Methods in Ecology and Evolution
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methodsinecoevol.bsky.social
Methods in Ecology and Evolution
@methodsinecoevol.bsky.social
6.6K followers 45 following 490 posts
Publishing analytical, practical and conceptual advances in methods across all areas of ecology and evolutionary biology. A @britishecologicalsociety.org journal.
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methodsinecoevol.bsky.social
Did you know that you may be able to publish your paper in MEE, or in our other open access journals at no cost?

We have outlined how you can use resources like funding, waivers and agreements – including our own BES waivers.

Find out more👇

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November 27, 2025 at 12:01 PM
methodsinecoevol.bsky.social
🚨 Check out our new blog post!!

@belette-runner.bsky.social and @fredericddb.bsky.social built a game to study predator-prey interactions. Find out more here 👇

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November 26, 2025 at 12:00 PM
methodsinecoevol.bsky.social
📖Published📖

In this study, authors assess and present the precision, accuracy and practicality of monitoring reproductive phenology using repeat photography in tundra ecosystems, by comparing satellite imagery, in situ observations and phenocams 📸 🧪 🌍

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Phenocam set-up on Qikiqtaruk, inset showing an example time-lapse image taken by the camera. Photo: Gergana Daskalova.
November 20, 2025 at 1:30 PM
methodsinecoevol.bsky.social
📖Published📖

Check out our recent research article by Renoult et al. 👉 Vision transformers for age prediction from facial images in a wild primate 🐵 🌍 🧪

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Example of images with extremely low and extremely high error (MAE). Predictions obtained with the best models: DINOv2-LARGE trained with 0–3, 0–12 and 0–24 year-old individuals to predict the age of other individuals of 0–3, 0–12 and 0–24 year old, respectively, with the age predicted in years (secondarily converted in days for <3 years individuals here). The figure illustrates the influence of external factors on age prediction, like the quality of the image (‘Qual’) and the sex of the individual (e.g. old females were predicted to be older than they were), but high error can occur even for high-quality images of young males. Such errors partly reflect inter-individual variation in developmental progress (e.g. the 372 day-old female in the bottom row shows a blue tint that typically appears in older individuals).
November 20, 2025 at 12:01 PM
methodsinecoevol.bsky.social
Don't forget to register for our next MEE live!

Join the authors of ‘DNA Divers: Volunteer-based eDNA capture for local and global marine biodiversity monitoring’ for this free online webinar! ⭐ 🌍 🧪

Find out more and register 👇

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November 18, 2025 at 9:30 AM
methodsinecoevol.bsky.social
📖Published📖

Gallois et al. present a roadmap for designing and implementing multi-modal LLMs to answer ecological research questions. Read more here 👇

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An example workflow for the development, evaluation and deployment of a retrieval-augmented generation large language model (LLM) application. Phase 1 involves gathering your source data and selecting model parameters. Phase 2 involves designing and testing prompts and agents. Phase 3 involves orchestrating multiple LLM agents into a multi-modal graph and deploying the chatbot online.
November 10, 2025 at 12:02 PM
methodsinecoevol.bsky.social
📖Published📖

Check out MEE's new review article 👉 Full decomposition of phenotypic variance in dichotomous traits: New methods and key implications for behaviour, demography and evolutionary ecology 🌍 🧪

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Illustration of how additive variation on the latent liability scale becomes partly non-additive on the dichotomous phenotypic scale.
November 7, 2025 at 12:01 PM
methodsinecoevol.bsky.social
We are looking for contributors to our series on the Methods Blog, exploring the experiences of ecologists conducting research in remote field stations during the holiday season 🎄

See previous blogs here 👉 buff.ly/MnMcRqG (1/2)
November 6, 2025 at 12:01 PM
methodsinecoevol.bsky.social
🚨 Our November Issue is now out!🚨

The cover image shows a Red Kangaroo (Osphranter rufus) in eastern Australia curiously watching as authors installed autonomous audio recorders 🦘 🌍 🧪

Find out more about the cover image and read the whole issue here 👇
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November 5, 2025 at 12:03 PM
methodsinecoevol.bsky.social
📖Published📖

Check out our new perspective article 👉 A framework for capturing indirect impacts in site-level screening for biodiversity risks

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Illustration of indirect impact pathways and area of influence (AoI). In this example, indirect impacts of a mine located in a forest ecosystem manifest within the AoI through proliferation of illegal roads connecting to official ancillary infrastructure (first pathway), building of settlements to house mine workers (second pathway) and agriculture started to cater to a new market (third pathway).
November 4, 2025 at 12:02 PM
methodsinecoevol.bsky.social
Register for our next MEE live!

Join the authors of ‘DNA Divers: Volunteer-based eDNA capture for local and global marine biodiversity monitoring’ for this free online webinar! 🧬 ⭐

⏰ 27 November 2025, 16:30-17:30pm (GMT)

Find out more and register 👇

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November 3, 2025 at 1:00 PM
methodsinecoevol.bsky.social
Check out our new blog by Josefine Umlauft!

Find out more about using seismic data to measure tree sway 🌴 🍃

🌍 🧪

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November 3, 2025 at 12:01 PM
methodsinecoevol.bsky.social
📖Published📖

Mauger et al. propose SINgle-CEll REads Decontamination through Automatic Taxonomic Assignation (SINCERE-DATA) workflow, an adaptable and universal SCG library preparation protocol and an automated data decontamination tool 🦠

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November 1, 2025 at 4:15 PM
methodsinecoevol.bsky.social
📖Published📖

Yan et al. develop a new wood–leaf separation algorithm designed to achieve both high classification accuracy and structural completeness from the trunk to high-order branches🌳🍃 Read the article here 👇

🌍 🧪

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October 30, 2025 at 10:01 AM
methodsinecoevol.bsky.social
📖Published📖

Patterson et al. evaluate the potential for integrated species distribution models to predict species distributions at remote, understudied locations, focusing on scenarios where no species observations are available at the projection site 🐾

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(a) A visual representation of spatial model transfer, where a model is fitted to occurrence records at a training site and predicted to a projection site where there are few or no records. (b, c) Representations of two key challenges often associated with model transfer: Environmental dissimilarity of the training and projection sites and unaccounted for spatial autocorrelation of the species distribution that can operate across different autocorrelation ranges and levels of variance.
October 24, 2025 at 11:02 AM
methodsinecoevol.bsky.social
📖Published📖

Using observations from ground-based seismometers and trunk-mounted accelerometers, authors isolated and analysed tree sway signals based on spectral decomposition and vibrational mode tracking 🌳 Find out more here 👇

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(a) Seismic instrument set-up at the ECOSENSE site within the Black Forest. The locations of the below-ground seismometers are indicated by white triangles, the locations of trees/trunks equipped with three vertically aligned accelerometers are indicated by grey hexagons. Geographical coordinates of the seismometers and instrumented trees are provided in the Supporting Information (Table S1). (b) Picture of the field deployment of an instrumented tree with three trunk-mounted accelerometers (ACC) and one co-located seismometer (SEISMO). (c) The seismometer: A Trillium Compact 120 s sensor (Nanometrics) was buried at 30 cm depth, based on a concrete slab and connected to a DATA-CUBE3 (Digos, Omnirecs) recorder, a GPS antenna and batteries all stored in a grey box. (d) Exemplary accelerometer: Three Episensors (Kinemetrics) were strapped to the trunk with a vertical spacing of 1 m connected to a DATA-CUBE3 (Digos, Omnirecs) recorder, a GPS antenna and batteries as well.
October 24, 2025 at 11:02 AM
methodsinecoevol.bsky.social
📖Published📖

Check out our new research article by Polacchi et al. 👉 Coupling gel electrophoresis with photoluminescence reveals biochrome complexes in modern and fossil shells 🐚

🌍 🧪

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October 21, 2025 at 11:01 AM
methodsinecoevol.bsky.social
📖Published📖

Lima et al. develop a fully automated heart frequency logger for shelled invertebrates, that integrates hardware, firmware and a new R package ‘heartbeatr’ ❤️ 🐚

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(a) Full system with ten amplification knobs at the front, two cabled CNY70 sensors connected on top and a power adaptor. (b) Glueing a CNY70 sensor to a blue mussel (Mytilus galloprovincialis). (c) Several limpets (Patella sp.) with CNY70s attached to their shell over their heart. (d) The heartbeat of a blue mussel, as shown on the LCD screen.
October 20, 2025 at 4:02 PM
methodsinecoevol.bsky.social
📖Published📖

Luxton et al. propose a structured process to enable researchers and practitioners to consistently develop restoration-specific state-and-transition models and apply these to the organisation and selection of indications 👇

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A detailed ‘break-out’ restoration state-and-transition model for the woodlands that starts from a crop state and has two potential targets: (i) a mature woodland and midstorey with highly modified understorey (new, novel state) and (ii) a mature woodland with highly modified understorey (STEP 3, Box 1)
October 13, 2025 at 11:02 AM
methodsinecoevol.bsky.social
📖Published📖

In our recent application paper, Ravenscroft et al. develop an unsupervised Historical Occurrence Georeferencing System (HOGS) to georeference point locations from high-resolution images of species distribution maps 🗺️ 📍 Read more 👇

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Georeferencing protocol steps in HOGS.
October 12, 2025 at 11:01 AM
methodsinecoevol.bsky.social
📖Published📖

The fluxible #rstats package provides tools to process #ecosystem gas fluxes in a fully #reproducible workflow, while offering full flexibility to the user 🌍 🧪 Read more here 👇

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October 6, 2025 at 11:01 AM
methodsinecoevol.bsky.social
📖Published📖

Deschamps et al. introduce CAMELIA (Community Assemblage Modelling macroEcoLogically Informed with AI), a neural network framework integrating species distribution data with community constraints to improve biodiversity predictions 👇

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CAMELIA workflow for model training: Stacked species distributions from S-SDMs trained with community observations and environmental variables, and community indices (species richness (SR), community mean (CM) and community standard deviation (CSTD) of various traits) are given to the multilayer perceptron. The parameters of the multilayer perceptron are then optimized by minimizing the final combined loss function that compares predicted species presence probabilities and community indices with observed community values. BCE and MSLE correspond to the binary cross-entropy loss function and the mean squared logarithmic error.
October 5, 2025 at 12:45 PM
methodsinecoevol.bsky.social
📖Published📖

Torres-Tamayo introduce a novel method using statistical shape modelling (SSM) to predict missing skeletal morphology from partially preserved hominin pelvic remains 🦴

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Mean shape from the modern human and chimpanzee model (SSM 2). (a) The (semi-)landmarks defined as predictors (red) and predicted (turquoise) in our models. (b) The anatomical region in our model used as a predictor (red) and the predicted region (turquoise).
October 4, 2025 at 10:01 AM
methodsinecoevol.bsky.social
📖Published📖

Using a novel method to visualize in situ underwater sound, Dantzker et al. have developed a technique that combines visualizations of spatial audio with concentric 360° video recordings 📹 🌊 Read more here 👇

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Ascribing sounds to individuals. The UPAC-360 can isolate which individual is the sound source in a coral reef. Here, we identified at least 121 individuals from six species, including 58 Stegastes partitus, greater than 53 Azurina multilineata, 1 Lactophrys bicaudalis, 1 Halichoeres garnoti, 2 Canthigaster rostrata, and 5 from the family Gobiidae. The 3 dB zone overlaps only one individual S. partitus. The region of the powermap around the focal individual has been removed to show the fish, but at this moment it is moving quickly so the visual ID is based on video before and after the soniferous event (Movie S1). The bottom left shows the Blue Robotics housing for the recorder.
October 2, 2025 at 11:02 AM
methodsinecoevol.bsky.social
🚨 Our October Issue is now out!🚨

This cover image shows a close-up of an adult male jackdaw (Corvus monedula), part of a long-term monitoring population in Lleida, Catalunya, Spain 🐦‍⬛ 🌍 🧪

Find out more about the cover image and read the whole issue here 👇
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October 1, 2025 at 11:00 AM