The ideal situation for block cross-validation where a large sample spans the predictive space, and structure in the observations can be used to tease out more-independent data folds. In practice, the independence achieved through blocking is often difficult to assess.

Hindsight: Tackling pattern, scale, and independence to ensure ecosystem models are predictive

In our Hindsight series, researchers highlight a historical piece of research that was -and is- significant to them. In this post, Kai Chan and Edward Gregr look how at the problem of pattern and scale in ecology informs the choice of training and testing data for models to reach beyond description to prediction. Kai Chan is also a Lead Editor for the journal People and Nature.

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Genetic diversity: a poor cousin of species diversity?

In July, Functional Ecology published the Special Feature: A Mechanistic Understanding of Global Change Ecology. We have invited the authors of the papers to write about their paper. In this post, Julia Koricheva (@korichevalab) author of  The relative importance of plant intraspecific diversity in structuring arthropod communities: A meta‐analysis writes about her paper why she wrote it, what she found and where the big gaps are.

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The wrong kind of nitrogen

StevensIn July, Functional Ecology published the Special Feature: A Mechanistic Understanding of Global Change Ecology. We have invited the authors of the papers to write about their paper. In this post, Carly Stevens  writes about her paper Atmospheric nitrogen deposition in terrestrial ecosystems: Its impact on plant communities and consequences across trophic levels: why she wrote it, what she found and where the big gaps are.

 

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Associate Editor Profile: Angélica L. González

Angélica L. González
Angélica L. González

We’re happy to welcome Angélica L. González, of the Department of Biology and Center for Computational and Integrative Biology, Rutgers University, to our Editorial Board.

Angélica has broad interests in community and ecosystem ecology and her work combines experiments, surveys, data synthesis, and meta-analysis to understand how changes in the availability of energy and matter constrain and shape the structure and function of ecological systems across spatial and temporal scales.

Find out more about Angélica’s research and her approach to ecology here.

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