Mind the gap: when the news article run ahead of the science

This is a quick post on a blatant example on how careful and prudent interpretation in scientific articles are over-simplified in news article. Scrolling through lemonde.fr website I found this article about a long-term study that looked at the long-term changes in insect biomass. In this article one can reads: 'Le facteur majeur permettant d’expliquer …

Cause, mechanism and prediction in ecology

This is a theme that bugged me for the past few months, through reading (Peters' critique for ecology, Shipley's path analysis book), meetings and discussions (IK computation ecology). So it is time to actually sit down, think this through and organize my thoughts. What better way to achieve this than to write a post? What …

How not to control for multiple testing

While reading the method section of a recent article by Solivares et al, I came upon the following paragraph: "The inclusion of many predictors in statistical models increases the chance of type I error (false positives). To account for this we used a Bernoulli process to detect false discovery rates, where the probability (P) of …

Making a case for hierarchical generalized models

Science is also about convincing others, be it your supervisors or your collaborators, that what you intend to do is relevant to get the answers sought. This “what” can be anything from designing an experiment, to collecting samples or formatting the data. This post was inspired by a recent discussion with one of my supervisor …

Prediction in ecology -implementing a priority.

In this post I would like to comment a bit on the recent forum paper by Houlahan et al on the importance of prediction to demonstrate ecological understanding. Before going through what I took from the paper I will outline a bit where I stood on prediction and understanding before reading the article. Explanation vs …

Spatial Dynamic in a Host-Parasitoid system

In this post I will explore the spatial dynamic that arise from a simple deterministic host-parasitoid model with migration in a homogeneous environment. If the previous sentence did not drive you away, congrats (!) you are most certainly in a terminal state towards biological nerditude. The idea of this post emerged while reading Chp. 6 …

150 years of ecology: lessons for the future

Last week I was at the annual meeting of the german, austrian and swiss ecologists (GfÖ) which took place in Marburg (DE). The title of the conference referred to the creation of the word Oecologie in 1866 by Ernst Haeckel and the conference aimed at "reflect upon the progress we have made in the past …

Shiny and Leaflet for Visualization Awards

Next week will be the meeting of the German (and Swiss and Austrians) ecologists in Marburg and the organizing team launched a visualization contest based on spatial data of the stores present in the city. Nadja Simons and I decided to enter the contest, our idea was to link the store data to the city …

Simulating local community dynamics under ecological drift

In 2001 the book by Stephen Hubbell on the neutral theory of biodiversity was a major shift from classical community ecology. Before this book the niche-assembly framework was dominating the study of community dynamics. Very briefly under this framework local species composition is the result of the resource available at a particular site and species …

Exploring the diversity of Life using Rvest and the Catalog of Life

I am writing the general introduction for my thesis and wanted to have a nice illustration of the diversity of Arthropods compared to other phyla (my work focus on Arthropods so this is a nice motivation). As the literature I have had access so far use pie charts to graphically represent these diversities and knowing …