Rachel Standish discusses her recent article: Mycorrhizal symbiosis and phosphorus supply determine interactions among plants with contrasting nutrient-acquisition strategies. Find out more about the importance of below-ground mechanisms for understanding factors determining community structure. The south-west region of Western Australia is a drawcard for plant nerds. Geographic isolation, a stable climate, and ‘quiet’ flat landscape…
In this new author post Anthony Davy provides an insight into a 35-year longitudinal study of salt marsh development from intertidal flat to a mid-marsh platform at Odiel Marshes in south-western Iberia. The unexpected rapidity of this primary succession highlights the central role of facilitation. Salt marsh is celebrated as a classic example of primary…
The Editor’s Choice for our February issue is “Spatial mapping of root systems reveals diverse strategies of soil exploration and resource contest in grassland plants“ by Lepik et al. This article combines fine‐scale measurements of plant root distributions with spatial statistics, yielding new insights into plant behavioural strategies. Here the handling Editor, JC Cahill, provides an overview…
Dina in ‘t Zandt discusses her recent paper Local soil legacy effects in a multispecies grassland community are underlain by root foraging and soil nutrient availability. Find out more about their soil legacy experiments and how their results differed from the theory. Biodiversity plays a key role in ecosystem structure and function, with plant community…
Journal of Ecology recently published new research article by Clark et al. Predicting species abundances in a grassland biodiversity experiment: Trade‐offs between model complexity and generality Author Adam Clark discusses the paper in more detail and explores the trade‐off between bias and variance when modelling ecological systems. It is common knowledge that increasing the number of…
Brock et al. recently published their new article “The hare, tortoise and crocodile revisited: Tree fern facilitation of conifer persistence and angiosperm growth in simulated forests” in Journal of Ecology. Author James Brock discusses this research in more detail and explains how tree fern understories are important determinants of forest structure. Establishing how conifers compete…
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…
Yong Luo and colleagues recently had their paper published in Journal of Ecology. Read more about their work below. Global change ecologists have often used trees under weak competition to examine relationships between climatic change and tree growth. Scaling up these results to a forest relies on the assumption that the climatic change-tree growth relationship…
In the next Journal of Ecology podcast I interview Lauren Urgensonabout her paper showing that an invasive plant species (Polygonum X bohemicum; bohemian knotweed) has different effects on plants of different seral stages. Check out the paper in the journal here. This interview took place at ESA 2012 in Portland, OR. As always let us know what you…
Journal of Ecology Blog 