Digitizing Historical Land-use Maps with HistMapR

Habitat destruction and degradation represent serious threats to biodiversity, and quantification of land-use change over time is important for understanding the consequences of these changes to organisms and ecosystem service provision. Historical land-use maps are important for documenting how habitat cover has changed over time, but digitizing these maps is a time consuming process. HistMapR is an R package designed to speed up the digitization … Continue reading Digitizing Historical Land-use Maps with HistMapR

Microphone Backpacks for Individual-level Acoustic Recordings

To understand the factors shaping vocal communication, we need reliable information about the communicating individuals on different levels. First, vocal behaviour should be recorded from undisturbed animals in meaningful settings. Then we have to separate and assign the individuals’ vocalisations. Finally, the precise timing of vocal events needs to be stored. Microphone backpacks allow researchers to record the vocal behaviour of individual animals in naturalistic settings – even in acoustically challenging … Continue reading Microphone Backpacks for Individual-level Acoustic Recordings

Biodiversity estimates from DNA sequences

The complexity of new methodologies can present a challenging barrier towards their uptake. Recognising this, Jeff Powell,  author of Accounting for uncertainty in species delineation during the analysis of environmental DNA sequence data, has put together an excellent tutorial to guide people through the implementation of his objective, theory-based method for predicting species boundaries, which explicitly incorporates uncertainty in the classification system into biodiversity estimation. … Continue reading Biodiversity estimates from DNA sequences