Todor Minchev, Université du Québec à Rimouski, discusses his article: Early departures and delayed arrivals: Holocene dynamics of temperate tree species in the boreal temperate ecotone. Forests are the backbone of most terrestrial ecosystems and form some of the largest biomes on the planet, excluding the oceans. Such is the case of the circumboreal forest…
Carla Vázquez-González, University of California, Irvine & Misión Biológica de Galicia (CSIC), discusses her article: Testing the contribution of vertebrate predators and leaf traits to mainland-island differences in insect herbivory on oaks Insularity research on plant-herbivore interactions Islands have long fascinated evolutionary ecologists, beginning with the early observational studies of naturalists like Charles Darwin and…
Keke Cheng & Shixiao Yu, from Sun Yat-sen University, discuss their article: Specificity determinants of pathogens in forest in English and Chinese. Background Autumn has come and the fruit is ripe. Seeds fall from the tree and spread around the mother tree, attracting squirrels who love to eat them. Squirrels came and ate a large…
Eugénie Mas, from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (@MasPlantphys) discusses her article: Drought effects in Mediterranean forests are not alleviated by diversity-driven water source partitioning Forest are unique ecosystems where each species of animal, plant, and microorganism interact together to provide many services, called ecosystem services. These services can benefit humans directly through wood production,…
Andrew Cortese, from Michigan State University, discusses his article: Ectomycorrhizal tree islands in arbuscular mycorrhizal forests: hotspots of fungal inoculum important for seedling establishment of historically dominant trees Present-day forests echo past disturbance history Northeastern North American forests are comprised of a mixture of arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) and ectomycorrhizal (EM) trees. However, by the turn…
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…
Mario B. Pesendorfer, Institute of Forest Ecology, Department of Forest and Soil Sciences, BOKU – University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria, discusses his article: Positive spatial and temporal density-dependence drive early reproductive economy-of-scale effects of masting in a European old-growth forest community In temperate forests, tree populations often produce large bumper crops…
Last week was National Tree Week. The UK has celebrated National Tree Week as the start of the tree planting season since 1975. It is the UK’s largest annual tree celebration. We took to Twitter to ask for your most fascinating tree facts. Here are some of our favourites. North American fagaceae retain their leaves…
Castagneyrol and company have a paper in the Journal in Early View titled “Plant apparency, an overlooked driver of associational resistance to insect herbivory”. Read the paper here. The authors have provided a short synopsis of the paper and a few photos.
In our second podcast in the EcoGist series, Justin Dohn of Colorado State University in Colorado, USA, describes his paper on tree effects on grass growth in Savannas. P.S. To give credit where it’s due, EcoGists are modeled after the 60 second science podcasts of Scientific American. If you haven’t heard them before, definitely go have a…
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