Dominique Gravel, Nicolas Mouquet, David Mouillot and I have recently published a paper in Ecography entitled ‘On the integration of biotic interaction and environmental constraints at the biogeographical scale’ where we develop some ideas about how ecological interactions and abiotic factors must be taken together into account to better predict species’ distribution. As suggested during the editing process, we wrote a blog post for Ecography that summarizes our paper. I think blog posts are an useful way to promote one’s work and also a good compromise between reading the abstract and reading the entire paper. We may also get more by reading the blog post than glancing over the paper.

In addition of sharing this blog post on my own blog, I would like to confess two regrets regarding this paper. First, I did not make any code available. Even if the core of the model does not take that much time to be implemented, I think it is good practice to make code available as it enhances reproducibility and it may save some times for potential users of the model. In my defense, I became familiar with GitHub right after the first submission of the paper… That being said, I will push myself to provide a version of the code available on GitHub in the very next days. Once it will be done, I will write a blog post saying so! My second regret regards the math of the paper. I have actually spent few hours to derive all the equations to get an exact solution (simple math though). However I didn’t fully value this work given our target journal. I hope to do so for the next paper that should involve more maths.

See ya next post!

Edited: 2019-02-05