Robert Buchkowski has written a blog post about his Journal of Ecology paper on how interactions between green and brown food webs impact plants and nutrient cycling. Herbivores indirectly impact plant growth by altering the speed at which nutrients are recycled through the soil and back into plant tissue. Changes in plant leaf chemical or physical…
The latest Biological Flora of the British Isles account is Ulmus glabra, written by Peter Thomas, Duncan Stone, and Nicole La Porta. Peter Thomas tells us more about Ulmus glabra in the blog post below. Find this account, and the rest of the series, online in the new BFBI database. A recent visit to Aberdeen was…
Eva Malecore tells us more about her newly published paper about the effects of phylogenetic distance on seedling emergence… In his “Origin of Species” of 1859, Charles Darwin expressed the hypothesis that exotic species more closely related to the native community would be more likely to naturalize, since they would share preadaptation to the local environment.…
Jennifer Rowntree (Manchester Metropolitan University) and Hayley Craig (University of Manchester) have had their study on grassland species and genetic diversity published in Journal of Ecology. Jennifer tells us more about the paper in the article below, and you can also read the Manchester Metropolitan University press release. We are currently experiencing a ‘biodiversity crisis’…
Daniel Souto‐Vilarós tells us more about his recent Journal of Ecology paper on fig-wasp mutualisms. You can see Daniel present his work at Evolution 2018 – his poster is part of Session 1 and will be available to view up on Level 2 on August 19th and 20th (Poster number: P-0200, S-18). Plant-pollinator interactions offer a unique…
Matt Barbour tells us about his recently published paper; Trait plasticity is more important than genetic variation in determining species richness of associated communities. If you are at Evolution 2018 in Montpellier, you can hear more about Matt’s work in his presentation: Food-web complexity alters the fitness landscape of an insect herbivore (Monday 20th August, Auditorium Berlioz, 10.10am, as part of…
Michał Bogdziewicz, Nathanael Lichti and Rafał Zwolak recently had their paper about predation and invasions accepted in the journal. You could read more about their paper in the blog post below. Plants throughout the world are dispersed by scatterhoarding animals, including jays, squirrels and chipmunks, wood mice, the neotropical agoutis and agouchies, and kangaroo rats…
Read more about Karin Burghardt and colleagues’ recently published paper on litter decomposition in their blog post below… Often when dead leaves from a plant fall to the ground and begin decomposing, we assume that all leaves from a plant species are equivalent from the perspective of decomposers. This assumption is even formalized in many models of…
Nina Joffard and colleagues recently had their paper on the pollination niches of orchids accepted in Journal of Ecology. The authors tell us more about their paper below… Plant-pollinator interactions can be seen as part of species’ ecological niches. One of the major challenges in the study of these interactions is to determine what factors underlie…
For Endangered Species Day 2018, Pedro Quintana Ascencio and Eric Menges have written a blog post about their recently published paper on the population dynamics of Hypericum cumulicola, an endangered herb across a range of landscape drivers. We are convinced that limited spatial replication and short study intervals can hinder our ability to adequately understand and predict population dynamics.…
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