Happy Pride Month! Join the British Ecological Society in this annual, global celebration as we share stories from STEM researchers who belong to the LGBTQ+ community.  This post is by Nathaniel Wells.  About me My name is Nathaniel, and I use he/they pronouns. I’m from Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, and I’ve just finished my undergraduate degree at Memorial University of Newfoundland with Honours in Psychology ..read more

Hi there! I’m Hooman Latifi, an Associate Professor of Ecological Remote Sensing. With an academic background in Forest Inventory, Remote Sensing and Aerial Photogrammetry at diverse universities in Germany and Iran, I am currently affiliated with the Dept. of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing of the K. N. Toosi University of Technology, the oldest technical university in Iran. My main research line focuses on using satellite ..read more

We’re excited to announce Willem Bonnaffé as the winner of the 2023 Robert May Prize, celebrating the best article in the journal by an author at the start of their career. Winner: Willem Bonnaffé Research: Fast fitting of neural ordinary differential equations by Bayesian neural gradient matching to infer ecological interactions from time-series data About the Research In previous work, Willem Bonnaffé and Tim Coulson ..read more

Post provided by Liam MacNeil Collecting data from thousands of biological specimens can reveal wide scale patterns, however, doing this manually is time intensive. In this blog post, Liam MacNeil describes their automated approach to data collection and the insights this provided on mudsnail morphology. Evolution on the beach Charles Darwin begins his masterwork On the Origin of Species (1859) with charming examples of selective ..read more

I’m Willem Bonnaffé,  a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. In my research, I integrate biological data, mathematical modelling, and machine learning. I spend most of my time modelling natural systems with neural ordinary differential equations – NODEs or Neural ODEs for short. In this blog post, I am hoping to shed light on what these models are and how I came to use ..read more

Post provided by Lotte de Vries Animals and plants exhibit a wide range of patterns of longevity, growth, and reproduction but the general drivers of this enormous variation in life history are poorly understood. Comparative demography uses large demographic databases to attempt to identify patterns in life-history strategies across the tree of life (e.g. this PNAS paper, and this one). In this paper, we show ..read more

Megan Laxton and colleagues originally set out to translate an existing example of a species distribution model into a new software framework. However, what originated as a simple modelling example developed into a discussion on structural complexity in species distribution models. Complexity in Species Distribution Models The original idea for our paper was to provide a worked example demonstrating the usage of the R package ..read more

Post provided by Alison Binley As a new Master’s student at Carleton University, I was excited to learn the ins and outs of using community science data (also known commonly as citizen science, participatory research, and crowd-sourced data) to conduct conservation research. I was working on estimating population trends using eBird, a popular, opportunistic community science platform that collects data on birds, and fascinated by ..read more

I was born in the Colombian Andes (Armenia, Quindío) back in the 90s. I received my bachelor’s degree in Biology from Universidad del Valle, in Cali, Colombia, in 2015. I moved to the US in 2016 to pursue a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona – a degree that I completed in Fall of 2020. Although my research interests seem ..read more

The Robert May Prize is awarded by the British Ecological Society each year for the best paper in Methods in Ecology and Evolution written by an early career author. With entries spanning the 14th Volume of the journal, our Senior Editors carefully shortlisted the following 9 papers: Megan Laxton; Balancing structural complexity with ecological insight in Spatio-temporal species distribution models Charlotte de Vries; Discretising Keyfitz’ entropy for ..read more