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Cover March

editor
26 October 2019
Here is our March Cover showing a majestic red deer ( Cervus elaphus )! The image is from the paper " Large herbivore migration plasticity along environmental gradients in Europe: life‐history traits modulate forage effects " found in this issue! Photo taken by: Anders...

Cover October

editor
26 October 2019
The photo on the October cover shows a barnacle goose ( Branta leucopsis ) from the paper " Resting metabolic rate in migratory and non‐migratory geese following range expansion: go south, go low " (Eichhorn et al. 2019) found in this issue! Photo taken by: Götz...

Cover June

editor
28 June 2019
Our cover for the June issue is a drawing made by Abby McBride. It summarizes the Forum paper "Inclusive fitness, asymmetric competition and kin selection in plants" by Bodil K. Ehlers and trine Bilde. The drawing is one of five that Abby has made to illustrate our...

Welcome Gregor Kalinkat - new SE

editor
7 June 2019
We are very happy to welcome Gregor Kalinkat to our editorial board! Read more about him in this interview! What's you main research focus at the moment? I just started a new position as a senior researcher in Franz Hölker's lab at the Leibniz-Institute for Freshwater...

Welcome Ignacio M. Pérez-Ramos - new SE

editor
26 May 2019
We are very happy to welcome Ignacio Manuel Pérez-Ramos, Institute of Natural Resources and Agrobiology (IRNAS); Superior Council of Scientific Research (CSIC), Seville, Spain, to our editorial board. Get to know him a bit better in the interview below, and do visit...

Beauty of collaborative experiments

editor
30 April 2019
I always am fascinated by the possibility of tweaking certain parameters and seeing their effects on a given process or a pattern. Experiments are usually my way of doing it. During my post-doc at iDiv, my office was next to a fungal ecologist-Ainhoa Martinez. We often...

Cover April

editor
11 April 2019
The photo on the April cover shows two black legged kittiwakes at nests on Puffin Island, one of the three study sites in the paper " Environmental heterogeneity amplifies behavioural response to a temporal cycle ". The paper studies the effect of a predictable...

Do water plants clean up water?

editor
2 April 2019
Anyone who has had an aquarium or a garden pond is likely to be familiar with the concept of water plants (macrophytes) helping to keep the water clean. In freshwater lakes, macrophytes are doing exactly that. Recall the lakes that you may have visited—you might notice...

Citizen science shows how predation risk effects can reduce lifetime fitness

editor
26 March 2019
Simple observations can sometimes lead to unexpected scientific discoveries. In 1996, wildlife biologist and educator Dick Thiel was musing about the abundance of North American porcupines (Erethizon dorsatum) near his home in central Wisconsin. That winter he started...

What happens in the ecosystem if an apex predator is removed?

editor
18 March 2019
Our study reports the results of the first broad-scale field study investigating the ecological role of Australia’s largest terrestrial predator, the dingo, in tropical savannah ecosystems. We did this by comparing the abundances of herbivores, an introduced...

Water and the lack of it shape tundra vegetation patterns

editor
5 March 2019
Water has a control over vegetation. Whether there is too much or too little of it, it has an impact on the spatial patterns of plants, mosses and lichens. This is evident in arid ecosystems – about but what about cold ecosystems which are considered as temperature...

Editor's Choice March

editor
4 March 2019
The first editor’s choice is the forum by Patrick & Yuan: ‘ The challenges that spatial context present for synthesizing community ecology across scales ’. The rationale for their forum is the common mismatch between community theory and its application within a...

How long time does a T. Rex take to digest a seed?

editor
19 February 2019
When an animal ingests a seed, how long does it take for the seed to pass through its gut? This is an important question for plant ecologists, because seed retention time (SRT) can determine the distance the seed can travel. A number of studies have measured SRT for a...

WHY this variation in vulnerability?

editor
13 February 2019
As I child, I could only dream about the Amazon Rainforest. Few places had such a stronghold on my imagination – a mystical and remote place teeming with unparalleled diversity and exotic creatures. But when, decades later, I made my inaugural trip to Manaus, Brazil, I...

Cover February

editor
8 February 2019
The cover for our February Issue shows "The butterfly Charaxes jasius, recolonizing a burn area 10 days after a high intensity wildfire (Òdena fire, Barcelona, NE Spain; August 2015); photo: JG Pausas. The photo is from the paper Generalized fire response strategies in...

Generalists are the most urban-tolerant birds

editor
1 February 2019
What makes an urban bird (Figure 1)? Are there certain ecological and life history traits which make some species predisposed to urban living (Figure 2)? This is a longstanding question in urban ecology: see here, here, and here for just a few select examples. Much of...

Small text, big returns

editor
30 January 2019
Our Oikos way to increase healthy debate and speculation in ecology Speculation in scientific articles is frequently discouraged, even though it can lead to new hypotheses and debate. Too often, as well, co-authors seek a consensus or commonality regarding the...

New Year and EC January

editor
11 January 2019
Happy New Year to all Oikos readers! The editorial team wishes you a healthy and prosperous 2019, with lots of exciting science! Our first issue of 2019 contains a collection of 13 fascinating articles, ranging from evolutionary processes of adaptation and sex-ration...

Cover January

editor
8 January 2019
The cover on our January Issue shows a moose (Alces alces) drinking in the boreal forest of Cape Breton Highlands National Park, Nova Scotia, Canada. When large terrestrial herbivores like moose are abundant, their browsing in terrestrial ecosystems can have cross-...

Temporal changes with life long effects

editor
14 December 2018
Walking through central European meadows among hills and mountains, in the middle of spring, we are amazed by the striking beauty of the plethora of flowers blooming, and the hundreds of insects feasting on the blossoms. Watching butterflies, we notice them stopping on...

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