In the first podcast video of 2017, Julia Chacón-Labella presents the findings of her recent study, accepted for publication in Journal of Ecology, and titled ‘Evidence for a stochastic geometry of biodiversity: the effects of species abundance, richness and intraspecific clustering‘. This study was part of Julia’s PhD project on elucidating spatial patterns of diversity in a species-rich shrubland, that…
Julieta Rosell is based in the Instituto de Ecología at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México – one of the largest Universities in Latin America. Julieta’s research focuses on plant ecology and evolution. She has worked on the functional ecology of woody stems, including mechanics, storage, and structure of bark and wood, along with the evolution of life forms in…
Happy New Year to all our readers! I started working for the Blog a bit more than a year ago (I really enjoy it!) with the help of the great Editorial Blog Team including Executive Editor David Gibson, Assistant Editor James Ross and Managing Editors Emilie Aimé and Andrea Baier. Together we are committed to…
It was a pleasant surprise to see some real plants at the BES Annual Meeting in Liverpool. The Ecological Continuity Trust (ECT), a charity supporting long-term ecosystem experiments, had model calcareous grassland communities on display at their stand, along with two different phenotypes of Festuca ovina. These plants were used in a comparative study with…
The BES meeting 2016 in Liverpool is now over and what a great meeting it was. Don’t worry: if you could not make it this year, you can hear all about it in the new blog post below from Jane Catford, our new Associate Editor. Jane kindly accepted to share her thoughts with you on the best…
In this new video, Felipe Albornoz presents the findings of his recent study, accepted for publication in Journal of Ecology, and titled ‘Native soilborne pathogens equalize differences in competitive ability between plants of contrasting nutrient-acquisition strategies‘. This study was part of Felipe’s PhD project on the role of mycorrhizal fungi on plant-plant interactions and in maintaining plant diversity, that he…
In this new video, Gesche Blume-Werry presents the very interesting findings of her study, published in the last issue (November) of Journal of Ecology, and titled ‘Short-term climate change manipulation effects do not scale up to long-term legacies: effects of an absent snow cover on boreal forest plants‘. This study was part of Gesche’s PhD project in which she explored…
Charlotte Grossiord et al. have an interesting paper recently published online in Journal of Ecology, entitled ‘Precipitation, not air temperature, drives functional responses of trees in semi-arid ecosystems‘. The scientists from the Los Alamos National Laboratory provide evidences that trees in semi-arid systems may acclimate to reduced precipitation but not to temperature rise. Charlotte kindly agreed to…
In this last interview from the EcoSummit2016 conference, Gerlinde De Deyn talks about plant-soil feedbacks in agricultural systems, and how outcomes of fundamental research can be used to improve farming practices and move toward more sustainable food production. Gerlinde also talks about the importance of raising awareness about soil and to inform the public, farmers and policy…
As mentioned in a previous blog post, ‘Belowground Ecology’ was an important topic of the EcoSummit2016 congress that was held two weeks ago in Montpellier, France (Corum, Aug 28th – Sept 1st). During the conference, I had the chance to meet with many leading soil scientists and invited three of them to talk about soil – Richard…
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