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…
Throughout May, we are featuring all the articles that were shortlisted for the Harper Prize 2020. The Harper Prize is an annual award for the best early career research paper published in Journal of Ecology. Evan’s article ‘A mechanistic and empirically supported lightning risk model for forest trees‘ was one of the eight papers shortlisted for this year’s award.…
3rd March is World Wildlife Day! For 2021, World Wildlife Day is being celebrated under the theme ‘Forests and Livelihoods: Sustaining People and Planet’, as a way to highlight the central role of forests in sustaining the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people globally, and particularly of Indigenous and local communities with historic ties…
Author James Dalling discusses recent paper “Nutrient availability predicts multiple stem frequency, an indicator of species resprouting capacity in tropical forests” by Heineman, Turner and Dalling. Read on to find out more about variations in the resprouting ability of tropical trees. The life of a tree is seldom the unobstructed path of a single stem…
The Editor’s Choice article for Volume 108, Issue 6 of Journal of Ecology is “Causes and consequences of liana infestation in southern Amazonia” by Reis et al. Here we highlight the key findings of this research, which evaluated the potential for lianas in southern Amazonia to reduce forest growth rates. Lianas are a key component of…
Authors Kanehiro Kitayama, Masayuki Ushio & Shin‐Ichiro Aiba discuss their recently published Journal of Ecology article: Temperature is a dominant driver of distinct annual seasonality of leaf litter production of equatorial tropical rain forests Find out more about this driver of annual seasonality in tropical rain forests and discover the future implications of this research.…
The Editor’s Choice article for Journal of Ecology’s latest issue Volume 108 Issue 5 is “Palms and trees resist extreme drought in Amazon forests with shallow water tables” by Sousa et al. Here handling Editor, Crystal McMichael highlights the key findings of this research and explores the question “is the Amazon more resilient to drought than previously…
Author Vincent Merckx discusses recently published Journal of Ecology article: Mycoheterotrophic plants living on arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi are generally enriched in 13C, 15N and 2H isotopes by Gomes et al. Find out more about mycoheterotrophic plants, which have a symbiotic relationship with fungi, and why they are important. Plants without photosynthesis All biology textbooks will…
Author Joseph Hawes discusses recently published Journal of Ecology article: A large-scale assessment of plant dispersal mode and seed traits across human-modified Amazonian forests by Hawes et al. Find out more about the effects of disturbance on functional traits related to seed dispersal in a tropical forest and the implications of this for the future.…
In this post, Eric Griffin, Assistant Professor at New Mexico Highlands University, discusses his paper Plant host identity and soil macronutrients explain little variation in sapling endophyte community composition: Is disturbance an alternative explanation?, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Harper Prize. You can see a full list of all shortlisted papers in the Harper…
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