World Wildlife Day 2021: Forests and Livelihoods

3rd March is World Wildlife Day! For 2021, World Wildlife Day is being celebrated under the theme ‘Forests and Livelihoods: Sustaining People and Planet’, as a way to highlight the central role of forests in sustaining the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people globally, and particularly of Indigenous and local communities with historic ties…

The importance of gardens for urban nectar supply

Lead author Nick Tew discusses recent Journal of Ecology article: Quantifying nectar production by flowering plants in urban and rural landscapes. Find out more about the importance of residential gardens for nectar supply within urban areas of the UK. You can also read the press release for this article here. Insect pollinators are faced with…

Is resprouting a persistence trait in tropical forests?

Author James Dalling discusses recent paper “Nutrient availability predicts multiple stem frequency, an indicator of species resprouting capacity in tropical forests” by Heineman, Turner and Dalling. Read on to find out more about variations in the resprouting ability of tropical trees. The life of a tree is seldom the unobstructed path of a single stem…

Keep your forests tight with pedunculate oak

In this latest Author Blog, Lionel R. Hertzog and Michael P. Perring discuss their recent paper: ‘Overstorey composition shapes across-trophic level community relationships in deciduous forest regardless of fragmentation context.’ Community ecology is complex; some even say that it is a mess (Lawton, 1999). After all, everything apparently depends on everything else in diffuse ways.…

Indigenous stewardship and the protection of plant biodiversity under global change

Georgia Hart-Fredeluces discusses her recently published Journal of Ecology article: ‘Simulated Indigenous fire stewardship increases the population growth rate of an understory herb‘. Find out more about about the importance of understanding Indigenous management practices to protecting plant biodiversity. Plant biodiversity is foundational to ecosystem integrity and human well-being, yet it continues to decline with…

What drives biodiversity patterns?

Jessie Woodbridge discusses research recently published in the Journal of Ecology: “What drives biodiversity patterns? Using long-term multi-disciplinary data to discern centennial-scale change” Find out more about the research that reveals relationships between human population change, insect faunal group turnover, pollen diversity and climate trends through the Holocene. Biodiversity plays an important role in ecosystem…

Reflections on the Festival of Ecology

It’s hard to believe that it has been a month since the Festival of Ecology! Like many other participants (if the Functional Ecology Twitter poll is an accurate representation), I was mixing my normal work with attending some of the online conference events of BES 2020. During the main festival, I caught some of the…

Happy National Tree Week!

Last week was National Tree Week. The UK has celebrated National Tree Week as the start of the tree planting season since 1975. It is the UK’s largest annual tree celebration. We took to Twitter to ask for your most fascinating tree facts. Here are some of our favourites. North American fagaceae retain their leaves…

Many Paths to Intermediate Symbiont Prevalence

Lead author Marion Donald discusses her recently published Journal of Ecology article: Context-dependent variability in the population prevalence and individual fitness effects of plant-fungal symbiosis. Find out more about about this investigation into intermediate symbiont prevalence. Microbial symbionts are common partners of nearly every macro-organism on Earth. While some symbioses are deeply integrated, rendering them…