Final call for entries to the BMC Ecology Image Competition

There’s now less than 1 month to go to submit your entries to the BMC Ecology Image Competition!

More than 50 images have now been submitted from all over the world, so be sure to send in yours before 1st December to be in with a chance of winning.

The competition is open to everyone affiliated with a research institution, and we consider all images from photos to data visualizations. Entries should be submitted to one of five categories that reflect the editorial sections of the journal. The winner of each category will be chosen by each of the journal’s Section Editors and the categories are:

Behavioural and physiological ecology

Conservation ecology and biodiversity research

Community, population, and macroecology

Landscape ecology and ecosystems

Theoretical ecology and models

If you’re not sure which category your image fits into – don’t worry, we can help you out!

To submit your images, please send them in to the journal’s Executive Editor.

Dr Yan WongIn addition to the individual winners from each section, BMC Ecology is delighted to announce that the overall winner of the competition will be selected by our guest judge, Dr Yan Wong, from the BBC science programme “Bang Goes the Theory”. Yan has a background in ecology and evolutionary biology, and has previously worked with Richard Dawkins on The Ancestor’s Tale while at the University of Oxford. In consultation with Yan, we will also be making a donation to the Wytham Woods conservation project  to help the continued running of one of the world’s most-studied ecological field systems.

We’ve already had some fantastic images submitted, a selection of which can be viewed on our Flickr page “Imaging Ecology”. A number of entries have also been accepted for inclusion in the peer-reviewed Biology Image Library, an online collection of images, movies, illustrations and animations across biology and biomedicine.

Yitzchak Ben Mocha_cc Our very first entry to the competition from Yitzchak Ben Mocha at Tel-Aviv University depicts a border confrontation between groups of Arabian babblers, a communally nesting scrub-dwelling bird from the Middle East. Full details of the behaviour of these birds, and the image metadata can be viewed in the image library.

 

 

 

 

As well as these striking photos, we are also particularly keen to encourage creative submissions to the “Theoretical ecology and models” section of the competition. Much of the science of ecology is built on strong theoretical underpinnings, and modern advances in computing power now mean that powerful models can be built to investigate complex ecological processes. We wish to reflect this important aspect of the field, and would encourage anyone with a interest in computation, statistics or data visualization, to submit their creative depictions of ecological theory to our competition!

For example, this figure from a recent publication in BMC Ecology depicts the endemic vertebrate species richness in the eastern Andean slope of Peru and Bolivia, utilising natural history records and observational data to create predictive distribution models of species occurrence in this hotspot of biodiversity.

Fig 5 Swenson et al 2012 BMC Ecology 12, 1

Full details on how to submit your images can be found in our previous blog post, which also includes full details of the prizes for the winning images.

Good luck, and we look forward to receiving your entries!

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