Long-term ecological experiments in plant-soil ecosystems – a joint ECT-PSE Annual Science Conference

UPDATE: The abstract submission deadline has been extended to 5pm on Friday 15 March. Abstracts should be no longer than 300 words and submitted to this address: plantsoileco@britishecologicalsociety.org ECT/PSE-SIG 2019 ANNUAL SCIENCE MEETING – BUXTON, DERBYSHIRE 21/22 MAY 2019: https://www.ecologicalcontinuitytrust.org/events Plant, Soils, Ecosystems is one of the special interest groups of the British Ecological Society. PSE…

Volume 107 Issue 1

Volume 107, Issue 1 of Journal of Ecology is now online! This issue is a bumper issue! It is made up of 40 papers which includes 5 Open Access papers. The first paper, which is the editor’s choice paper for this issue, is about how disease plays a role in determining host range limits of plants. The…

Avoiding Loaded Terminology in Ecology

At Journal of Ecology we recently published in Early View a paper by Kazuya Kobayashi entitled “Sexual harassment sustains biodiversity via producing negative density-dependent population growth”. The use of the term ‘sexual harassment’ in the title and throughout the paper was a cause of significant and understandable concern among the Journal’s Twitter followers and beyond.…

Ecological Society of Australia Annual Conference 2018

The last week of November saw the annual conference of the Ecological Society of Australia held in Brisbane, the capital of Queensland, Australia. Our Associate Editor Peter Vesk kindly agreed to share with us some insights about the conference and the  interesting new findings presented during the week. The annual conference of the Ecological Society of…

World Soil Day 2018

Wednesday 5th December is World Soil Day 2018. This soil celebration gives me the opportunity to highlight great papers related to soil published in Journal of Ecology this year. While the role of soil in shaping plant community assembly, composition and diversity has long be recognized, the mechanisms involved to explain these effects are not always…

Sexual conflict: a key to sustaining biodiversity

  Kyoto University press release What factors sustain the diversity of life on our planet? This is the main question surrounding the study of biodiversity, but in spite of significant gains in our understanding of the field, many of the key factors defining it remain obscure. In a new paper published in Journal of Ecology, research…

Also of Interest… Methods in Ecology and Evolution

Last year at the BES Annual Meeting in Ghent, I took part in an R package workshop where I learned the rudiments of scripting R packages. The ‘traitfindr’ package that our group came up with and started is, well,….still in progress. Nevertheless, the writing and introduction of new R packages is somewhat of a cottage…

Fieldwork: UK, Austria, China & Mongolia

Journal of Ecology Senior Editor Richard Bardgett shares some images from his fieldwork this year. Wasdale Head in the Lake District, UK (Photo: R. Bardgett)  Grassland research sites at Wasdale Head in the English Lake District, where we are studying how grassland management alters the resistance and resilience of ecosystem properties to climate extremes. Vent,…

Fieldwork: Grasslands across Eurasia

For the first post in our new fieldwork section on the blog, Salza Palpurina has shared some photos taken by her colleagues related to her recently published Journal of Ecology paper; The type of nutrient limitation affects the plant species richness–productivity relationship: Evidence from dry grasslands across Eurasia.  Altai Mountains, Ongudai district, Altai Republic, Russia…