Harper Prize Highly Commended Paper 2016: Ecological Legacies of Civil War on Savanna Tree Cover

Each year, as well as selecting an overall winner for the Harper Prize (see Martina’s interview), the editors of Journal of Ecology also select two highly commended papers. This year we had two fantastic highly commended papers by Kris Kramer-Walter et al. titled ‘Root traits are multidimensional: specific root length is independent from root tissue density and…

Interview with Harper Prize Winner 2016 Martina Treurnicht

The Harper Prize 2016 for the best paper published in Journal of Ecology by an early career researcher has been awarded to Martina Treurnicht.  Martina and colleagues collected 3454 population-level records from across the global range of these species in the Cape Floristic Region of South Africa. The findings of her paper entitled ‘Environmental drivers of…

Virtual Issue: Ecology in an Evolving World – The dawn of Evolutionary Ecology

Ecologists and evolutionary biologists for many decades happily coexisted largely ignoring each other. This separation was clearest in theory where ecological models assumed fixed, constant parameters, so evolution could not occur, and population genetics models assumed fixed selection coefficients which summarised all underlying ecological process that influence fitness. To an extent this reflected the obvious…

Editor’s Choice 105.4

Nutrient-poor grasslands cover a substantial portion of the terrestrial surface and provide important ecosystem services ranging from forage and livestock production to stabilization of erosion-prone soils. The future of these grasslands under increased drought frequency and severity is difficult to predict, especially given the complex ecological interactions and feedbacks among plants, other organisms, and physical…

Volume 105, Issue 4

Volume 105 Issue 4 of Journal of Ecology is now online! The July 2017 issue of Journal of Ecology includes a special feature titled; Ecological solutions to global food security. Edited by David Gibson and Richard Bardgett, this special feature considers the ways that plant ecologists can help meet the challenges of food production and…

Three days of plant ecology in Germany

Journal of Ecology Associate Editors Jane Catford and Rob Salguero-Gómez were both keynote speakers at this year’s PopBio conference. Here is their report… A few weeks ago, we had the privilege of attending PopBio2017 in Halle, Germany. This was the 30th annual conference of the Plant Population Biology Section of the Ecological Society of Germany, Austria…

Lianas stifle tree fruit and seed production in tropical forests

Press release from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Woody vines, known as lianas, compete intensely with trees and their numbers are on the rise in many tropical forests around the world. A new study, published in Journal of Ecology, from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama shows that lianas prevent canopy trees from…

BES Journals at Macroecology of Alien Species Symposium

Here at the BES publishing team we’re looking forward to next month’s symposium entitled The Macroecology of Alien Species: Patterns, Drivers and Consequences of Global Biotic Exchange, where Journal of Ecology, Journal of Animal Ecology and Journal of Applied Ecology will be sponsoring a drinks reception. The symposium will be held in the lovely and…