Ecology Editing and Proofreading Services

Bird abundance was measured at twelve points along one transect, on three mornings in June, in a single valley. The paper concludes something about the species' response to forest management. Whether that conclusion holds beyond twelve points, three mornings and one valley is not a limitation to be conceded at the end — it is the size of the claim, and it should have been settled before the first count.

We edit what ecologists write — field study methods and sampling design descriptions, abundance and occupancy analyses, vegetation survey and quadrat work, long-term monitoring reports, species distribution modelling, restoration and management evaluations, permit and ethics documentation, systematic reviews and meta-analyses, and theses, papers and grant proposals. Our editors work on the design and the reach of what it can show.

The sampling design is the part of an ecology paper that determines what the results are about, and the failure is a conclusion stated at a broader extent than the design supports. Ecological pattern is scale-dependent, so the extent and grain of the sampling are the boundary of the inference. We work through these so the spatial extent is stated as the area over which units were placed and the grain as the size of the unit itself, since a claim about landscapes cannot rest on quadrats placed within one stand; so the temporal extent covers the variation being generalised over, because three mornings in one June describes a June and inter-annual variation in most populations exceeds the effect sizes being reported; so the placement rule is given — random, systematic, stratified or opportunistic — as convenience placement along tracks and edges samples a habitat that is not the habitat of interest; so replication is distinguished from repeated measurement of the same unit, given that three visits to one site are not three sites; so detection is addressed rather than assumed, since counts confound abundance with detectability and the two respond differently to vegetation structure; so the sampling unit and the unit of inference are stated as the same thing or the step between them is justified; and so the conclusion is written at the extent that was sampled. Papers written this way get used in the syntheses that follow.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished field data, site locations and records of sensitive species. We are editors rather than ecologists or statisticians, and we offer no view on design, analysis or findings. What we can do is match the claim to the sampling.