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Does fish size affect trophic cascades?

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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”

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

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...

Welcome Elizabeth Borer as new SE

We're so happy to having recruited several new, great editors to Oikos lately. One of them is Elizabeth Borer, University of Minnesota, St Paul. Get to know her in the interview below and visit her website here : What's you main research focus at the moment? I'm an...

Energy flow between stream and forest

Cross-system subsidies, or transfers of energy and nutrients from one ecosystem to another, have been studied extensively in many different types of environments. In particular, a great deal of research demonstrates that subsidies between streams and surrounding...

Editor's Choice October

Our October issue is out! Editor’s choices are two remarkable papers focusing on species interactions. The forum paper of Oriol-Cotterill and colleagues focuses on landscapes of fear from the perspective of terrestrial carnivores, downgraded to penultimate predators by...

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