Socioecology Research Today

The supposition that agricultural intensification results in land sparing for conservation has become central to policy formulations across the tropics. However, underlying assumptions remain uncertain and have been little explored in the context of conservation incentive schemes such as policies for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation, conservation, sustainable management, and enhancement of carbon [...]

A study with low statistical power has a reduced chance of detecting a true effect, but it is less well appreciated that low power also reduces the likelihood that a statistically significant result reflects a true effect. Here, we show that the average statistical power of studies in the neurosciences is very low. The consequences [...]

There is a growing realization among scientists and policy makers that an increased understanding of today’s environmental issues requires international collaboration and data synthesis. Meta-analyses have served this role in ecology for more than a decade, but the different experimental methodologies researchers use can limit the strength of the meta-analytic approach. Considering the global nature [...]

To develop a long-term volunteer-based system for monitoring the impacts of climate change on plant distributions, potential indicator plants and monitoring sites were assessed considering habitat prediction uncertainty. We used species distribution models (SDMs) to project potential habitats for 19 popular edible wild plants in Japan. Prediction uncertainties of SDMs were assessed using three high-performance [...]

The Atlas of Guatemalan Crop Wild Relatives (Atlas Guatemalteco de Parientes Silvestres de las Plantas Cultivadas) is a unique new resource designed to facilitate the conservation and use of wild plant species that are related to cultivated crops. Guatemala is located in the heart of Mesoamerica, one of the world’s most important centers of plant [...]

Liquid Robotics is betting that autonomous vehicles will emerge as the best way to troll the oceans to gather data. The Silicon Valley-based company yesterday raised $45 million in a series E round to grow the company’s sales and services around what it calls “high-value ocean data services” in research, defense, and oil and gas [...]

Now we are witnessing the transition to yet another scholarly communication system — one that will harness the technology of the Web to vastly improve dissemination. What the journal did for a single, formal product (the article), the Web is doing for the entire breadth of scholarly output. The article was an attempt to freeze [...]

ARPA-E was modeled on the applied research method at DARPA where the military serves as a target customer. But energy lacks that “ecosystem” for advancing promising research into the marketplace. In some cases, grants have funded a group of researchers, but once the grant expired, many couldn’t continue work in that area of expertise, one [...]

Understanding the role of atmospheric CO2 during past climate changes requires clear knowledge of how it varies in time relative to temperature. Antarctic ice cores preserve highly resolved records of atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic temperature for the past 800,000 years. Here we propose a revised relative age scale for the concentration of atmospheric CO2 and [...]

The Global Innovation Index (GII) is a recognition of the key role that innovation serves as a driver of economic growth and prosperity. It is also an acknowledgement of the need for a broad horizontal vision of innovation that is applicable to both developed and emerging economies, with the inclusion of indicators that go beyond [...]