International Women’s Day: Choose to Challenge

International Women’s Day is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. The campaign theme for International Women’s Day 2021 is ‘Choose To Challenge’. Find out more on Twitter by following @womensday and using #IWD2021 and #ChooseToChallenge. To mark International Women’s Day 2021 we hear from our Senior Editor, Yvonne…

Sprent Reviews

We are delighted to announce the publication of our first Sprent Review in Journal of Ecology, by Julie Ardley and Janet Sprent on the “Evolution and biogeography of actinorhizal plants and legumes.” Here our Senior Editors, Richard Bardgett and David Gibson, introduce the Sprent Reviews series, discusses the career of Janet Sprent and highlights the…

World Wildlife Day 2021: Forests and Livelihoods

3rd March is World Wildlife Day! For 2021, World Wildlife Day is being celebrated under the theme ‘Forests and Livelihoods: Sustaining People and Planet’, as a way to highlight the central role of forests in sustaining the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people globally, and particularly of Indigenous and local communities with historic ties…

Drought revisited: manipulating humidity changes the whole ball game

Authors Beatriz Aguirre and Alexandra (Sasha) Wright discuss the findings of their new article – The experimental manipulation of atmospheric drought: Teasing out the role of microclimate in biodiversity experiments. This article is also part of our upcoming Special Feature on Facilitative Mechanisms! Drought occurrence is increasing due to anthropogenic climate change. Drought can negatively…

Transparent Peer Review update

In November 2019 two of the British Ecological Society journals, Journal of Ecology and Methods in Ecology and Evolution, began trialling a Transparent Peer Review process. This meant that (unless the authors opted out) the reviewer reports, author responses and editor decisions were made available on Publons for all of our published articles. 15 months…

The importance of gardens for urban nectar supply

Lead author Nick Tew discusses recent Journal of Ecology article: Quantifying nectar production by flowering plants in urban and rural landscapes. Find out more about the importance of residential gardens for nectar supply within urban areas of the UK. You can also read the press release for this article here. Insect pollinators are faced with…

Is resprouting a persistence trait in tropical forests?

Author James Dalling discusses recent paper “Nutrient availability predicts multiple stem frequency, an indicator of species resprouting capacity in tropical forests” by Heineman, Turner and Dalling. Read on to find out more about variations in the resprouting ability of tropical trees. The life of a tree is seldom the unobstructed path of a single stem…

Cover stories: Volume 109 Issue 2

The cover image for our new issue shows an ant standing on the tip of a Lafoensia pacari leaf in the Cerrado, Brazil. Author Kleber Del-Claro shares the story behind this stunning image, which was taken by co-author Denise Lange and relates to their recent research article “Climate seasonality drives ant–plant–herbivore interactions via plant phenology in an extrafloral…

Editor’s Choice: Volume 109 Issue 2

The Editor’s Choice for our February issue is “Spatial mapping of root systems reveals diverse strategies of soil exploration and resource contest in grassland plants“ by Lepik et al. This article combines fine‐scale measurements of plant root distributions with spatial statistics, yielding new insights into plant behavioural strategies. Here the handling Editor, JC Cahill, provides an overview…