Biodiversity and plant functional traits Connor Fitzpatrick’s video podcast: Phylogenetic relatedness, phenotypic similarity and plant–soil feedbacks Connor is a plant ecologist who got his PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto. He studies the ecological and evolutionary importance of interactions between plants and soil and focuses on how variation within and among plant…
Global changes in terrestrial and marine ecosystems Lucia Fuchslueger’s video podcast: Drought history affects plant and microbial C turnover after a subsequent drought event Lucia Fuchslueger received her PhD from the University of Vienna (supervised by Andreas Richter and Michael Bahn). Lucia is currently a postdoc at Antwerpen University investigating how soil microbes mediate processes involved in organic matter…
Competition, plant enemies and defense mechanisms Felipe Albornoz’s video podcast: Native soilborne pathogens equalize differences in competitive ability between plants of contrasting nutrient-acquisition strategies Felipe Albornoz did his PhD at The University of Western Australia where he worked on mycorrhizal fungi in a 2 million years chronosequence. He studied how pedogenesis and plant communities influenced ectomycorrhizal…
In this new video podcast, Marc-Olivier Martin-Guay highlights the role of belowground responses in biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationship, asking three main questions: does adding below-ground biomass change diversity effect estimations? Do species shift their biomass allocation strategies within mixtures? Do we interpret correctly the origins of these diversity effects when ignoring below-ground biomass? Have a look at the…
In this video podcast, Alissa Brown highlights the role of shade tolerance and mycorrhizal type on conspecific negative density dependence in seedlings and saplings in forest. Alissa’s findings have recently been published in Journal of Ecology. Have a look at the video to discover what she found! If you want to know more, check out the full…
In this new video podcast, Xiaojuan Liu explains how species richness impacts growth-trait relationships in subtropical forest. These results are part of a large forest biodiversity-ecosystem functioning experiment in China (BEF China) and have just been published in Journal of Ecology (see Bongers et al. 2019). Xiaojuan’s video can also be found on the Journal of Ecology YouTube…
I always look forward to the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America although by the end of the marathon week I am with everyone else ready to head home. This year’s meeting ended a week ago and as I reflect on it my recurring thought was, what was the theme? I know that…
This year’s Harper Prize winner is Rutuja Chitra-Tarak for her paper; The roots of the drought: Hydrology and water uptake strategies mediate forest‐wide demographic response to precipitation. Rutuja received a PhD from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, went onto to do a post-doc at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, USA, and is now a post-doctoral…
This year’s Harper Prize winner is Rutuja Chitra-Tarak for her paper; The roots of the drought: Hydrology and water uptake strategies mediate forest‐wide demographic response to precipitation. Rutuja received a PhD from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, went onto to do a post-doc at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, USA, and is now a post-doctoral…
This new video podcast from Albert Pessarrodona focuses on marine ecology and shows that climate warming is strongly affecting underwater forests. But will ecosystem functions be maintained? In this video, Albert answer this question and highlights the main results of his recently published Journal of Ecology paper titled “Can ecosystem functioning be maintained despite climate‐driven shifts in species…
