Understanding how functional traits define tree species dominance in Amazonian forests

Laura Matas-Granados, Autonomous University of Madrid, discusses her article: Species functional traits affect regional and local dominance across western Amazonian forests Lowland forests in western Amazonia are among the most diverse ecosystems on Earth, harbouring hundreds of tree species living side by side. Despite this exceptional diversity, only a few tree species dominate these forests,…

Editor’s Choice: Volume 108 Issue 4

How Will Climate Change Affect Community Stability? There’s a great deal of concern and uncertainty over the patterns and causal mechanisms that underlie community grassland change in response to climate change (Ratajczak & Ladwig 2019). Experimental work is needed to better understand the potentially synergistic effects of global change stressors on stability of grasslands. In…

Model fitting in ecology: trade-offs between complexity and generality

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…