Model fitting in ecology: trade-offs between complexity and generality

Journal of Ecology recently published new research article by Clark et al. Predicting species abundances in a grassland biodiversity experiment: Trade‐offs between model complexity and generality Author Adam Clark discusses the paper in more detail and explores the trade‐off between bias and variance when modelling ecological systems. It is common knowledge that increasing the number of…

The Positively Biased Life

The following is an invited guest post by Dr. Matthew Chew.  The bias in research commentary in Nature by Daniel Sarewitz has attracted a lot of comments on the Nature site and Ecolog*. We felt that the issue deserves more discussion. Here, Dr. Chew presents his take on the issue. Matthew K. Chew, Ph.D. Arizona…