Press release from Aarhus University. In a new Journal of Ecology article, researchers from Aarhus University describe how the waste left by ants on plant leaves serves as a valuable fertiliser for the plants – handed on a silver platter. You will have often seen ants wandering about on leaves – even in tall trees.…
Jasmine Packer (University of Adelaide) has written a blog post about the keystone coloniser of land and water Phragmites australis (common reed), which is the subject of the issue 105.4 Biological Flora of the British Isles article. Reed beds throughout the world have been supporting animal and human populations since the last ice age. These reed communities…
The Editor’s Choice paper for issue 105.5 is a study that looks into rapid plant evolution in response to changes in land use. Author Eva Völler tells us more about the paper below… Land-use changes are a significant threat to biodiversity and are known to have tremendous effects on the taxonomic diversity and species composition…
Volume 105 Issue 5 of Journal of Ecology is now online! The September issue consists of 25 papers across a variety of different topics including plant-soil interactions, ecological-omics, plant-climate interactions and dispersal. Articles include a mini-review about the multifunctional legacy of plant traits and an essay review on moving-habitat models for climate change ecology. There…
European forests have been long regarded as invasion-resistant; however, recent findings suggest that invasive alien plant species increasingly colonise this ecosystem. In a new study published by Journal of Ecology, researchers from the Polish Academy of Sciences, Nebraska-Lincoln University and Jagiellonian University have analysed the mechanisms of invasion of alien walnut Juglans regia in over hundred forests…
Julienne Schiebold (University of Bayreuth) has written an article about her recently published paper; Exploiting mycorrhizas in broad daylight: Partial mycoheterotrophy is a common nutritional strategy in meadow orchids. With approximately 28,000 species, the Orchidaceae is often referred to as the largest plant family. Regardless of their geographical occurrence or life form, all orchid species are…
The editors of Journal of Ecology have put together this Virtual Issue to showcase some of the recent forest ecology research from Asia published in the journal, and in particular, our Biological Flora of the British Isles (BFBI) series. The BFBI accounts provide a concise summary of the ecology of British species, but inevitably, many of the accounts are…
Mexico is famous for being one of the most biodiverse countries on the planet. This amazing biodiversity is owed to the wide-ranging topography of the country – varying from 0 to 5600 metres above sea level – with the most diverse areas being in the southern and south-eastern parts of the country. Approximately 10% of…
Ecologists and evolutionary biologists for many decades happily coexisted largely ignoring each other. This separation was clearest in theory where ecological models assumed fixed, constant parameters, so evolution could not occur, and population genetics models assumed fixed selection coefficients which summarised all underlying ecological process that influence fitness. To an extent this reflected the obvious…
Nutrient-poor grasslands cover a substantial portion of the terrestrial surface and provide important ecosystem services ranging from forage and livestock production to stabilization of erosion-prone soils. The future of these grasslands under increased drought frequency and severity is difficult to predict, especially given the complex ecological interactions and feedbacks among plants, other organisms, and physical…
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