Zak Ratajczak and Laura Ladwig contributed a chapter to Grasslands and Climate Change, the latest volume of the Ecological Reviews series. Zak tells us more about their chapter below. Critical thresholds or “tipping points” are familiar to most of us. Think of a boat out at sea, which can stay afloat wave after wave after wave, without much…
The latest in the Ecological Reviews series is Grasslands and Climate Change. Kathryn Yurkonis, co-author with Will Harris of the chapter ‘Keeping up: climate-driven evolutionary change, dispersal and migration‘, tells us more about their contribution to the book below. Can our grassland species keep up with climate change? Can we predict which species are more…
Eric Griffin and colleagues recently had their paper, Plant host identity and soil macronutrients explain little variation in sapling endophyte community composition: Is disturbance an alternative explanation?, published in Journal of Ecology. You can read more about the paper below. Recent advances in high-throughput sequencing are enabling scientists to uncover the structure and function of microbial…
Deepak Barua is an Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune, India. The overarching goals of Deepak’s work are to understand how interactions between traits translate to plant performance, and test how variation in performance influences adaptation and persistence in complex ecological environments. This work spans levels of biological organization:…
Grasslands are the most extensive terrestrial biome, and have the largest total global accumulation of soil carbon. Grasslands and their ecotonal neighbours the savannas, have been the crucible for much of human history and activity. However, despite being lauded and loved because of their charismatic megafauna (e.g., lions in African grasslands and savannas, bison in…
Anna Liang (Washington University in St. Louis, USA) and colleagues recently had their paper on snail herbivory published in Journal of Ecology. This study was a large part of Anna’s undergraduate senior thesis done under the supervision of Scott Mangan and Claudia Stein. Many thanks to Claudia and Anna for sharing these photos from their…
Journal of Ecology author and Associate Editor Amy Iler tells us more about her new paper on the effects of climate change‐induced early flowering in aspen sunflowers… As someone who has spent hours upon hours counting flowers at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) to measure flowering phenology, I often wondered how the changes in flowering…
Friday 8th March is International Women’s Day – a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. The theme for 2019 is Balance for Better. Find out more on Twitter by following @womensday and using #IWD2019 and #BalanceforBetter. To mark International Women’s Day 2019 we hear from our Associate Editors Imma Oliveras and Mahasweta…
Before writing and publishing papers and presenting exciting new findings, most ecologists experience one of the best things about doing science: field work! If you are lucky – as I was in this case – doing field work means great weather, an awesome team, a beautiful landscape, hard work, good samples, lots of fun and…
Cynthia Chang and Ben Turner are the guest editors for our latest special feature: Ecological Succession in a Changing World. Cynthia and Ben tell us more about their special feature and the inspiration behind it, below. There is no doubt that succession is a foundation of ecology. However, when ecologists talk about succession, it often…
