Polar bears, by Alan D. Wilson (naturespicsonline.com: [1]) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Here’s something for the lovers of cute fluffy white mammals: a new study in science lead by Frank Hailer uses nuclear markers to infer the time at which polar bears split up from their ancestral brown bear lineage. Previous analysis, based on…
It seems the time is there for coupling genetics, ecology and evolution, at least Nature is pulling out one interesting paper after the other in that area (see also the recent posts 1,2). One of the latest outcomes is an impressive study by a large group of authors around Aylwyn Scally and Richard Durbin, who…
In a review paper that appeared in this week’s edition of Nature, Davidson and colleagues describe the interactions and feedbacks between land use change, climate change, and a range of more local climatically mediated processes such as water balance, winds and pressure systems and fire in the Amazon basin. I found this a very nice…
In a new study led by Carsten Dormann and Stanislaus Schymanski which I coauthored, we look at differences, but also at growing similarities between rather static/statistical/correlative and rather dynamic/process-based approaches to species distribution modeling. I think this is an interesting paper which touches upon a lot of issues that arise from the fact that classical…
In a paper from today’s edition of Science (Detecting Novel Associations in Large Data Sets), Reshef et al. propose a new measure of correlation which they call the maximal information coefficient (MIC). The authors have their focus on detecting and ranking correlations in large and high-dimensional dataset. They argue that previous measures of correlation lack…
In a proverbial “mammoth project”, Lorenzen and colleagues report in this weeks issue of Nature on the responses of six Late Quaternary megafauna herbivores (woolly rhinoceros, woolly mammoth, horse, reindeer/caribou, bison and musk ox) to climate and humans. The authors draw on various data sources, in particular species distribution models and ancient DNA, to “reconstruct…
I want to highlight two interesting papers coming out last week in the field of phylogenetics and evolution. The first is a paper by Nagalingum et al. who use fossil-calibrated molecular phylogenies to examine the diversification of cycads, and ancient lineage of woody plants. The cycad record dates back at least to the early Permian…
A recent paper by P. Adler et al., “Productivity Is a Poor Predictor of Plant Species Richness” deals with the relationship between productivity and diversity. The authors examine an old and, not surprisingly, debated doctrine of ecology, which is that there is generally a hump-shaped relationship between productivity and diversity (as an example of such…
In a recent comment in Nature, titled “Don’t judge species on their origins”, Mark Davis and others call for judging ecosystems and the species therein in terms of their ecosystem functions, and not according to whether they are native or introduced to a region. Basically, they argue that the paradigm of conserving the native vegetation…
Our new review on statistical inference for stochastic simulation models is now available at Ecology Letters. The paper discusses how approximate likelihood functions can be generated from stochastic simulations. Such simulation-based likelihood approximations are a very general and powerful tool because they allow us to apply statistical methods to a large class of models such…
I’m lagging a little behind the news, but maybe it’s also an advantage to write about this issue after the first smoke has cleared. The topic is a paper by Fangliang He and Stephen Hubbell that appeared in Nature two weeks ago and that has sparked considerable controversy. Basically, the authors claim that “conventional” extinction…
It’s already a few months old, but still worth mentioning – I really liked the paper “Rise and fall of political complexity in island South-East Asia and the Pacific” by Thomas E. Currie and colleagues in Nature. The authors construct a phylogenetic tree based on the vocabulary of 84 Austronesian societies, and used these measures…
theoretical ecology 