It is common place to find youngresearchers with serious problems regarding experimental design, data analysisand correct interpretation of results. These limitations are a serious handicapfor their future scientific endeavour. This is specially the case nowadays becausewe are living a substantial revolution within the field of techniques for dataanalysis and even statistical inference procedures (the mathematical jump fromsample data to the unknown population parameters), which affects not only ecologybut other scientific disciplines such as medicine, psychology or sociology.We recall here that the old idea of having just one tool available to answerecological questions (the testing of biologically non-informed null hypothesis)has now been substituted by the paradigm of the "tool box", where we can findseveral tools available depending on the complexity of the problem we are dealingwith. Since gathering information on each tool requires an important searchingeffort, our purpose here is to offer an updated guideline of the main toolsavailable to solve biologically-informed contrasts in ecology in the 21stcentury, and to correctly interpret our results, identifying the weaknessesand strengths of each tool. We also present, with practical purposes, a selectionof relevant publications which can be consulted to master the tools in the box.
