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The complexities of climate on the feeding ecology of the polar bear

editor
27 February 2015
There may be no more prevalent icon of climate change in the Arctic than the polar bear. The story is simple: a warming climate is causing reductions in the volume, extent and seasonal duration of Arctic sea ice. Polar bears use the sea ice surface for hunting seals,...

Ongoing plant invasion: increasing dispersal ability during range expansion

editor
27 February 2015
Invasive populations within the invaded range are often regarded as a homogeneous group in the studies of invasive plants. However, since invasive plants can evolve very rapidly and there may be lots of differences between old and young invasive populations, the...

Ecology might not be so complicated after all

editor
13 February 2015
Ecosystem-shaping interactions between consumers and plants are notoriously variable. Indeed, even within a single system (and a single pair of interacting species) enormous variability can be seen -- the same consumer might increase plant biomass at one place and time...

To the North – habitat selection of geese during their spring migration to the high Arctic

editor
13 February 2015
Understanding the distribution of species over space and time is an important aspect of ecological research and has great value for wildlife and land management. How animals choose foraging sites is typically influenced by a variety of environmental conditions...

Editor's Choice February

editor
13 February 2015
The editor’s choice papers are for February are two meta-analyses: Bracken and colleagues studied signatures of nutrient limitation in primary producers ; Jauni et al. how non-native plant species benefit from disturbance . Matthew Bracken and colleagues collected data...

Climate change or competition most important for population dynamics?

editor
12 February 2015
It is usually delightful to observe forest birds as they playfully hop from branch to branch chirping, or sing their hearts out. But there is a dark side to a birds’ behaviour that is less often acknowledged. Many birds engage in a fierce (and often fatal) struggle for...

How does climate variables and diversity loss “filter” natural communities?

editor
10 February 2015
As the oceans gradually become warmer and more acidified, an increasing number of studies test the effects of climate change on marine organisms. As most climate change experiments have studied effects of single climate variables on single species, more and more...

Phenotypic effects of climate change

editor
6 February 2015
Understanding how changes in the climate affect biological communities is essential in predicting the future size and composition of populations. However, accurate predictions pose a difficult challenge for researchers. For the majority of animal species it is not...

Synthesising: Population genetics and tropical ecology

editor
4 February 2015
This is our first collaboration study between a population geneticist, Hideki Innan, and a field-based tropical ecologist, me, Yayoi Takeuchi. I have been long wondering why Hubbell’s neutral model fitted so well to tropical forest communities because my impression of...

Invaders in plant-pollinator communities

editor
3 February 2015
The introduction of a new species to an ecological community can initiate a chain of events that results in a significant change to the community’s composition. For instance, the introduction of a pollinator species can facilitate the colonization of new plants that...

To live longer - choose the right place to live?

editor
30 January 2015
Despite the increasing use of Species Distribution Models (SDM) for predicting current or future animal distribution, only a few studies have linked the gradient of habitat suitability to demographic parameters. Species Distribution Models are a niche modelling...

Frugivores and seed dispersal

editor
30 January 2015
Everyone who likes to spend some time in nature, or who has trees at home, knows that several animals love to feed on fruits. Figs, tomatoes, peppers, guavas, mangos, bananas, and many other delicacies are harvested by frugivores that range from tiny bats to huge...

Herbivore response to global warming

editor
27 January 2015
Experimental warming is an effective approach to determine the effect of increasing temperature on ecological processes, with few confounding factors (e.g., other variables that covary spatially and temporally with temperature). Therefore, a number of field experiments...

Soil, elevation and plant growth

editor
27 January 2015
Elevational gradients have become important tools for assessing the effects of temperature changes on vegetation properties, because these gradients enable temperature effects to be considered over larger spatial and temporal scales than is possible through...

How do ants affect spider populations in coffee plants?

editor
23 January 2015
Biotic interactions play a central role in determining species distribution and abundance. Indeed, some organisms can have particularly strong effects on the distribution of other species because they act as keystone species or ecosystem engineers whose effects cascade...

January Cover

editor
20 January 2015
I hope you haven't missed that Oikos from 2015 changes cover each month! Each month a photo from one of the papers in the issue will be featured on the cover. The January cover photo was taken by David W. Inouye. The paper in questions is "Phenological shifts and the...

Herbivory effects of climate change

editor
20 January 2015
Herbivory may be changed by climate change and how does that affect the host plants? Find out in the Early View paper "Colonization of a host tree by herbivorous insects under a changing climate" by Kaisa Heimonen and co-workers. Below is their summary of the paper:...

Amphibian responses to diversity of native and non-native litter

editor
19 January 2015
Fig. 1. Recently metamorphosed green frog (Lithobates clamitans) at the edge of a pond (photo by Laura Martin) Amphibians develop in watery places that are full of plants. And yet we know little about how these plants affect larval amphibians. As disease, climate...

Only few invading individuals, still dangerous?

editor
14 January 2015
Invasive species have negative economic and environmental consequences worldwide and, in our changing world, it has become increasingly important to understand their impacts. However, when assessing the impacts of invasive species, scientists often compare un-invaded...

Travelling around to catch more parasites?

editor
14 January 2015
Do migratory birds catch more parasites? This is explored in the Oikos Early View paper "Flying with diverse passengers: greater richness of parasitic nematodes in migratory birds" by Janet Koprivnikar and tommy L.F. Leung. Below is their short summary of the study:...

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