Unveiling Earth’s Giants: A Lidar-Based Journey into Asia’s Tallest Trees

It has been a few weeks since the 15th Chinese Symposium on Biodiversity Science and Conservation, where the first “Seminar on Methods in Ecology and Evolution in China” was held. In these blog posts, we hear from some of the winners of the “Outstanding Young Scholar Award in Ecological and Evolutionary Methodology in China”. Here, winner Yu Ren discusses their presentation ‘Discovering and measuring giant … Continue reading Unveiling Earth’s Giants: A Lidar-Based Journey into Asia’s Tallest Trees

besmeeOctober 15, 2024October 8, 2024Leave a comment

Journal updates, Methods papers

Issue 10.10: Conservation, Molecular Techniques, Stats and More

The October issue of Methods is now online!

We’re a little lat on this post, but there’s another great issue of Methods in Ecology and Evolution online now.

This month, we cover movement ecology, plant cover class data, acoustic indices, local adaptations an much more.

There’s more information below on the Featured Articles selected by the Senior Editor and all of our freely available papers (Practical Tools and Applications articles are always free to access for everyone upon publication, whether you have a subscription or not). Continue reading “Issue 10.10: Conservation, Molecular Techniques, Stats and More”

India StephensonOctober 7, 2019Leave a comment

Conservation and management, Methods papers

Assessing Sea Turtle Populations: Can We Get a Hand From Drones and Deep Learning?

Post provided by PATRICK GRAY

An olive ridley sea turtle in Ostional, Costa Rica. ©Vanessa Bézy.

Understanding animal movement and population size is a challenge for researchers studying any megafauna species. Sea turtles though, add a whole additional level of complexity. These wide-ranging, swift, charismatic animals spend much of their time underwater and in remote places. When trying to track down and count turtles, this obstacle to understanding population size becomes a full-on barricade.

Censusing these animals doesn’t just satisfy our scientific curiosity. It’s critical for understanding the consequences of unsound fishing practices, the benefits of conservation policy, and overall trends in population health for sea turtles, of which, six out of seven species range from vulnerable to critically endangered. Continue reading “Assessing Sea Turtle Populations: Can We Get a Hand From Drones and Deep Learning?”

India StephensonMay 23, 2019Leave a comment

Methods papers

Drones used to assess health of Antarctic vegetation

Below is a press release about the Methods paper ‘Unmanned aircraft system advances health mapping of fragile polar vegetation‘ taken from the University of Wollongong.

New method faster, more efficient and less damaging to the environment

A team of researchers from the University of Wollongong (UOW) and the University of Tasmania has developed a new method for assessing the health of fragile Antarctic vegetation using drones, which they say could be used to improve the efficiency of ecological monitoring in other environments as well.

The researchers have written about their method in an article published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution, a scientific journal of the British Ecological Society.