Is the audience gender-blind? Smaller attendance in female talks highlights an imbalanced visibility in academia.

Diverse perspectives are essential to the advancement of biodiversity science, yet persistent structural biases continue to shape who is seen and heard in academic spaces. Despite efforts to promote inclusivity, it remains unclear whether increased representation translates into equitable visibility and engagement from peers. Seminar talks, key arenas for idea exchange and networking, offer a window into how such dynamics unfold.

The promise of community-driven preprints in ecology and evolution.

Publishing preprints is quickly becoming commonplace in ecology and evolutionary biology. Preprints can facilitate the rapid sharing of scientific knowledge establishing precedence and enabling feedback from the research community before peer review. Yet, significant barriers to preprint use exist, including language barriers, a lack of understanding about the benefits of preprints and a lack of diversity in the types of research outputs accepted (e.

Latitudinal patterns in stabilizing density dependence of forest communities.

Numerous studies have shown reduced performance in plants that are surrounded by neighbours of the same species, a phenomenon known as conspecific negative density dependence (CNDD). A long-held ecological hypothesis posits that CNDD is more pronounced in tropical than in temperate forests, which increases community stabilization, species coexistence and the diversity of local tree species. Previous analyses supporting such a latitudinal gradient in CNDD have suffered from methodological limitations related to the use of static data.

Fixed or random? On the reliability of mixed-effects models for a small number of levels in grouping variables.

Biological data are often intrinsically hierarchical (e.g., species from different genera, plants within different mountain regions), which made mixed-effects models a common analysis tool in ecology and evolution because they can account for the non-independence.