More background about mecoco

How it started and who’s involved.

The idea for mecoco came from the method-comparison project by Silberzahn and Uhlmann (2015). Inspired by this project, Emiel van Loon (University of Amsterdam) checked with colleagues in several ecological domains whether collaborations, projects or platforms existed to do something similar in ecology - nothing appeared to exist. A literature research to various types of method comparsion (or model competition) projects confirmed that no methodology had not been developed and that it had only a few times been applied in ecology.

During 2019, Emiel was joined by Johannes de Groeve (Fondazione Edmund Mach, Italy), and Simone Ciuti (University College Dublin). They started to build-up the mecoco-infrastructure and to shape the first comparison project in movement ecology.

In Autumn 2019 our plans are to:

• be present at several conferences to explain the mecoco goals;
• make templates and guidance documents to help organisers set-up and run a comparison project;
• start-up teams to organise comparison projects in the domains of Island Biogeography and Species Distribution Modeling;
• secure funding in order to make mecoco sustainable on the long run.

In 2020 we hope to expand the mecoco management team with two or three colleagues. If you are interested, do send us an email: mecoco.project@gmail.com