Karina Guo: Using machine learning to link climate, phylogeny and leaf area in eucalypts through a 50-fold expansion of leaf trait datasets

2024 HARPER PRIZE SHORTLIST: For the next two weeks, we are featuring the articles shortlisted for the 2024 Harper Prize. The Harper Prize is an annual award for the best early career research paper published in Journal of Ecology. Karin Guo’s ‘Using machine learning to link climate, phylogeny and leaf area in eucalypts through a 50-fold expansion of leaf trait datasets’…

Joshua Brian: Release from aboveground enemies increases seedling survival in grasslands

2024 HARPER PRIZE SHORTLIST: For the next two weeks, we are featuring the articles shortlisted for the 2024 Harper Prize. The Harper Prize is an annual award for the best early career research paper published in Journal of Ecology. Joshua Brian’s ‘Release from aboveground enemies increases seedling survival in grasslands’ is one of those shortlisted for the award. About the paper:…

Eugénie Mas: Drought effects in Mediterranean forests are not alleviated by diversity-driven water source partitioning

2024 HARPER PRIZE SHORTLIST: For the next two weeks, we are featuring the articles shortlisted for the 2024 Harper Prize. The Harper Prize is an annual award for the best early career research paper published in Journal of Ecology. Eugénie Mas’s ‘Drought effects in Mediterranean forests are not alleviated by diversity-driven water source partitioning’ is one of those shortlisted…

How beech trees fare under drought: Lessons from recent climate extremes

Guangqi Zhang, UMR SILVA – INRAE, Grand-Est Nancy Research Center, discusses his article: Analyzing resilience of European beech tree to recurrent extreme drought events through ring growth, wood anatomy and stable isotopes As the climate warms, extreme weather events like droughts are expected to become more frequent and intense. A recent extreme and recurrent drought…

2024 Harper Prize Shortlist: Early Career Research Award

The Harper Prize is awarded annually by the British Ecological Society for the best paper in Journal of Ecology by an early career author. We are pleased to present the shortlisted papers for the 2024 award, published in Volume 112: Daiki Takahashi: Deer grazing drove an assemblage-level evolution of plant dwarfism in an insular system Eugénie Mas: Drought effects in Mediterranean forests…

Wood trait-decay relationships depend on environmental context

Donghao Wu, School of Ecology, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-Sen University, discusses his article: Wood trait-decay relationships vary with topography and rainfall seasonality in a subtropical forest in China Wood trait-decay relationship Deadwood stores 8% of global forest carbon, and thus it is important to understand the dominant drivers of wood decomposition rates. Many physical…

Glucosinolates are probably not novel weapons that promote invasion by Alliaria petiolata

Robert I. Colautti (@ColauttiLab), Queen’s University in Canada, discusses his article: Direct and indirect fitness effects of plant metabolites and genetic constraints limit evolution of allelopathy in an invading plant A storied history As a relatively young discipline, invasion ecology has developed through a proliferation of hypotheses that often fail to hold against careful experimentation.…

Legacies of fire influence how plant communities respond to the next burn

Anita Simha, Louisiana State University, USA, discusses their article: Short-term prescribed fire frequency manipulation alters community response to subsequent fires in a Southeastern pine savanna Fire regimes are shifting globally Fire is a key disturbance that affects plant communities, but one challenge of studying the effects of fire is that the impacts of any one…

International Women’s Day 2025 – Yvonne Buckley

To celebrate International Women’s Day 2025, we are excited to share a collection of blog posts showcasing the work of some of the BES community. In each post, they discuss their experiences in ecology, as well as what this year’s theme, ‘Accelerate Action’, means to them. What work do you do? I’m an ecologist working…

The mechanisms of the depletion of alpine meadow seed banks due to nitrogen enrichment

Miaojun Ma, Gansu Gannan Grassland Ecosystem National Observation and Research Station, State Key Laboratory of Herbage Improvement and Grassland Agro-ecosystems, College of Ecology, Lanzhou University, discusses his article: Multiple mechanisms associated with loss of seed bank diversity under nitrogen enrichment Background Anthropogenic activities have caused an increase in atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition, which threatens the…