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.…
This year’s International Congress of Ecology (INTECOL 2017) is held in Beijing, China and is happening this week (August 20-25, 2017). The conference theme is Ecology and Civilization in a Changing World. We will get more information and feedback from the conference in few days but in the meantime, let’s talk a bit about China…
Mexico is famous for being one of the most biodiverse countries on the planet. This amazing biodiversity is owed to the wide-ranging topography of the country – varying from 0 to 5600 metres above sea level – with the most diverse areas being in the southern and south-eastern parts of the country. Approximately 10% of…
Timm Döbert, from CSIRO in Australia, recently had a paper published in Journal of Ecology entitled “Logging increases the functional and phylogenetic dispersion of understorey plant communities in tropical lowland rainforest”. Below, his co-author Bruce Webber describes the context of the research and highlight the main findings of their study. How does logging affect the diversity of rainforest understorey plant…
For the cover image for our latest issue we chose a photo from one of the Special Feature papers (Farwig et al. 2016) which showed an area of the Białowieża Forest in Eastern Poland. To make the most of all the great photos from our authors we have included a slideshow below. Read the full January…
The BES annual meeting is officially over, and what an amazing meeting it was! See the summary from Journal of Ecology’s Executive Editor David Gibson for his insight into #BES2015. Take note of the Special Features on two of the thematic topics that we hope to publish in the Journal over the next 12 months…
Biogeochemical cycling traces the pathways by which elements pass through both biotic and abiotic steps on their journeys between the earth and the atmosphere. Plants are a critical step in this process for many elements; however, traditional biogeochemistry views typically take a top down approach, treating plants as a ‘green box’ and failing to appreciate…
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…
One of my favourite manuscripts provides a detailed account as to why evolutionary biologists should be demographers (Metcalf & Pavard 2007). The authors argue that, because the propagation of genes into future generations depends on the st/age-specific vital rates of survival, fecundity and migration of individuals within and between populations, and such rates are precisely…
Last year Roberto Salguero-Gómez (Associate Editor, Journal of Ecology) interviewed Hal Caswell and you can listen to the interview in its entirety below. Roberto and Hal are co-authors on “The COMPADRE Plant Matrix Database: an open online repository for plant demography“, which was published in Journal of Ecology in issue 1 of 2015. Roberto is…
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