Freshwater Plant Ecology

Journal of Ecology is pleased to announce a new Virtual Issue on Freshwater Plant Ecology. Featuring research on algae, phytoplankton, aquatic biofilms, invasive species, dispersal, phylogenetics and much more! Here our Editors Amy Austin, Christer Nilsson and Janne Alahuhta give us an overview of the themes covered in this collection of papers. Streams, lakes, rivers…

Harper Prize Winner 2019: Maria Leunda

Author Maria Leunda offers an insight into the research behind her paper Ice cave reveals environmental forcing of long‐term Pyrenean tree line dynamics, which won our 2019 Harper Prize. Maria also further discusses how she ended up doing this exciting research and introduces her study site in the Central Pyrenees.  Alpine ecosystems are particularly sensitive…

Editor’s Choice: Volume 108 Issue 4

How Will Climate Change Affect Community Stability? There’s a great deal of concern and uncertainty over the patterns and causal mechanisms that underlie community grassland change in response to climate change (Ratajczak & Ladwig 2019). Experimental work is needed to better understand the potentially synergistic effects of global change stressors on stability of grasslands. In…

Happy World Mangrove Day 2020!

To celebrate World Mangrove Day 2020, we’re taking a closer look at this important ecosystem and highlighting some of the fascinating mangrove papers that have been published in Journal of Ecology in recent years. In 2015, in order to raise awareness of the importance of mangrove ecosystems, the General Conference of UNESCO designated 26 July…

Cover Stories: Volume 108 Issue 4

The cover image for our new issue shows a native New Zealand bee, visiting the flowers of an alien creeping thistle. Author and photographer, Carine Emer shares her insight into the ecology of New Zealand, this captivating photograph and her related research paper: Alien plants and flower visitors disrupt the seasonal dynamics of mutualistic networks by Arroyo‐Correa, Burkle…

Falling seed size in forest fruits after Amazonian fires

Author Joseph Hawes discusses recently published Journal of Ecology article: A large-scale assessment of plant dispersal mode and seed traits across human-modified Amazonian forests by Hawes et al.  Find out more about the effects of disturbance on functional traits related to seed dispersal in a tropical forest and the implications of this for the future.…

Functional traits that moderate tropical tree recruitment during post‐windstorm secondary succession

Author Hao Ran Lai discusses recently published Journal of Ecology article: “Functional traits that moderate tropical tree recruitment during post-windstorm secondary succession” by Lai et al.  Find out more about their study on what causes differences in tree recruitment in a tropical lowland forest in Singapore. Understanding how species respond to environmental changes is becoming an…

Harper Prize Shortlist 2019: Ole Petter Laksforsmo Vindstad

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…