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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...

Welcome new SE - Jiri Reif

editor
9 March 2018
We are happy to welcome Dr. Jiri Reif, Charles University, Prag, Czech Republic, to our Editorial Board. Get to know him in my interview below and read more at https://www.natur.cuni.cz/fakulta/zivotni-prostredi/lide/zamestnanci/jiri-reif What's you main research focus...

Forever young - a strategy for niche differentiation?

editor
13 February 2018
On the right: paedomorphic alpine newt, a phenotype that retains gills at the adult stage (Photo by Mathieu Denoël). On the left: Fig. 2 of the article illustrating the isotopic niche of alpine newts, with paedomorphic females foraging more on planktonic organisms than...

Welcome Paul Caplat, new SE!

editor
7 February 2018
We are very happy and proud to welcome Paul Caplat, Queens University, Belfast, to our editorial board. Get to know Paul here and visit his webpage http://paulcaplat.weebly.com/ What's you main research focus at the moment? I develop approaches to understand and...

Host heterogeneity determines epidemic outcomes

editor
30 January 2018
A dynamic network simulation where the infection (in red) spreads to uninfected individuals (blue). Infected individuals ultimately recover and become immune (green). Throughout the simulation, contacts between individuals are continuously dissolving and forming...

Oikos goes Double Blind

editor
26 January 2018
Peer review is central to science, it is a necessary quality-control procedure to ensure that scientific research published in publications can be reproduced and trusted. While being an essential step in the scientific procedure, it is under severe pressure and...

Do you ever feel tempted to try new things?

editor
23 January 2018
Do you ever feel tempted to try new things? As time goes on, we are always acquiring new preferences; it goes for food, books, songs and hobbies for example. Time, in the evolutionary scale, may also play an important role in determining the chances of species...

November Cover

editor
3 November 2017
The beautiful photo on the November Cover was taken by photographer Martin Oeggerli, and shows the single-celled eukaryote Euglena gracilis, that swims via an anterior flagellum and uses a paraflagellar body and red stigma (a red eyespot) to respond to light gradients...

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