New Orleans has been an exciting venue for the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America this year (#ESA2018). Delegates were faced with the task of balancing time in sessions and sampling the culinary and musical delights of this vibrant American city. Journal of Ecology Associate Editor delegates enjoyed dinner at Tommy’s following a…
Franciska De Vries is an Associate Professor at The University of Manchester. Her research interests are focused on the effects of land use and climate change on soil biodiversity, and subsequently on the effects of changes in soil biodiversity on ecosystem processes. She is particularly interested in how plants and soil microbial communities interact under…
Science rarely waits at your office door and most likely follows you home, engaging your family and friends. Drawn to the interesting science, friends and family become helpers, facilitators and allies in your research. However, the contribution of your relatives and friends may go totally unrecognised in the ultimate output of your research – the…
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…
In this video podcast, Luisa Conti explains how ‘Functional trait differences and trait plasticity mediate biotic resistance to potential plant invaders‘, which is also the title of her recent paper published in Journal of Ecology. Luisa’s video can also be found on the Journal of Ecology YouTube channel (English subtitles available). Luisa Conti is a plant ecologist. She…
Our new video podcast brings us below the ocean surface and explores the role of interacting local stressors on algal turf communities, an important driver of coral reef development and survival. This study conducted by Caitlin Fong at the University of California Santa Barbara (USA) and titled ‘Simultaneous synergistic, antagonistic and additive interactions between multiple local…
Liesje Mommer‘s research focuses on “belowground plant-plant interactions” within the Plant Ecology and Nature Conservation group of Wageningen University, the Netherlands. Recently, the theme of her research has expanded to include plant-fungal interactions, as root-root interactions cannot be understood without considering the myriad of microbes in the soil. To reveal these ‘hidden’ interactions and the consequences…
Sunday 11th February is International Day of Women and Girls in Science. To mark this day and celebrate the occasion, we asked some of our Associate Editors to share some of their inspirations and experiences in an effort to find what it really means to be a woman working in ecology. Who are the women in science…
Everyone would agree that Ecology Across Borders (#EAB2017), the joint annual meeting of the BES, Gfö, NECOV and EEF, was a great success. As usual, the quality of talks and the ecological concepts and findings developed during the conference was outstanding. However, what struck me the most was the increasing number of workshops and events…
This new video podcast from Eveline Krab is dedicated to winter ecology and shows that climate warming is also happening in winter! In this video, Eveline highlights the main results of her paper recently accepted for publication in Journal of Ecology titled “Winter warming effects on tundra shrub performance are species-specific and dependent on spring…
