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Welcome Susan Harrison - new SE

We are very happy to welcome Prof. Susan Harrison from UC Davies, USA, to our editorial board. My research seeks to understand the processes that shape and maintain plant species diversity at the landscape scale, where small-scale forces such as competition and...

Same, same but oh so different.

They look the same, but perform so differently. And act differently against each other. Cryptic amphipods are dealt with in the Early View paper " Phenotypically similar but ecologically distinct: differences in competitive ability and predation risk among amphipods "...

Taking metacommunity models to the empirical world

Will the use of "real" connectivity between communities improve metacommunity models? Read more in C.Moritz and colleague's Early View paper: "Disentangling the role of connectivity, environmental filtering, and spatial structure on metacommunity dynamics" . Here's...

When plants help other plants...

Nice to see that nature provides other kinds of interactions than nasty predation, competetion and parasitism! Christian Schöb and coworkers have studied the importance of "nursing" plants - plants that fascilitate for other plants - in community ecology. Read their...

Birthday checks, hungry bears, and subsidy dynamics in the Everglades

Hello everyone, my name is Ross Boucek and I am PhD student at Florida International University. Oikos has asked me to write about our Early View paper "No free lunch: displaced marsh consumers regulate a prey subsidy to an estuarine consumer" where we investigate the...

Large-scale testing of Bergman's rule

The colder, the bigger, suggested Bergman in 1848. In 2013 we publish a paper testing Bergman's rule on a large data set. Showing...well find out in "Bergmann′s rule in mammals: a cross-species interspecific pattern" by Marcus Clauss and his co-workers. Below is their...

Editor's choice April 2013

For the April issue, we chose the following two papers as editor’s choice according to our motto of synthesizing ecology. Mumby et al. (2013) discuss various articles that either support or reject the hypothesis that coral reefs might be able to exist under certain...

New Oikos Cover!!

From the April issue 2013 onwards, Oikos will have a photo illustrating ecology in action on it's cover. To find the right photo for this year's cover, we had a photo competition during winter. The happy winner of the competetion is Sascha Rösner, Marburg, Deutschland...

Time to get rid of the males?

It has been debated for a while...are males really necessary? Find out how fish of the genus Chrosomus solve the small problems associated with asexual reproduction, in the Early View paper " Diets of sexual and sperm-dependent asexual dace ( Chrosomus spp.): relevance...

On the evolution of fruit colour

Ever thought about why an orange is orange while an apple is green? And a blueberry blue and blackberry black, while a raspberry is red? Well, one explanation - seasonality - is studied in the new Early View Paper "Fruit color and contrast in seasonal habitats – a case...

Guess who planted invasive seeds on blackbuck mating territories?

To consider at your Friday dinner tonight: Sex-biased diets affect the ecology of other species in the surroundings. Read more in the new early View paper "Antelope mating strategies facilitate invasion of grasslands by a woody weed" by Shivani Jadeja and colleagues...

The little black dress of ecology

Taylor´s power law and bird populations are studied with in the new Early View paper "Interspecific differences in stochastic population dynamics explains variation in Taylor's temporal power law", by Marit Linnerud and her coworkers. Here's Marit's summary of the...

Cocktail mingle ecology

I would so much like to see someone using Hari Sridhar, Ferenc Jordán and Kartik Shankers paper "Species importance in a heterospecific foraging association network" as a basis for a study of humans on cocktail parties. Which small groups may be the core of highly...

Theoretical weed ecology

Do you like trying new food items? I do. And many herbivore insects seem to do so as well. Invading alien species, yummy yummy! How these interactions affect the ecology of the invaders is studied by Matthew L. Forrister and Joseph S. Wilson in " The population ecology...

Can we trust field-guides in ecological studies?

How consistent are field-guides and atlases? Enough to be used as sources in ecological research studies? Jay Fitzsimmons has checked and has the answer! Find out in his new Early View paper "How consistent are trait data between sources? A quantitative assessment" ...

When to stay and when to go - how porpoises make their decisions

How do animals decide how to forage? In the new Early View paper "How a simple adaptive foraging strategy can lead to emergent home ranges and increased food intake" Jacob Nabe-Nielsen and colleagues demonstrate that it only requires a few simple behavioural rules to...

Plagiarism in Oikos?

We now check all submitted manuscripts for possible plagiarism using iThenticate .This means that all manuscripts are compared to more than 32 billion webpages, more than 34 million scholarly content items and more than 91 million news pages, books and magazines (and...

Top of the Pops

One of the most cited papers in Oikos, during 2011 (published 2009 and 2010) is " New perspectives for estimating body condition from mass/length data: the scaled mass index as an alternative method ", by J Peig and AJ Green. Here, Jordi Peig gives a short summary of...

Mites hitch-hiking with bugs

Thumb's out when the mite Spadiseius calyptrogynae needs to move to a new host plant. It can't get their on it's own, so it simply hitchhikes on bees, bats or beetles. Emanuel H. Fronhofer and co-workes have studied this in the new Early View paper " Picky hitch-hikers...

New populatin metrics for top-down-bottom up

Here is an interesting essay about measuring top-down-bottom-up effects, written by Leonard Polishchuk. He is also the first author of the Early View paper "How to measure top–down vs bottom–up effects: a new population metric and its calibration on Daphnia ", on which...

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