The Editor’s Choice paper for volume 106 issue 3 is a paper on niche occupancy and community assembly by Yuanzhi Li and colleagues. Journal of Ecology Associate Editor Peter Vesk has given his thoughts on the paper below. In the latest issue of Journal of Ecology, Li et al. present an exciting new investigation of…
The Editor’s Choice paper for this issue is Woodland resilience to regional drought: Dominant controls on tree regeneration following overstorey mortality by Miranda Redmond and colleagues. Associate Editor Peter Bellingham has taken a closer look at the paper and shares his thoughts below… All but one of the warmest years since 1880, based on global combined land and…
The Editor’s Choice paper for the final issue of 2018 is titled Manipulating two olfactory cues causes a biological control beetle to shift to non-target plant species by Li et al. Professor Stephen Bonser, who handled the paper as an Associate Editor, gives some thoughts on the paper… Phytophagous insects are potentially useful biocontrol agents. Insect…
The Editor’s Choice paper for issue 105.5 is a study that looks into rapid plant evolution in response to changes in land use. Author Eva Völler tells us more about the paper below… Land-use changes are a significant threat to biodiversity and are known to have tremendous effects on the taxonomic diversity and species composition…
Nutrient-poor grasslands cover a substantial portion of the terrestrial surface and provide important ecosystem services ranging from forage and livestock production to stabilization of erosion-prone soils. The future of these grasslands under increased drought frequency and severity is difficult to predict, especially given the complex ecological interactions and feedbacks among plants, other organisms, and physical…
The Editor’s Choice paper for Issue 105.3 is titled; A global test for phylogenetic signal in shifts in flowering time under climate change. Authors Nicole Rafferty and Paul Nabity have written a blog post about their paper… Biological signals of climate change abound. One of the most conspicuous is changes in the timing of life history events,…
Associate Editor Matt McGlone (Landcare Research, New Zealand) has written the Editor’s Choice blog for issue 105.2 on the paper “An assessment of carbon and nutrient limitations in the formation of the southern Andes tree line” by Alex Fajardo and Frida Piper.
External disturbances are powerful drivers of community and ecosystem reorganization over most of the Earth’s terrestrial surface. As such, they cause losses of plant biomass, reset succession, modify stocks and fluxes of nutrients, and change trophic dynamics. Furthermore, most ecosystems are subjected to multiple disturbance agents, and these disturbances do not operate in isolation from…
If evolution happened anew, what would the present-day plant world look like? That is, would the randomized processes that govern evolutionary change tell a different story? And particularly for plants which are sessile organisms, is the starting point of ‘who gets there first’ the most important of all? Priority effects – the order and timing…
The Editor’s Choice paper for Issue 104:5 is titled ‘On the link between functional traits and growth rate: meta-analysis shows effects change with plant size, as predicted’ and was written by a team from the Department of Biological Sciences of Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Many thanks to authors Anaïs Gibert, Daniel Falster and Mark Westoby for providing some…
