About the cover: This image shows a female chacma baboon (Papio ursinus) in the Okavango Delta, Botswana. During floods, animals often have to cross inundated areas to reach small islands with high-valued food items, such as fig fruits. While some animals enjoy the fresh water, most are stressed by the possibility of encountering crocodiles. To assess how wildlife is affected by such events, metabolites of glucocorticoids (stress hormones) and other hormones can be extracted and measured from faeces. Although a powerful and non-invasive method to answer questions regarding endocrinological processes in free-ranging animals, the long-term storage of hormone samples at remote field sites is of concern. The article linked to the picture, “Long-term storage effects in steroid metabolite extracts from baboon (Papio sp.) faeces – a comparison of three commonly applied storage methods“, assesses variation in hormones extracted from baboon faeces and stored under different conditions for a period of one year. The results underscore the strengths and weaknesses of different storage methods that can be performed at remote field stations.
Image credited to: Urs Kalbitzer.

To keep up to date with Methods newest content, have a look at our Accepted Articles and Early View articles, which will be included in forthcoming issues.

Carolyn Kurle

The newest Associate Editor to join the Methods team is Carolyn Kurle from UC San Diego. Carolyn is interested in several aspects of marine and terrestrial vertebrate ecology. She uses stable isotope biogeochemistry to answer questions about trophic interactions, foraging ecology, niche partitioning, and animal movement patterns. She also studies the impacts of human perturbations, such as pollution and invasion, on ecological communities.

Liam Revell

Welcome to Liam Revell from the University of Massachusetts Boston. Liam brings Methods expertise in computer-based phylogeny methods, and the evolutionary ecology of reptiles. He has previously published with us, and his articles are currently in Methods top papers list, containing our most highly cited and downloaded articles.
Click on his photo to read more about his work.

“while ecological work is fascinating to do, it is unbearably dull to read about.”

It is reassuring that things were just as bad 86 years ago. Here, I want to think about why not all ecological work is unbearably dull to read about, and what this means for ecological methods.

To my mind, the two things that make a work interesting are strangeness and simplicity. By strangeness, I mean ideas that come from outside the reader’s experience. For example, to an ecologist of my generation, raised on Begon, Harper and Townsend (1990), Odum’s Fundamentals of Ecology (1971) is strange. It is hard now to imagine the optimistic intellectual climate in which an undergraduate ecology textbook contained a chapter on space flight, and discussed using algae to feed the inhabitants of the kind of mega-city best known from the pages of 2000AD. One of the roots of this strangeness is that Odum’s book is based on a unifying principle (energy flow at the ecosystem level) that is now rather out of fashion. Almost by definition, little contemporary ecology is strange, and if methods papers are interesting, it is usually for other reasons.

By simplicity, I mean that the work’s intellectual framework is the logical consequence of a small number of initial statements (a.k.a. axioms). I do not mean that it is necessarily easy to see how the consequences follow from the axioms, only that they do follow. Some fields are full of simplicity (geometry and linear algebra, for example). In ecology, simplicity is rarer. There are big theories that aim for simplicity, such as Dynamic Energy Budget theory (Kooijman, 2010), the metabolic theory of ecology (Brown et al., 2004), the inertial view of population dynamics (Ginzburg and Colyvan, 2004), and the neutral theory of biodiversity (Hubbell, 2001). Any given ecologist will disagree with at least three out of four of these, but still they are theories that strive for (without necessarily achieving) a clear foundation and internal consistency.

In methods papers, even those with modest theoretical aspirations, simplicity should be almost always achievable. There are only two requirements: a foundation of clearly-stated axioms; and the avoidance of arbitrary choices in progressing from these axioms to a result. Write a simple paper, and reviewers may dislike your axioms, but cannot (unless they do not feel bound by logic) disagree with how you arrived at your results. Write a paper that is not simple, and its fate depends much more on the whims of reviewers. The first option is easier for all concerned.

Matthew Spencer.
Associate Editor, Methods in Ecology and Evolution

References
Begon, M., Harper, J. L. and Townsend, C. R. (1990). Ecology: individuals, populations and communities. Second edition. Blackwell Scientific, Oxford.
Brown, J. H., Gillooly, J. F., Allen, A. P., Savage, V. M. and West, G. B. (2004). Toward a metabolic theory of ecology. Ecology 85:1771-1789.
Elton, C. (1927). Animal ecology. Reprinted 2001, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Ginzburg, L. R. and Colyvan, M. (2004). Ecological orbits: how planets move and populations grow. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Hubbell, S. P. (2001). The unified neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography. Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Kooijman, S. A. L. M. (2010). Dynamic energy budget theory for metabolic organisation. Third edition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Odum, E. P. (1971). Fundamentals of ecology. Third edition. W. B. Saunders, Philadelphia.

Barb Anderson

To accommodate Methods ever-increasing number of submissions, we’ve recruited another Associate Editor! Welcome to Barb Anderson.

Barb is currently at James Cook University, Australia, but will be moving to the University of Otago in New Zealand this July, and she is also still affiliated with the University of York, UK.

Click on her photo to read more about her field of research.

Erica Leder

We’d like to welcome Erica Leder to the Methods Associate Editor Board, from the University of Turku.

Erica brings us expertise in molecular methods and the evolution of the phenotype. Click on her photo to read more about her research interests.

Congratulations to all concerned!

Visit the other BES Journals:
- Functional Ecology
- Journal of Ecology
- Journal of Animal Ecology
- Journal of Applied Ecology

About the cover: Whilst volunteer data collection programs provide an opportunity to address the challenge of studying biodiversity across large spatial scales, issues regarding the quality of the data collected in this manner must be addressed. Volunteer survey protocols are typically less standardised than their professional equivalents and in “Comparing diversity data collected using a protocol designed for volunteers with results from a professional alternative” Holt et al. consider the implications of this for marine fish diversity studies. The image of a SCUBA diver was taken at Hin Muang pinnacle in South Andaman Sea.
Photo © jimcatlinphotography.com.

About the cover: Long-term demographic studies that use individually identified animals offer invaluable views of ecological processes. Photo-id is a powerful tool for studying wild animals, particularly as there is no need to handle the animals – a good image is all that is required to “capture” individuals for life. ExtractCompare is the latest version of a freely available semi-automated photo-id system that allows standardized comparison of natural patterns. Crucially, the new software takes into account some of the complications that arise with data of this type which had been overlooked previously. Although female grey seals (Halichoerus grypus) are distinctively and laterally asymmetrically patterned, they pose a challenging problem for automated photo-id because of the impossibility of controlling the camera distance and angle to the subject (seals swimming offshore, and only partly visible as pictured, or lying on the shore) and the wide range of body postures they display. This work uses an extensive photo-id database of an intensively studied breeding colony, North Rona, to consider the problems of individuals generating multiple encounter histories through the risk of false rejection of matches or being captured from a single side.  Survival, abundance and preference can be estimated now using patterns from different body areas by measuring and allowing for the risk of false rejection. In “Analysis of photo-id data allowing for missed matches and individuals identified from opposite sides“, the research confirms that apparent annual survival of female seals at North Rona is lower than expected, something that is reflected in the declining number of seal pups born there. Pup production at the island has fallen from over 2000 in the 1970s to around 500 at present, whereas other colonies have increased.
Image by Patrick Pomeroy.

To keep up to date with Methods newest content, have a look at our Early View articles which will be included in forthcoming issues, and our list of Accepted Articles, which will be available online soon.