Understanding how diversity and disturbance affect biomass stock and productivity

Erica Rievrs Borges, Institut de recherche pour le développement in France, discusses her article: Evolutionary diversity impacts tropical forest biomass and productivity through disturbance-mediated ecological pathways in both English and French. Understanding Biodiversity and Biomass We know that tropical forests are incredibly important, partly because they account for around half of global forest aboveground carbon…

Editor’s Choice: Volume 109 Issue 8

The Editor’s Choice for our August issue is “The fate and transit time of carbon in a tropical forest” by Carlos A. Sierra, Lina M. Estupinan-Suarez, & Ingrid Chanca. This research article provides an estimate of the transit time distribution of carbon in a Colombian tropical forest ecosystem using a data assimilation technique to parameterise a dynamic…

Drought revisited: manipulating humidity changes the whole ball game

Authors Beatriz Aguirre and Alexandra (Sasha) Wright discuss the findings of their new article – The experimental manipulation of atmospheric drought: Teasing out the role of microclimate in biodiversity experiments. This article is also part of our upcoming Special Feature on Facilitative Mechanisms! Drought occurrence is increasing due to anthropogenic climate change. Drought can negatively…

Stress and strategy for salt marsh plants

“Multiple trait dimensions mediate stress gradient effects on plant biomass allocation, with implications for coastal ecosystem services” by De Battisti et al. is a new research article published in Journal of Ecology. In this blog post, author Davide De Battisti summarises the recent advances in understanding how coastal plants respond to stress. Salt marshes are highly appreciated ecosystems…

Editor’s Choice: Elegance in simplicity – a useful new way to quantify plant diversity dynamics

The Editor’s Choice article for Volume 107 Issue 5 is a study by Zhang et al., which outlines their new SRUD approach for measuring plant diversity dynamics. Associate Editor, Hans Cornelissen, discusses the importance of this new method. Many thousands of researchers have been concerned with what drives and threatens biodiversity. They have investigated whether biodiversity provides benefits…