invertebrates). Accurately and precisely identifying prey items is mostly impossible by observation. Molecular methods, such as DNA metabarcoding, offer a sensitive approach for investigating trophic interactions of cryptic species; however, this high sensitivity can introduce errors. In this post, the authors discuss potential sources of errors in dietary metabarcoding datasets, and how to use minimum sequence copy thresholds to carefully remove them, detailed in their Methods in Ecology and Evolution article “An assessment of minimum sequence copy thresholds for identifying and reducing the prevalence of artefacts in dietary metabarcoding data”.
Digital photography has revolutionised the way we view ourselves, each other and our environment. The use of automated cameras (including camera traps) in particular has provided remarkable opportunities for biological research. Although mostly used for recreational purposes, the development of user-friendly, versatile auto-focus digital single lens reflex (DSLR) cameras allows researchers to collect large numbers of high quality images at relatively little cost.
Methods Blog 