Biological Sciences Division
Staff Awards & Honors

January 2016

Article Named Top 100 of 2015 by Frontiers Blog

Congratulations to a team of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory microbiologists for having their research article named among the top "100 Articles from 2015 in the Spotlight" by Frontiers Blog. The article lists the ranking of all the top 100 articles. Frontiers Blog is one of the largest and fastest-growing community-rooted, open-access academic publishers and received the ALPSP Gold Award for Innovation in Publishing in 2014.

"Estimating and Mapping Ecological Processes Influencing Microbial Community Assembly" was one of the most viewed and downloaded articles within 1 month after publication across all Frontiers publications, a feat considering the blog published over 12,500 articles in 2015. James Stegen, a former Linus Pauling Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow, was lead author, and coauthors were Laboratory Fellow Jim Fredrickson, former PNNL researcher Xueju Lin, and Allan Konopka (retired). The article and appeared in Frontiers Microbiology May 1, 2015. It received 3,354 views and downloads in the first month, placing it at number 95 on the top 100 list.

In the article, Stegen explains his process of using a new ecological simulation model to evaluate a new null modeling framework that aims to quantify ecological processes. This new simulation resulted in evidence that the developed null modeling framework generates robust inferences of ecological processes from observational data, thus providing an ecological modeling framework that can be applied across microbial and nonmicrobial ecosystems.