With an estimated >27,000 species, the orchid family is one of the most speciose plant families within the Angiosperms. At the same time, it harbours a large number of threatened species, making it one of the most vulnerable plant families as well. Due to their spectacular floral diversity, orchids have long attracted wide attention from…
Why aren’t cushion plants always the best facilitators? Consequences of eco-evo processes in alpine systems. In recent decades facilitation in plant communities has moved from being largely neglected to a well-established phenomenon (Brooker et al. 2008). However, the simple picture of greater facilitation in stressful environments is gradually fading. Not only does abiotic stress change…
The annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America took place a bit over a week ago (Aug 8-14th 2015) in the city of Baltimore, MD. The centennial of largest national ecological society in the world was no joke, and I can’t imagine how much work must have gone behind the scenes for the impeccable…
This is a guest post by Associate Editor Richard P. Shefferson, who recently also guest-edited a Special Feature for Journal of Ecology. The most recent issue of Journal of Ecology (July 2015) includes a Special Feature on Eco-evolutionary Dynamics in Plants. The Special Feature consists of five research papers and an editorial, and the themes…
I don’t know what the collective term is for a lot of ecologists gathered together at one time, but given my past experience with ESA Annual Meetings, a swarm seems to be an appropriate word. I’ll be attending this year’s Centennial Meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Baltimore and fully expect to be…
Journal of Ecology is looking for an Associate Editor to join the Editorial team in order to run the Journal of Ecology blog. The blog was launched in 2012 and is intended to showcase Journal content in a more accessible format. It also serves as a platform for discussing topics that are of more general…
Plant invaders: same difference? To paraphrase Tolstoy, is each plant invader alike, or is each invasive in its own way? Among the hundreds of papers on this subject that have been published in the last two decades, a paper by Bezeng and colleagues stands out as an unusually thorough investigation in a flora of great…
Happy International Fascination of Plants Day from Journal of Ecology! In celebration Executive Editor, David Gibson, has interviewed Anthony Davy about the Journal’s Biological Flora of the British Isles series.
Issue 103:3 is online now. The latest Editor’s Choice paper is “A spatially explicit model for flowering time in bamboos: long rhizomes drive the evolution of delayed flowering” by Tachiki et al. Associate Editor – Richard Shefferson – has written a commentary on the paper below. Bamboos, sex, and the ultimate sacrifice Nature is a…
One of my favourite manuscripts provides a detailed account as to why evolutionary biologists should be demographers (Metcalf & Pavard 2007). The authors argue that, because the propagation of genes into future generations depends on the st/age-specific vital rates of survival, fecundity and migration of individuals within and between populations, and such rates are precisely…
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