Adaptive Preregistration for Model-Based Research

About

This repository provides the source-code for a practical guide to implementing Adaptive Preregistration for Model-Based Research that accompanies the paper:

Gould, E., Jones, C. S., Yen, J. D. L., Fraser, H. S., Wootton, H. F., Good, M. K., Duncan, D. H., Hauser, C. E., Wintle, B. C., & Rumpff, L. (2026). ‘But I can’t preregister my research’: Improving the reproducibility and transparency of ecology and conservation with adaptive preregistration for model-based research. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 17(6), 2041-210x.70311. https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210x.70311

The guide provides background on researcher degrees of freedom and the risk of questionable research practices in model-based research, and argues for the role in preregistration for improving the replicability and transparency of ecological modelling. The main components of the guide include an overview of adaptive preregistration, a practical guide on implementing it using git and GitHub, as well as a template that can be used to preregister ecological modelling studies.

Both the template and Adaptive Preregistration methodology were developed and tested using a case study of environmental flows modelling in Victoria, Australia, led by Chris Jones and Jian Yen at the Arthur Rylah Institute for Environmental Research, Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action (Jones et al., 2026)^{1 2}.

Citing this work

Please cite the material in this repository as:

Gould, E., Jones, Christopher, S., Yen, J. D. L., Fraser, Hannah, S., Wootton, H., Good, M., Duncan, David, H., Rumpff, L., & Fidler, F. (2026). EcoConsPreReg: A Guide to Adaptive Preregistration for Model-Based Research in Ecology and Conservation. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19064144

Resources & References

The OSF repository for the Adaptive Preregistration project is accessible at: https://osf.io/sq5j4/.

The material presented in this repository's website is accessible in PDF format at: https://osf.io/sq5j4/files/x2kpj.

N.B.

This page is built and published to GH-pages using the quarto publish gh-pages workflow.

Footnotes

1. Jones, C., Vivian, L., Wootton, H., Gould, E., Yen, J., Mole, B., Thomas, F., Sutton, F., Crowther, D., Backstrom, A., & Just, K. (2026). Vegetation responses to managed river flow events and regimes. EcoEvoArXiv [Preprint]. https://doi.org/10.32942/X2S67G ↩

2. Case study Source code repository: https://github.com/egouldo/VEFMAP_VEG_Stage6/tree/EG-prereg-updates ↩