This is a guest post by Carsten Dormann. It is his invited keynote lecture at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the Gesellschaft für Ökologie in Braunschweig (specifically on 1 Sept 2021 at 8:15). The topic of the conference was “From Science to Policy”, and he deemed it necessary to question whether thus step is not…
A guest post by Carsten F. Dormann. In October 2021, Paul Ehrlich wrote a “Correspondence” in Nature with which I seemed to sympathise to a surprisingly large part. But the last sentence wiped out all agreement, as it revealed a fundamentally different view of the role and “duty” of “scientists”. I wrote this blog at…
A guest post by Oskar Hagen (iDiv) | www.hagen.bio | @hagen_oskar What is the cause and what are the processes that gave rise to Earth’s biodiversity patterns through space and time? Much research has been devoted to describing these patterns, and over the years, the fields of macroecology and macroevolution have slowly transitioned from a mainly correlational…
A colleague forwarded me a preprint (Louca and Pennell, 2019), which questions if time-varying extinction / speciation rates can be simultaneously inferred from extant phylogenies. I’d like to preface this by saying that this is not really my core expertise, so take my points with a grain of salt. Anyway, I was interested in the…
A guest post by Carsten Dormann (Uni Freiburg) / @CarstenDormann. Cover picture by Takver via Wikimedia Commons. BioScience has just published the latest installment of “Scientists’ Warnings“. There have been two previous such Warnings, the latest organised by the same authors in 2017. Quite a few scientists have signed this Warning. I chose not to,…
Although one would think that the basic concepts of statistics should be the same across all sciences, there is an amazing heterogeneity between fields in how statistics is taught and practiced. One example are the validity concepts (e.g. construct validity, internal validity, external validity) that are heavily taught in the social sciences and economics (see…
Guest post by Carsten Dormann (Uni Freiburg) / @CarstenDormann The relationship between species richness and ecosystem function is a field of ecology that has always puzzled me. I learned the scientific rope in a department of vegetation ecologists: vegetation was the result of environmental conditions, and indeed a substantial part of their research was to…
By Lisa Hülsmann and Florian Hartig (U Regensburg), with short comments by Ryan Chisholm (NUS) and Matteo Detto (Princeton). By Betteridge’s law, the answer to this question is of course no. Or better: we don’t know. But let’s back up a bit: Global gradients in CNDD Almost a year ago, LaManna and coauthors published a paper in Science…
This (co-)guest post by Carsten F. Dormann & Florian Hartig summarizes a comprehensive review on model averaging for predictive inference, just published in Ecological Monographs.
Over at dynamic ecology, Jeremy Fox argues that Technical statistical mistakes are overrated; ecologists (especially students) worry too much about them. Individually and collectively, technical statistical mistakes hardly ever appreciably slow the progress of entire subfields or sub-subfields. And fixing them rarely meaningfully accelerates progress. continuing with Don’t agree? Try this exercise: name the most…
Originally posted on AK Computational Ecology:
This guest post by Carsten F. Dormann, with inputs from Casper Kraan and the panel (see below) summarises the results from the short workshop “Biotic interactions and joint species distribution models” at the Ecology Across Borders BES/GfÖ/NEVECOL/EEF-meeting 2017 in Ghent, Belgium. The purpose of this event was to exchange thoughts and…
In good old tradition, including being too late, I provide here the JCR 2016 data for the top 40 journals indexed by what is now Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science in the subject area “Ecology”, released in June 2017 (see footnote 1). For comparison, see my old posts, summarizing the JCR 2015, JCR 2014, JCR 2013, JCR 2012, JCR…
We are pleased to announce our 7th international summer school on Bayesian Modelling in the ecological and environmental sciences (see past courses here). This year the course will take place at the Heathland Centre on the beautiful island of Lygra in western Norway. Motivation Bayesian inference is an increasingly used statistical framework in ecology and…
A guest post by Carsten F. Dormann Over the last years, I have been using null models more often than I liked. I had to, when there was no other way to figure out if an ecological pattern was unexpected, or trivial. Inspired by some recent (and also some older) posts, I thought I might throw around…
As for the JCR 2014, JCR 2013, JCR 2012, JCR 2011 and JCR 2010, here the 40 most highly cited journals indexed by the ISI Web of Knowledge under the subject area “Ecology”. Rank ’15 Journal Publications IF’15 5-yr IF ’15 1 TRENDS IN ECOLOGY & EVOLUTION 72 16.74 19.42 2 ECOLOGY LETTERS 138 10.77 14.94…
Guest post by Carsten F. Dormann In his book “The Signal and the Noise”, Nate Silvers likened competing scientific hypotheses to betting. If you think that your hypothesis H1 is correct, rather than H2, you should be willing to put money on it, with odds reflecting your belief in H1 vs H2. This post collects…
As for JCR 2013, JCR 2012, JCR 2011 and JCR 2010, I list the 40 most highly cited journals indexed by the ISI Web of Knowledge under the subject “ecology”. To give you a reference to the general journals: Nature is now (last year) at 41.456 (42.351), Science at 31.477 (33.611), Plos Biology at 9.343…
For a few years now, Jörn Pagel, Joseph Chipperfield, Björn Reineking (in the beginning) and I have been teaching an introductory summer school in Bayesian statistics. In previous years, we were in Bayreuth 2011 Bayreuth 2012, Göttingen 2013, Freiburg 2013 and Bergen 2014. This year, we will be again in Lygra, a beautiful field station…
A guest post by Gita Benadi and Jochen Fründ Mutualistic networks have become an increasingly popular way of describing mutually beneficial interactions between species-rich communities, for example those between plants and their pollinators. Besides offering a nice method of visualizing these interactions, networks are also used to make inferences about the relationship between interaction structure…
Two events I’m involved in that may be interesting for people that work on connecting process-based vegetation models to data. Both are organized through CA 1304 PROFOUND, and fully funded by COST: There will be a training school on Bayesian calibration, forecasting and multi-model predictions of process-based vegetation models in Rencurel / Grenoble, France, 12.-16.…
theoretical ecology 