Collaboration sizes increase across all scientific disciplines, and Ecology is no exception to this trend. One of the problems emerging from this development is that it seems more and more difficult to remember all your coauthors. This recent erratum in Nature adds no less than five forgotten coauthors, in addition to correcting various names and…
In an editorial in tomorrow’s issue, Nature announces an initiative to increase reproducibility of research results. They state that “From next month, Nature and the Nature research journals will introduce editorial measures to address the problem by improving the consistency and quality of reporting in life-sciences articles”. The announced measures include To ease the interpretation…
Tomorrow’s issue of Nature has a special section devoted to the future of academic publishing. The topics covered are not particularly surprising (see also my older posts on this subject), but I found the articles really informative and enjoyable to read, in particular “Open access: The true cost of science publishing”, a News Feature by…
A news article in the upcoming edition of Nature highlights a new kid on the block in the battle for the publishing system of the future – it’s called Rubriq, a company that wants to “outsource” the review process from the normal publication process. Very similar to what Peerage of Science provides, but as a…
This week’s edition of Nature featured a comment by Drew Purves and colleagues titled “Ecosystems: Time to model all life on Earth”, in which they propose that we need a new model type, general ecosystem models (GEM), that describe the interplay of all major organism types on earth. They say that GEMs […] could capture…
There has been considerable controversy in recent years about the question of earth system tipping points in general and about the question of an Amazon dieback that is predicted by some of the global vegetation models in particular. A cornerstone for answering this question is to understand how tropical forests affect large scale precipitation patterns…
Tomorrows issue of Nature has an interesting interview with Uri Simonsohn, a researcher that has been investigating several cases of data fabrication in psychology by requesting the raw data and looking for statistical anomalies. In the interview, he explains that The basic idea is to see if the data are too close to the theoretical…
A new article coming up in Nature by David Storch and Petr Keil and Walter Jetz calculates continental scale SAR and EAR relationships for amphibians, birds and mammals. They find that, after correcting for mean range size of the taxa, there are nearly universal relationships across taxa and continents. While the SARs are clearly not…
I was blogging recently about a study on the evolution of the Gorilla and its ancestral relationship to the other great apes. Now, the circle on the sequencing of the great apes closes with a new study published today in Nature, which presents a genome-wide sequence of the Bonobo, contrasted with the chimpanzee and the…
There’s an interesting new study in tomorrow’s issue of nature. Andrew F. Hugall and Devi Stuart-Fox use molecular phylogenies to look at speciation rates of birds. I cite from the abstract: … we confirm, using species-level molecular phylogenies for five families of non-passerine birds, that colour polymorphism is associated with accelerated speciation rates in the…
A article in tomorrow’s edition of Nature caught my eye – Iñigo Martincorena and colleagues have sequenced a number of Escherichia coli genomes and compare the speed of genetic drift at different locations in the genome. They observe that the neutral mutation rate varies by more than an order of magnitude across 2,659 genes, with…
Evolution is a tricky thing – and so is inferring general theory from simplified model results. This is proven once again in a new study by Leithen K. M’Gonigle with Ulf Dieckmann as senior author, which challenges the wide held belief that sexual selection alone cannot stabilize coexistence in the absence of ecological differentiation when…
In a correspondence in tomorrow’s edition of Nature, “Data accessibility: Getting a handle on biological data”, Dave Roberts & Alex Hardisty call for contributions to an initiative that prepares a white paper on data accessibility in the biological sciences, intended for the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 funding call in 2013. The aim is to contribute…
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…
Last year, I blogged about a Nature paper by Fangliang He and Stephen Hubbell, which claims that conventional extinction predictions based on species-area relationships are overestimated. They suggest extinction-area relationships as more appropriate to estimate extinction risk from habitat loss. My old post can be found here. After two short replies by Brooks and colleagues…
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…
theoretical ecology 