Fascination of Plants Day 2013

Journal of Ecology & Fascination of Plants Day 2013

The Editors of the Journal of Ecology are pleased to honour Fascination of Plants Day 2013  by highlighting the most recent accounts in our Biological Flora of the British Isles series.  The series provides a fascinating insight into both common and endangered plant species. The accounts have their own format in the Journal presenting information on distribution, habitat, communities, responses to biotic and environmental factors, structure and physiology, phenology, floral and seed characteristics, herbivores and disease, history and conservation. The series Editor is Professor Anthony Davy who is always open to enquiries from authors for new accounts.

Interview with Harper Prize winner: Simon Doxford

The prize winners for best papers across the BES journals have been announced. See the announcement here. The Harper Prize for the best paper in the Journal of Ecology has been awarded to Simon Doxford for his paper with Rob Freckleton titled Changes in the large-scale distribution of plants: extinction, colonisation and the effects of climate. Read their paper here.

We conducted an interview with Simon to talk about his research. Enjoy!

Subordinate plant species increase resistance against drought

Pierre Mariotte and colleagues have a paper in the Journal in vol 101:3 titled Subordinate plant species enhance community resistance against drought in semi-natural grasslands. Read the paper here.

The authors have provided a short synopsis of the paper and a photo.

Better quality podcasts

We have been doing interviews for the past 1.5 yrs or so, and are now hosted on Soundcloud here. I have not been trained in doing interviews and podcasting, so of course there is some learning to do. One simple thing that I was able to fix thanks to one of the people I interviewed, James Rosindell, was to export audio as mono instead of stereo from GarageBand.

Compare the audio at the same time points in this old version with relatively worse audio…

…to this one with better audio…

If you have any suggestions for our podcast, please do tell!

Interview with James Rosindell

In the next Journal of Ecology podcast I interview James Rosindell, of Imperial College London, about OneZoom. Visit OneZoom here: www.onezoom.org. I spoke with James at the British Ecological Society annual meeting in Birmingham, UK in December, 2012. This interview took place in person at the metting on 19 December, 2012.

A few months have passed and the tetrapod tree mentioned in the interview is on OneZoom now (see here: http://www.onezoom.org/tetrapods.htm).

Follow this link to the BES podcast series on Souncloud, or use the Soundcloud widget below.  Souncloud has apps available for many mobile devices - check those out too.

Get in touch on twitter: @JEcology or @recology_

Editor’s Choice 101:3

The next issue of Journal of Ecology will be published online soon. We are really pleased to announce that the Editor’s Choice article from issue 101:3 is “Specialist species of wood-inhabiting fungi struggle while generalists thrive in fragmented boreal forests” by Nordén et al. Read a commentary on the paper below, written by Journal of Ecology Associate Editor Peter Thrall.

Editor’s Choice 101:3 

Ecologists and evolutionary biologists have long recognised the importance of spatial structure. For example, the metapopulation concept (Levins 1969), which has stimulated an extensive body of work over several decades (e.g. Hanski & Gilpin 1997), explicitly recognises the importance of considering population connectivity at a landscape scale, as well as the role of life history (e.g. dispersal) in determining local and regional dynamics. Studies framed in this context have contributed to a broad range of insights regarding the role of spatio-temporal heterogeneity in species and community persistence, host-pathogen and predator-prey systems, population genetics and coevolutionary outcomes.

The current facilitation debate and a relevant meeting

The following is a guest post written by Santiago Soliveres. 

Once seen as anomalies, positive (facilitative) interactions among plants and their importance for ecosystem structure and functioning are now fully recognized (see Brooker et al. 2008 for a review). Research focused on facilitation has received increasing attention from the most important ecological and interdisciplinary journals during recent years, and the Journal of Ecology stands above them in the concerted effort to advance our knowledge of this important topic.

Researchers agree that facilitative interactions have important implications for community structure (albeit their relative importance as drivers of ecosystem structure and functioning regarding other processes remains poorly understood; Kikvidze et al. 2005; Mitchell, Cahill & Hik 2009; Maestre et al. 2010). However, they disagree about what the different drivers of such interactions are, and how these interactions behave across environmental gradients.

Interview with Michael Hutchings

In the next Journal of Ecology podcast I interview Michael Hutchings, who recently stepped down from the Executive Editor position at the Journal of Ecology. I spoke with Mike at the British Ecological Society annual meeting in Birmingham, UK in December, 2012. This interview took place in person at the metting on 17 December, 2012.

Follow this link to the BES podcast series on Souncloud, or use the Soundcloud widget below.  Souncloud has apps available for many mobile devices - check those out too.

Get in touch on twitter: @JEcology or @recology_

Interview with Ross Mounce on open data and open access

In the next Journal of Ecology podcast I interview Ross Mounce, of the University of Bath, on open data and open access. Ross is an advocate for open data and open access, and a Panton Fellow with the Open Knowledge Foundation, in which he promotes open data and access.  This interview took place in person in London on 21 December, 2012.

Follow this link to the BES podcast series on Souncloud, or use the Soundcloud widget below.  Souncloud has apps available for many mobile devices - check those out too.

Get in touch on twitter: @JEcology or @recology_

Interview with Rebecca Atkinson on the growth-survival trade-off in plants

In the next Journal of Ecology podcast I interview Rebecca Atkinson, of the University of Sheffield, on her research presented at the British Ecological Society annual meeting in Birmingham, UK in December, 2012. This interview took place in person at the metting on 20 December, 2012.

Follow this link to the BES podcast series on Souncloud, or use the Soundcloud widget below.  Souncloud has apps available for many mobile devices - check those out too.

Get in touch on twitter: @JEcology or @recology_