Editor's Choice March and April

Submitted by editor on 2 April 2015.

March was a hectic project month in Belgium, with a series of important deadlines. A shame that I did not provide blog notes for our editor’s choices for March - they are great. Timothee Poisot and colleagues published a forum paper on the context-dependency of species interactions and developed a concise view on how theoretical approaches can (have to) take advantage of these insights to move towards a mechanistic understanding of how species interact over large spatial or temporal scales, thereby improving predictive ability. The seconds EC was the meta-analysis by Lars Gamfeldt and colleagues synthesizing current insights and caveats on the role of marine biodiversity for ecosystem functioning. By bringing together the literature in a standardized way, they demonstrate that changes in species richness induce sometimes strong changes in multiple functions of the marine ecosystem.

The April EC’s are as intriguing. We use many surrogates when studying often complex ecological processes. Philip Bart and colleagues argue that our use of these surrogates is too much based on correlative approaches and that these surrogates are subsequently applied in often very different contexts as the one in which they were developed. The predictive ability of these surrogates is therefore highly uncertain. By drawing together ideas from the medical sciences, they define an explicit surrogate concept that has not previously been used in ecology.

The second EC by Janet Koprivnikar and Tommy Leung is a meta-analysis on the richness of parasites (nematodes) in migratory birds. There is hardly any information on the parasite load in migratory organisms, despite the fact that they may severely impact the migration process and the species’ eventual fitness. By comparing the nematode species richness and relative immune investment of almost 200 migratory and non-migratory species within three diverse groups of birds, the authors provide the first large-scale demonstration that migratory birds face greater challenge from macroparasites compared to non-migratory species. The provided synthesis opens avenues for further mechanistic research on the interplay between parasite-host interactions and migratory movements and the expected vulnerability of migratory species in the light of ongoing global change.

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Editor's ChoiceGeneralInsights into Oikos papers

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