To celebrate World Wetlands Day 2017, Helen Moor of Stockholm University has given a background to her recent essay review published in Journal of Ecology; Towards a trait-based ecology of wetland vegetation. Wetland ecosystems, from marshes to bogs, can provide numerous benefits to society. They can act as water reservoirs and attenuate floods, filter…
For the cover image for our latest issue we chose a photo from one of the Special Feature papers (Farwig et al. 2016) which showed an area of the Białowieża Forest in Eastern Poland. To make the most of all the great photos from our authors we have included a slideshow below. Read the full January…
In the first podcast video of 2017, Julia Chacón-Labella presents the findings of her recent study, accepted for publication in Journal of Ecology, and titled ‘Evidence for a stochastic geometry of biodiversity: the effects of species abundance, richness and intraspecific clustering‘. This study was part of Julia’s PhD project on elucidating spatial patterns of diversity in a species-rich shrubland, that…
Julieta Rosell is based in the Instituto de Ecología at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México – one of the largest Universities in Latin America. Julieta’s research focuses on plant ecology and evolution. She has worked on the functional ecology of woody stems, including mechanics, storage, and structure of bark and wood, along with the evolution of life forms in…
Connor Fitzpatrick is a graduate student based at the University of Toronto Mississauga. The article below gives us a background into his work and recent Journal of Ecology paper; Phylogenetic relatedness, phenotypic similarity and plant–soil feedbacks. This project started from the simple idea that closely related organisms will interact more strongly due to their similarity…
Michigan State University Press Release Once upon a time, it was thought that crop diseases affected only crops. New research shows, however, that a common wheat virus can spread and harm perennial native grasses. In their Journal of Ecology paper, researchers from Michigan State University, Kansas University and Virginia University show that farmers and scientists need to…
Happy New Year to all our readers! I started working for the Blog a bit more than a year ago (I really enjoy it!) with the help of the great Editorial Blog Team including Executive Editor David Gibson, Assistant Editor James Ross and Managing Editors Emilie Aimé and Andrea Baier. Together we are committed to…
A Happy New Year to all our readers, authors, and reviewers from the Journal of Ecology Editorial Team! In many ways 2016 was an eventful year (we promise not to talk about politics here), including for the Journal. In brief, we were pleased to receive well over 800 original manuscript submissions, 54% of which were…
It was a pleasant surprise to see some real plants at the BES Annual Meeting in Liverpool. The Ecological Continuity Trust (ECT), a charity supporting long-term ecosystem experiments, had model calcareous grassland communities on display at their stand, along with two different phenotypes of Festuca ovina. These plants were used in a comparative study with…
External disturbances are powerful drivers of community and ecosystem reorganization over most of the Earth’s terrestrial surface. As such, they cause losses of plant biomass, reset succession, modify stocks and fluxes of nutrients, and change trophic dynamics. Furthermore, most ecosystems are subjected to multiple disturbance agents, and these disturbances do not operate in isolation from…
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