Cathy Pfister (University of Chicago) has recently had a paper published on kelp forests in the Northeast Pacific Ocean. She tells us more about her paper below… In the decade or so before WWI, Germany had a near monopoly on an essential resource: potash mines that supplied fertilizer (as well as gunpowder) globally. The possibility…
This past week the determination and tenacity of 1500 or so ecologists was tested as they travelled to Ghent, Belgium, to attend the Ecology Across Borders 2017 winter Annual Meeting, organized and hosted by the British Ecological Society, Ecological Society of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, the Netherland-Flanders Ecological Society, and the European Ecological Federation. I was…
Dali Guo, who passed away aged 46 on the 19th November 2017, was known for his major contributions to plant ecology through advancing our understanding of root ecology and patterns of root traits in terrestrial ecosystems. His research has not only helped to establish the importance of root branching order on root and ecosystem function,…
In the run up to Ecology Across Borders, we hear from Niek Scheepens, speaker of the GfÖ-Specialist Group Plant Population Biology, about some of the plant ecology projects happening in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The scientific community is a global community and the rise of internet has obviously advanced communication among researchers tremendously. Nevertheless, it…
The editors of Journal of Ecology would like to invite special feature proposals for publication in 2019. Journal of Ecology has been publishing special features since Bullock and Nathan’s 2008 collection of 12 papers on the topic “Plant Dispersal Across Multiple Scales: Linking Models and Reality.” Since that time, the Editors have commissioned special features…
Tuesday 5th December is World Soil Day 2017 and Ellen Fry, Secretary of the Special Interest Group Plant, Soils, Ecosystems (SIG PSE) of the British Ecological Society, has kindly agreed to share some thoughts about soil. She also gives some information about where to meet the PSE group at next week’s Ecology Across Borders meeting (Follow the…
This week has been EcoTAS 2017, the joint conference of the Ecological Society of Australia and the New Zealand Ecological Society. This year it was held in Hunter Valley in New South Wales, Australia, with a theme of ‘putting ecology to work’ in an effort to explore how ecological science can contribute to the economy,…
University of Antwerp press release Studies on mild fluctuations in weather have provided support for the idea that higher biodiversity results in more stable functioning of ecosystems, but critical appraisal of the evidence from extreme event studies is lacking. Higher plant species richness is not always sufficient to reduce ecosystem vulnerability to climate extremes, as…
This year for National Tree Week we have a guest blog post from the Treezilla team. Treezilla is a citizen science platform that has been devised by The Open Science Laboratory. Its aim is to map every tree in Britain which will provide valuable information for researchers, conservationists and other organisations. In 2017, trees in…
This new video podcast from Eveline Krab is dedicated to winter ecology and shows that climate warming is also happening in winter! In this video, Eveline highlights the main results of her paper recently accepted for publication in Journal of Ecology titled “Winter warming effects on tundra shrub performance are species-specific and dependent on spring…
