Editor’s Choice 100:3

Amy Austin discusses the Editor’s Choice for issue 3, by Alex Ireland & Robert Booth.  Enjoy!

Issue 3 will appear online next week. As usual, the issue will be filled with cracking papers! Happy Easter from Journal of Ecology!

Editor´s Choice March 2012

Human impact on the landscape through alteration of vegetation is occurring globally, with conversion of natural ecosystems for food production, industry and urban areas (Foley et al. 2005). However, one of the challenges for accurately assessing these impacts is the fact that the vast majority of our ecosystems have already been modified in some way. As such, it is difficult to know what the original impacts have been from land and forest clearing that occurred in these systems at least a century ago.  Perhaps even more complicated is trying to understand the impact on adjacent intact ecosystems, particularly non-point source changes in nutrient availability and biogeochemical cycling, which are critical components for understanding the integrated impact of land-use change on the landscape (Buffam et al. 2011). For example, eolian dust deposition due to human activity has increased markedly with the increase of agricultural expansion in North America (Neff et al. 2008), but at present, it is far from clear how ecosystems have been impacted from these alterations in nutrient pools and turnover.

The field site "Titus bog", studied in Ireland and Booth's paper. Photo credit: Robert K. Booth.

Selection on flowering time affects subsequent reproductive traits

Laura Galloway and Kevin Burgess have a paper in Early View in the Journal titled “Artificial selection on flowering time: influence on reproductive phenology across natural light environments “.  Read it here.

The authors have provided a short synopsis of the paper and an nice photo of the  plant species they studied.

Campanulastrum americanum.
Photo credit: Laura Galloway

Interview with Katie Becklin

A paper in 100:2 at the Journal (Willows indirectly reduce arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal colonization in understorey communities) by Katie Becklin and colleagues explores how willow (Salix) reduce arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal colonization in plant communities in Colorado.  Read the paper here.

I caught up with Katie to do a video interview.

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Predicting plant dynamic rates from aerial image derived forest structure

Stephanie Bohlman and Stephen Pacala have a paper in 100:2 in the Journal titled “A forest structure model that determines crown layers and partitions growth and mortality rates for landscape-scale applications of tropical forests“.  Read it here.

Stephanie has provided a short synopsis of the paper and an example photo used in their study.

Photo credit: Richard A. Grotefendt, Tropical Forest Management Foundation, grotefen@uw.edu

Inferring community assembly mechanisms

Marko Spasojevic and Katharine Suding have a paper in Early View in the Journal titled “Inferring community assembly mechanisms from functional diversity patterns: the importance of multiple assembly processes“.  Read it here.  We posted an interview with Marko here.

Marko has provided a short synopsis of the paper and a photo of the study site. Enjoy.

Photo Credit: Marko J. Spasojevic

Seed diversity and microhabitat heterogeneity effects on plant establishment

Paul Richardson and colleagues have a paper in Early View in the Journal titled “Fine-scale spatial heterogeneity and incoming seed diversity additively determine plant establishment“.  Read it here.

The authors have provided a very thorough description of their study with many beautiful pictures of their study sites.  Enjoy.

Bayesian estimation of population viability

Alejandro Ruete and colleagues have a paper in the Journal (100:2) titled “Hierarchical Bayesian estimation of the population viability of an epixylic moss“.  Read it here.

The authors have provided a motivation for their study, a brief description of their major finding below, and a picture of their study organism.

Coexistence mechanisms differ along a long-term soil chronosequence

Norman Mason and colleagues have a paper in the Journal in Early View titled “Changes in coexistence mechanisms along a long-term soil chronosequence revealed by functional trait diversity“. Read the paper here.

The authors have provided a short description of their research below, with some pictures of their study sites.

Their 250 year old site with high soil Phosphorous, and dense canopy cover. Photo credit: Duane Peltzer.

A more rational alternative to blind usage of α = 0.05

The following is a guest post by Joseph Mudge, who published a paper with colleagues recently arguing for a different approach to setting α values.  Joseph has written a summary of the argument below.  Please chime in with your thoughts.  Do you agree/disagree?

Video interview with Marko Spasojevic

A paper in Early View at the Journal (Inferring community assembly mechanisms from functional diversity patterns: the importance of multiple assembly processes) by Marko Spasojevic and Katharine Suding explores community assembly mechanisms through functional traits.  Read the paper here.

I caught up with Marko recently to do a video interview on his paper recently published in the Journal.

Subscribe to our YouTube posts by pressing the Subscribe button on the YouTube page (search ‘JournalOfEcology’), or by using this link (http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/JournalOfEcology/videos.rss) in your  RSS reader.