The more compelling talks I’ve seen at #ESA2017 are the ones that have left me with more questions than answers. Reflecting on this, I think that the role of conferences in ecology is switching from advertising your work to creating opportunities for open conversations. With the rise of Twitter, blogs and preprints, advertising your new results…
I write this as the week-long 2017 meeting of the Ecological Society of America wraps up in Portland, Oregon. I’m a veteran of many ESA meetings; my first was in 1977, giving me a long-term perspective indeed on what has changed, and what has been stable, in the structure and human dimensions of the annual…
Journal of Ecology was well represented at the 2017 annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America with Senior Managing Editor Andrea Baier on the BES stand in the convention hall, and several Associate Editors joining me for a board meeting and dinner, in prowling the halls, networking, and attending and giving presentations. I survived…
A trait is any aspect of an organism that defines it with respect to a concept. A trait may be color, when examining heat absorption; accent, in the case of humans when attempting to approximate nationality; specific leaf area (i.e., area to dry mass ratio of a leaf) when interested in investment in photosynthetic machinery…
European forests have been long regarded as invasion-resistant; however, recent findings suggest that invasive alien plant species increasingly colonise this ecosystem. In a new study published by Journal of Ecology, researchers from the Polish Academy of Sciences, Nebraska-Lincoln University and Jagiellonian University have analysed the mechanisms of invasion of alien walnut Juglans regia in over hundred forests…
Journal of Ecology Executive Editor David Gibson, Associate Editor Lorena Gómez-Aparicio, and Methods in Ecology and Evolution Senior Editor Bob O’Hara recently attended a workshop “The hierarchy-of-hypotheses approach: Exploring its potential for structuring and analyzing theory, research and evidence across disciplines” August 19-21, in Hannover, Germany. Below they tell us more about this workshop. Set…
Julienne Schiebold (University of Bayreuth) has written an article about her recently published paper; Exploiting mycorrhizas in broad daylight: Partial mycoheterotrophy is a common nutritional strategy in meadow orchids. With approximately 28,000 species, the Orchidaceae is often referred to as the largest plant family. Regardless of their geographical occurrence or life form, all orchid species are…
The editors of Journal of Ecology have put together this Virtual Issue to showcase some of the recent forest ecology research from Asia published in the journal, and in particular, our Biological Flora of the British Isles (BFBI) series. The BFBI accounts provide a concise summary of the ecology of British species, but inevitably, many of the accounts are…
Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) press release Do young pines build up food reserves at the expense of growth to enable them to survive longer in the event of a drought? This controversial hypothesis is refuted by a new study carried out by the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow…
Mexico is famous for being one of the most biodiverse countries on the planet. This amazing biodiversity is owed to the wide-ranging topography of the country – varying from 0 to 5600 metres above sea level – with the most diverse areas being in the southern and south-eastern parts of the country. Approximately 10% of…
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