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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...

Seasonal effects on stream community structures

editor
11 December 2018
Think about your garden, where you might plant vegetables in late spring and expect to harvest them throughout the summer. Fertilizers are often required to provide nutrients to the plants, and pests like insects might consume the plants before you can harvest them...

Forum: Eltonian niche and functional diversity

editor
10 December 2018
One of this month's Editor's choice papers, which is also Forum paper, has the title "Bringing the Eltonian niche into functional diversity". The first author, Matthias Dehling sent us a photo.... This composite photo shows a Western Lowland Gorilla (Gorilla gorilla)...

December cover

editor
4 December 2018
The photo on our December cover shows a Laughing falcon, Herpetotheres cachinnans , scoring a human-dominated landscape at Costa Rica. Photo: Daniel Karp The paper "Do correlated responses to multiple environmental changes exacerbate or mitigate species loss?" is...

There is a hole in my litterbag….

editor
27 November 2018
Disaster. A ruined experiment. Returning after a year to find half of the experiment eaten! Usually plant material, or litter, rots when buried outside, so we were expecting some of the litter to have disappeared through decomposition. But eaten? What would eat plant...

November cover

editor
13 November 2018
The photo on the November cover shows a Bombus appositus legitimately visiting a Corydalis caseana flower on an inflorescence bearing both robbed and unrobbed flowers. This interaction is studied in the paper Why are some plant–nectar robber interactions commensalisms...

Seabirds of habit

editor
9 November 2018
Breakfast at the nearest coffee shop in the morning, lunch from the local convenience store, quick drink in your regular on the way home. Sound familiar? Just like we can be creatures of habit, new research has revealed that seabirds, too, adapt to hourly cycles to...

One or more embryos? A parasitoidic dilemma....

editor
6 November 2018
The small (1.5 mm) parasitoid wasp female in the photo is inserting her ovipositor into the egg of a moth, which she uses as a host for her young. After she has laid her own egg within the host, the growing embryo divides many times to form a clone of genetically...

Editor's choice November

editor
6 November 2018
We chose the article of Ellen van Velzen and colleagues as the editor’s choice for November. The authors present a model that challenges the paradigm and common view that plastic inducible defences stabilise predator-prey dynamics. The reason for this contrasting...

Coastal phytoplankton community dynamics, interactions, and coexistence

editor
30 October 2018
Diatoms and more generally phytoplankton exhibit a striking diversity of species, which is reflected in a stunning variation of shapes, sizes, and life-histories. Photo credit: Nadine Neaud-Masson - Ifremer Nantes Yet, being primary producers, these small algae ought...

Cover October

editor
30 October 2018
The cover of our October Issue is a photograph of an armadillo lizard ( Ouroborus cataphractus ) showing it's heavy armour and defensive tail-biting behaviour. Body armour not only evolved to thwart predators, but also appears to be driven by climate, more specifically...

The price of safety

editor
10 October 2018
The world is a dangerous place for a small insect. With so many would-be predators, many insects turn to chemical defences in order to protect themselves. These chemicals range from the toxic to the merely smelly or bad tasting. They all have one purpose however, to...

Which hosts do root hemiparasitic plants chose from a plant community?

editor
9 October 2018
As a part of my PhD I wanted to test the quality of 13 different host species for the hemiparasite Rhinanthus alectorolophus, and I planned to include also one host mixture, because this might be the more natural host environment for the parasite. But which mixture...

Towards a common fire strategy scheme for plants and animals

editor
4 October 2018
One of the unifying approaches in ecology is to search for common strategies, that is, types of mechanisms and responses to environmental factors and disturbances. Plant strategies to persist in fire-prone ecosystems (and the traits involved) are nowadays quite well...

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...

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