Cool new Oikos papers (UPDATED)

drupaladmin

2 February 2012

Lots of interesting papers coming out in Oikos in the next little while. I wanted to highlight a few that particularly caught my eye. In the most recent (Feb. 2012) issue: Barto & Rillig on dissemination biases in ecology. This is a really important study. Barto...

Getting over Robert MacArthur (UPDATEDx3)

drupaladmin

31 January 2012

The previous post referred to a philosophy talk about Robert MacArthur, his observations of feeding warblers, and the competition models which his warbler work helped inspire.The speaker apparently drew some general lessons about the conduct of ecological science from...

Statisticians, meet ecologists

drupaladmin

30 January 2012

Interesting discussion thread over at statistician Andrew Gelman's blog, about time series analysis of the lynx-hare cycle. Standard phenomenological statistical models (autoregressive moving average models) don't fit or predict these data all that well. Andrew links...

Crowdsourcing papers on species' traits as predictors of their abundances

drupaladmin

27 January 2012

Back in the blog's early days I did what I still think is a quite nice little post on whether we should expect species' phenotypic traits to predict or explain their abundances. I'm going to be fleshing that post out into a short perspectives-type review paper, mixing...

Zombie ideas in ecology: "neutral" = "dispersal limitation"

drupaladmin

24 January 2012

Following on from the previous post , another way in which community ecologists often misinterpret neutral models is by mixing up neutrality with dispersal limitation. This leads to mistakes like testing for neutrality by testing for a community ecology equivalent of "...

Another peer review reform: Peerage of Science (UPDATED)

drupaladmin

23 January 2012

Following on from previous posts on reforming peer review (see here , here , and here ), I wanted to note a new peer review service, Peerage of Science . PoS is a private company founded by a trio of Finnish scientists, which combines several proposed peer review...

Sh*t scientists say

drupaladmin

19 January 2012

Amusing video here . But it's mostly not sh*t ecologists or evolutionary biologists say (well, except "stochastic", "got any virgin flies?", and "more work is needed"). Feel free to suggest sh*t ecologists or evolutionary biologists say in the comments.

The scientific impact of a nation of beavers

drupaladmin

14 January 2012

Recent changes in the grant application procedures of the US National Science Foundation have prompted much discussion, and have renewed the debate over the best way for governments to fund scientific research. I have argued in favor of the Canadian NSERC system...

Advice: choose the right tool for the job

drupaladmin

12 January 2012

As an editor, reviewer, and committee member, I have seen many authors and students give the following rationale for their chosen research approach (e.g., choice of study design, analytical method, or response variable): "This approach has proven useful in other...