A new study from the Department of Soil Quality at Wageningen University and the Department of Terrestrial Ecology at Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW) gives evidence that plants grow better in soil from other species. Published today in Journal of Ecology, the paper is written by Cortois et al. and is titled ‘Plant-soil feedbacks: role of plant functional group and plant traits‘. …
Editor’s note We are very pleased to announce that Jenni McDonald has been selected to receive the Postdoctoral Excellence Award by the Ecological Society of America’s Plant Population Ecology section for her Journal of Ecology paper, “Transients drive the demographic dynamics of plant populations in variable environments.” This paper was part of a BES cross-journal…
New lay summary wrote by Manuel Delgado-Baquerizo about his paper”Lack of functional redundancy in the relationship between microbial diversity and ecosystem functioning” published in the last issue (July) of Journal of Ecology. Happy reading! The shape of the relationship between microbial diversity and ecosystem function (BEF) remains unclear, which limits our capacity to assess the impact of microbial diversity…
Mahasweta Saha and collaborators have an interesting paper published in the last issue (July) of Journal of Ecology titled “Rapid adaptation to controlling new microbial epibionts in the invaded range promotes invasiveness of an exotic seaweed“. The lead author of this article, Mahasweta Saha, wrote a blog post below describing the context and results of her research. Along with…
Philip Hahn and John Orrock have an interesting paper accepted in Journal of Ecology titled “Ontogenetic responses of four plant species to additive and interactive effects of land-use history, canopy structure, and herbivory“. The authors have provided a lay summary and a picture of their research below. Herbivory can have destructive effects on a plant’s…
Today is Endangered Species Day and to mark the occasion the BES journals have put together a Virtual Issue of recent papers on endangered species of various taxa from around the world. Journal of Ecology papers are strongly represented, showing that endangered species day is about more than just lions and tigers! The papers from Journal of…
With an estimated >27,000 species, the orchid family is one of the most speciose plant families within the Angiosperms. At the same time, it harbours a large number of threatened species, making it one of the most vulnerable plant families as well. Due to their spectacular floral diversity, orchids have long attracted wide attention from…
Why aren’t cushion plants always the best facilitators? Consequences of eco-evo processes in alpine systems. In recent decades facilitation in plant communities has moved from being largely neglected to a well-established phenomenon (Brooker et al. 2008). However, the simple picture of greater facilitation in stressful environments is gradually fading. Not only does abiotic stress change…
Plant invaders: same difference? To paraphrase Tolstoy, is each plant invader alike, or is each invasive in its own way? Among the hundreds of papers on this subject that have been published in the last two decades, a paper by Bezeng and colleagues stands out as an unusually thorough investigation in a flora of great…
Issue 103:3 is online now. The latest Editor’s Choice paper is “A spatially explicit model for flowering time in bamboos: long rhizomes drive the evolution of delayed flowering” by Tachiki et al. Associate Editor – Richard Shefferson – has written a commentary on the paper below. Bamboos, sex, and the ultimate sacrifice Nature is a…
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