Defense against multiple enemies changes differently across latitudes in an invasive plant and its native congener

Xinmin Lu, Huazhong Agricultural University, Joshua Lynn, Manchester University, and Evan Siemann, Rice University, discuss their article: Latitudinal patterns in growth and defense against multiple enemies of an invasive species and its native congener Why are some plant species more successful invaders than others? A long-standing hypothesis is that invasive plants differ from native species…

Editor’s Choice: Volume 109 Issue 6

The Editor’s Choice for our June issue is “Disentangling the social complexities of assisted migration through deliberative methods” by Shannon Hagerman & Robert Kozak. This mini-review identifies a novel deliberative agenda for understanding the societal aspects and implications of plant translocation research and practice. This article is also part of our new cross-journal Special Focus: Plant translocations…

Can invasive plants become new species in their invaded range?

Ramona Irimia and Daniel Montesinos discuss their recent Journal of Ecology article: “Experimental admixture among geographically disjunct populations of an invasive plant yields a global mosaic of reproductive incompatibility and heterosis”. Find out more about their insights into the biogeographic patterns of variation in reproductive success in the yellow star-thistle, an invasive weed. Invasive plants…

Call for proposals: Leveraging natural history collections to understand the impacts of global change

Natural history collections in museums, herbaria, seed banks, and tissue banks provide some of the most valuable information sources in an ecologist’s toolbox: time series data. These collections not only permanently archive preserved specimens, but also critical historical and contemporary information about how species distributions, interactions, and phenotypes respond to global change across time scales.…

On the speed of plants

Author Daniel Montesinos discusses his recent Journal of Ecology article: “Fast invasives fastly become faster: Invasive plants align largely with the fast side of the plant economics spectrum.” Find out more about the plant economics spectrum and how invasive plants align largely with the fast side. This mini-review is part of our upcoming Special Feature…

Gulls can spread weeds over large distances and between habitats

Authors, Víctor Martín-Vélez and Andy J. Green, discuss their recent study which highlights the importance of non‐frugivorous waterbirds as vectors for long‐distance plant dispersal: Spatial patterns of weed dispersal by wintering gulls within and beyond an agricultural landscape. You can also read the Press Release for this article here. Weeds are plants that spontaneously grow…

Can we use remote sensing technology as a practical short-cut to explore trait-mediated ecosystem functioning impacts?

Author Kenny Helsen discusses recently published Journal of Ecology article: Optical traits perform equally well as directly‐measured functional traits in explaining the impact of an invasive plant on litter decomposition by Helsen et al. Discover whether the optical traits of an invasive plant species can be used to explain their ecosystem impacts. Is the data…

Disentangling how alien species shape the seasonal dynamics of plant-pollinator communities

“Alien plants and flower visitors disrupt the seasonal dynamics of mutualistic networks” by Arroyo-Correa, Burkle & Emer has just been published in Journal of Ecology. This study provides one of the first empirical reports of alien species shaping the seasonal dynamics of plant–flower visitor networks. Author, Blanca Arroyo-Correa, provides further insight into this research. The…

Green turtle grazing and seagrass carbon capture across Caribbean meadows

Journal of Ecology recently published an exciting new research paper by Johnson et al. “Seagrass ecosystem metabolic carbon capture in response to green turtle grazing across Caribbean meadows.” Author Robert Johnson discusses this research in more detail and presents further insights into how green turtle grazing affects carbon dynamics, within seagrass ecosystems. Green turtle abundance is…