“We are nothing if we do not deal with our roots.” Author Mauro Brum offers an insight into his paper “Hydrological niche segregation defines forest structure and drought tolerance strategies in a seasonal Amazon forest“, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Harper Prize. Mauro also discusses his further research and what (and who!) inspired him to…
The Journal of Ecology article “Can novel pest outbreaks drive ecosystem transitions in northern‐boreal birch forest?” was shortlisted for the Harper Prize early researcher award earlier this spring. In this blog post, first author Ole Petter Laksforsmo Vindstad explains how the emergence of novel climate-driven outbreaks by phytophagous insects came to define the trajectory of…
In this post author Katie Baer, offers an insight into her paper Declining demographic performance and dispersal limitation influence the geographic distribution of the perennial forb Astragalus utahensis (Fabaceae), which was shortlisted for the 2019 Harper Prize. Katie also discusses her wider research and ecological career. You can see a full list of all shortlisted papers in the Harper…
In this post, Eric Griffin, Assistant Professor at New Mexico Highlands University, discusses his paper Plant host identity and soil macronutrients explain little variation in sapling endophyte community composition: Is disturbance an alternative explanation?, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Harper Prize. You can see a full list of all shortlisted papers in the Harper…
The John L Harper Early Career Researcher Award is given each year to the best paper in the journal by an early career author at the start of their career. We’re delighted to announce that the 2019 winner is Maria Leunda her article ‘Ice cave reveals environmental forcing of long‐term Pyrenean tree line dynamics. The…
The Harper Prize is awarded by the British Ecological Society each year for the best paper in Journal of Ecology written by an early career author. Today we are pleased to present the shortlisted papers for this year’s award. These papers were published in 2019 (Volume 107, Issues 1-6). The winner will be selected in the coming weeks so…
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…
In this second Harper Prize video podcast, I present the findings of my highly commended paper entitled ‘Stoichiometric N:P flexibility and mycorrhizal symbiosis favour plant resistance against drought‘. This experiment was carried out at The University of Sydney (Australia) with Alberto Canarini and Feike Dijkstra through a postdoctoral fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation.…
Each year, as well as selecting an overall winner for the Harper Prize (Jenny Zambrano, see previous blog post), the editors of Journal of Ecology also select two highly commended papers. This year the two highly commended papers are from Connor Fitzpatrick et al. titled ‘Phylogenetic relatedness, phenotypic similarity and plant–soil feedbacks‘ and myself, Pierre Mariotte et al.…
The winner of the Harper Prize 2017 is Jenny Zambrano. Jenny’s paper, ‘Neighbourhood defence gene similarity effects on tree performance: a community transcriptomic approach’, takes a community functional phylogenomic approach to understand how defence genes drive tree community structure and dynamics. Jenny originates from Colombia and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the National Socio-Environmental…
