Editorial 2019

Molecular Ecology Resources publishes broad resources to enhance studies in evolution, ecology and conservation. The journal has established itself in the community in recent years and consistently ranks highly among journals in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, with an h5‐index of 56 and Impact Factor of 7.06 in 2017. The journal strives to publish the highest quality resources including computer programs, statistical and methodological advances, and extensive molecular tools. Author guidelines are updated on an annual basis to reflect advances, and we encourage authors to review guidelines prior to submitting manuscripts to Molecular Ecology Resources since previous content may not reflect current standards. http://onlinelibrary.wiley. com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1755‐0998/ homepage/ForAuthors.html. Some of the top resources published in Molecular Ecology Resources in 2018 include the following key contributions: New Computer Programs that are expected to become broadly utilized include the program NATURALGWAS (François & Caye, 2018) that provides power simulations for association mapping studies with the ability to account for confounding factors such as population structure and G × E interactions, the package STRUCTURESELECTOR (Li & Liu, 2018) that provides extensive evaluation for optimal selection of k clusters, and a package called EDNAOCCUPANCY (Dorazio & Erickson, 2018) that allows users to estimate detection probabilities for eDNA and compare different models. NOTE: Computer programs continue to be published as “free access” in the journal to make them broadly available to the community. Important Statistical Advances include development of a framework to identify populations under threat from environmental change (Razgour et al., 2018), a novel approach to visualize patterns of genomic differentiation across landscapes (House & Hahn, 2018), a synthesis of significant genome associations between common garden and genotype‐environmental association testing (Lasky, Forester, & Reimherr, 2018) and the ability to resolve allele dosage in paralogous genes with genotyping‐by‐sequencing (McKinney, Waples, Pascal, Seeb, & Seeb, 2018). Remarkable articles published as Molecular Advances included a cost‐effective method for expressed exome capture called EecSeq (Puritz & Lotterhos, 2018) and a novel ageing technique by measuring methylation of candidate CpG sites (Wright, Mathews, & Schofield, 2018). Further, Baetscher, Clemento, Ng, Anderson, and Garza (2018) demonstrated how closely linked SNPs called “microhaplotypes” can be applied to achieve high power for pedigrees and kinship reconstruction. Metabarcoding and eDNA resources continue to ascend with many strong examples published in the journal in 2018, but a notable finding by Bista et al. (2018) revealed that mitogenome sequencing was more accurate than metabarcoding to quantify biomass of macroinvertebrates in freshwater communities. Finally, an article by Peona, Weissensteiner, and Suh (2018) comments on incomplete genome assemblies in non‐model organisms and finds that caution must be exercised with highly fragmented assemblies. In line with this warning, Molecular Ecology Resources continues to emphasize publication of “chromosome level” genome assemblies where scaffolds have been ordered and anchored to chromosomes, as opposed to draft genomes that contain large numbers of scaffolds that are not ordered. Molecular Ecology Resources published a special issue on the topic of “Association Mapping in Natural Populations” edited by Santure and Garant (2018). This special issue contains exemplary resources ranging from statistical packages, guidance on study design and specific applications of association mapping. Future special issues are planned for Molecular Ecology Resources, and authors who wish to propose a topic for a special issue are encouraged to contact the Managing Editor (Karen Chambers) and Chief Editor (Shawn Narum). Molecular Ecology Resources has also made efforts to emphasize new resources published in the journal that are expected to have broad influence in the community. In particular, each issue contains a “From the Cover” article that is chosen by editors and receives an accompanying Perspective from an expert in the field. Perspective articles are coordinated by News and Views Editor, Armando Geraldes, and these Perspectives have been well received by authors and readers of MER.