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December Cover!

editor
8 December 2015
The cover for Oikos December Issue shows "A male southwestern fence lizard (Sceloporus cowlesi) carrying a radio-transmitter displays to rivals at White Sands National Monument, New Mexico, USA". Photo by H. Streby Link to the paper: Evidence for ecological release...

Biodiversity beyond species

editor
8 December 2015
When people think about nature, they usually think in terms of species -- whether it be an oak tree, a red squirrel, or a sunflower. Sometimes, ecological studies fall into the same trap and categorize organisms by species when there's a lot more variation going on at...

Selection, habitat preference and the evolution of sexual size dimorphism in arvicoline voles

editor
8 December 2015
In mammals, the male generally is the larger sex. For example, a mature male of southern elephant seal weights 3,200 Kg on average, whereas the females in his harem typically weigh five times less. However, females do still outweigh males in some species. For example,...

Does fish size affect trophic cascades?

editor
4 December 2015
Understanding the ecological consequences of human activities has become a central issue in ecology. A large number of studies have shown that anthropogenic biodiversity loss is not random, but is biased against large vertebrate consumers at the top of trophic networks...

Editor's choice December

editor
4 December 2015
EC papers for our last issue of 2015 are Mrowicki et al’s contribution on the context dependency of species loss effects in a marine system and Maino and Kearney’s synthesis on the variation in metabolic scaling in insects according to body size. The impact of species...

Welcome Silke Langenheder - new SE

editor
24 November 2015
We're very happy and proud to welcome Dr Silke Langenheder, Uppsala University to our editorial board. Get to know Silke in the interview below. What's your main research focus at the moment? I am a microbial community ecologist and the overall aim with my research is...

The power-law nature of individual body size variation

editor
20 November 2015
The ubiquitous Taylor’s law (TL) scaling between the mean and the variance of species population density was discovered more than half a century ago. The mechanistic basis of TL has been the focal point of research, and little attention was paid to its application...

What's the colour of environmental noise?

editor
20 November 2015
Understanding the environmental conditions that a species can tolerate is a growing concern in ecology and evolutionary biology. Research is beginning to reveal that the environmental factors that actually challenge organisms in nature (e.g., temperature, precipitation...

Welcome new SE - Yngvild Vindenes

editor
10 November 2015
We're very happy to welcome Dr Yngvild Vindenes, Oslo, Norway, to our Editorial Board. Get to know her in the mini-interview below! And visit her webpage here . What's you main research focus at the moment? I use demographic approaches (such as matrix models and...

November Cover

editor
2 November 2015
The cover on the November Issue is an illustration made by K. Curtis-Hill, asociated with the paper "Recognizing cross-ecosystem responses to changing temperatures: soil warming impacts pelagic food webs" by Samuel B. Fey et al. "Lakes respond to direct and cross-...

Spatial effects in mycorrhizal communities

editor
2 November 2015
The symbiosis between plants and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) is a crucial interaction that mediates nutrient cycling in terrestrial ecosystems. It is hypothesized that this symbiosis was essential for the evolutionary radiation of terrestrial plants...

Digging into the data – what can we learn from decades of monitoring?

editor
30 October 2015
Our recent article in Oikos seeks to understand biological interactions and long-term trends in northern Baltic Sea phytoplankton communities. At the heart of this article, however, is long-term monitoring data collected by Stockholm University as part of the Swedish...

Timing is crucial for consequences of migratory connectivity

editor
30 October 2015
Migratory animals typically visit several places throughout their journeys. It is widely acknowledged that ‘migratory connectivity’ - the geographic linking of individuals and populations between one life cycle stage and another - has consequences for migrant fitness...

Meta communities in dynamic systems

editor
16 October 2015
Biological communities are shaped by both local biotic interactions and abiotic environmental conditions (environmental filtering) and regional processes, such as the movement of organisms from one site to another (dispersal). Following this, how sets of local...

WELCOME TO THE 1st PER BRINK SYMPOSIUM

editor
13 October 2015
WELCOME TO THE 1st PER BRINK SYMPOSIUM On Feb 1st, Oikos , together with Nordic Society Oikos and Wiley arrange the Per Brink symposium: (Re)appreciating the role of life history in Eco-evolutionary dynamics? Any environmental change shifts an individual’s optimal life...

Do bats know what's in the fruits?

editor
13 October 2015
Fleshy fruits function primarily to attract mutualistic animal seed dispersers, yet they are much more than packages of nutritional rewards. Fruits contain a rich array of secondary metabolites that give them their incredible diversity in flavors, odors, and colors...

On predation in the Bromeliad ecosystems

editor
13 October 2015
Tank bromeliads are a family of Neotropical plants, with tightly overlapping leaves that are capable of accumulating rain water and detritus. These plants host a very diverse aquatic community in which the larval stage of several species of mosquitoes, non-biting...

Welcome Marjo Saastamoinen- new SE

editor
13 October 2015
We are very happy to welcome a new Subject Editor to our board - Dr Marjo Saastamoinen, University of Helsinki, Finland. Get to know her in th inteview below and visit her webpage: http://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/msaastam/ What's you main research focus at the moment?...

Philosophy behind “Colony size and foraging range in seabirds”

editor
13 October 2015
Basic questions in animal collective behaviour are still unanswered. Bird coloniality is a good example: Why do many bird species breed in colonies? Why is colony size so variable within and between species? Why is breeding in colonies often synchronised? Historically...

El Nino and density-dependent mortality in saplings

editor
13 October 2015
Density-dependent mortality (DDM) has been identified as one of the processes allowing coexistence of hundreds of species in tropical forests. At the early stages of tree development, mortality occurs mainly within dense clumps of conspecific individuals as a...

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