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MOOSE ARE DRIVERS OF CHANGE INFLUENCING ADAJACENT STREAM ECOSYSTEMS

editor
28 September 2018
Moose have altered the direction of forest regeneration following spruce budworm outbreak and created vast areas of spruce-moose savannah – particularly in Cape Breton Highlands National Park (see above picture). We conducted a field study to investigate whether the...

How does urbanization affect herbivory?

editor
27 September 2018
Urban environments are expanding at a rapid rate with over half of the human population residing now in cities. This fast development promises dramatic changes on physical environment, ecological communities and local and global ecosystems in the coming decades. For...

How robust are the patterns of density-dependence and sex-bias in dispersal?

editor
18 September 2018
Organisms disperse from one place to another for a variety of reasons, including search for food or mates and escape from stress. One of the factors that influence dispersal is population density. We investigated three issues on the effects of population density on...

Cover September

editor
14 September 2018
The photo on our September cover shows a dung beetle on a boletus mushroom and comes from the paper "Down‐sizing of dung beetle assemblages over the last 53 000 years is consistent with a dominant effect of megafauna losses" by Andreas H. Schweiger and Jens-Christian...

Photosynthetic performance and species success

editor
13 September 2018
During ecological successions, the differences in physiological performances of co-occurring species contribute to trigger the changes in plant community composition: however, plant physiology and vegetation dynamics are rarely investigated together. A long term...

When the big partner disappears – ecological consequences of megafauna loss for dung beetles

editor
10 September 2018
Dung beetles – tireless workers behind the scenes Dung beetles keep our ecosystems running by processing the left-overs of bigger animals. Services of high ecological and economic importance such as nutrient cycling and soil fertilization, bioturbation and aeration as...

How environmental noise and harvest affect population synchrony....

editor
27 June 2018
We show proportional harvesting of species increases the spatial region undergoing simultaneous population depletion on the arrival of an unfavorable random environmental change. This increase in population spatial coherence may have important consequences for...

Can community diversity predict predator abundance?

editor
26 June 2018
Riparian habitats, which include streams and the surrounding land, are sites of material and energy exchange between land and water. Predators that use these areas, such as river otter and mink, rely on both systems for cover and prey (i.e., fish, crayfish, muskrat)...

Don't forget the kids - in ecological networks

editor
12 June 2018
As every child knows, plants grow from seeds and became adult through their lifetime. But when studying at ecological networks involving plants, we ecologists often look only at adult plants, hence overlooking a fundamental aspect of plants life such as seeds. We...

Cover June

editor
12 June 2018
The cover for our June issue shows Grey reef sharks swim along the forereef at Palmyra Atoll. Blacktip reef sharks are rarely seen on these deeper forereef habitats, likely due to competitive interactions between the species. We thank Yannis Papastamatiou for the...

Spatial distribution - phylogeny or environment?

editor
5 June 2018
A number of studies has shown the individual influence of dispersal mechanism, species height, sexual system, and wood density on the spatial distribution pattern of tropical tree populations at small spatial scales (i.e. < 50 m). These traits are usually conserved...

Are high-arctic plant-pollinator networks unraveling in a warming climate?

editor
22 May 2018
Flung into the high North is the Zackenberg Research Station (see our recent photo story in Biosphere magazine). We may think of the Arctic as a barren place supporting few species, but previous work at Zackenberg has shown that many plants, arthropods, mammals, and...

Individuals differ: does it matter?

editor
18 May 2018
Today we are hapy to introduce a new guest post. It's one of our editors, Isabelle Smallegange that has written about her contribution to our Special Issue on Individual Hetergeneity. Link to her blog is here. Individuals, be they plants or animals, are rarely equal...

Special Issue on Individual heterogeneity

editor
4 May 2018
We are very proud to announce the publication of our Special Issue “Individual heterogeneity: the causes and the consequences of a fundamental biological process”. This Special Issue originated from a workshop we held at UiT The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø,...

April Cover

editor
27 April 2018
The beautiful illustarion on the cover for the April Issue was created by former student Patrick Beh and captures the most common zooplankton genera found while re-sampling aquatic communities from Canadian lakes in the paper “Geographic signatures in species turnover...

When can plant populations be invaded by other species?

editor
10 April 2018
The world is experiencing increasing climatic variability, loss of biodiversity, and spread of invasive species. Together, these factors can have huge effects on the functioning of our ecosystems. But what makes ecological systems more resistant to biological invasions...

Editor's choice April

editor
10 April 2018
The first editor’s choice for the April issue is the meta-analysis by Frida Piper and colleagues . The authors present a global analysis on herbivory rates in understorey vegetation from forests. The rationale for the study comes from observations that herbivory in...

Did you fertilize evenly?

editor
5 April 2018
Thanks Jitka Klimesova for the cartoon about your recent paper "Philip Grime's fourth corner: are there plant species adapted to high disturbance and low productivity?" in Oikos! Sir, are you sure you have dug and fertilized the entire flower bed evenly?

Closing the gender gap in science - Guest post

editor
14 March 2018
We are happy to present to you our first guest blog post, by Sam Perrin and Kate Layton-Matthew, Centre for Biodiversity Dynamics​/Museum of Natural History, NTNU, Norway, who made an interview with 2018 L’Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science award-winner Amy Austin,...

March Cover

editor
13 March 2018
The photo on the March-cover 2018, shows some of the 163 species of seeds that was used to test the trade-off between physical and chemical defenses, in the paper "Tradeoff between physical and chemical defense in plant seeds is mediated by seed mass", by Bo Wang et al...

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