editor
5 May 2015
Caterpillar of the Arctic moth (Gynaephora groenlandica) feeding on Salix arctica. Accelerated rates of warming in tundra ecosystems can simultaneously affect plants, herbivores and their interactions. Invertebrate herbivores are likely to respond strongly to warming...
editor
5 May 2015
Forests provide a large collection of ecosystem functions and services. They produce wood for pulp and timber, and contribute to the regulation of the carbon and water cycles. Furthermore, they host a major part of the world’s biodiversity, and provide numerous...
editor
28 April 2015
The study of scaling is an attempt to understand why bigger is not only bigger. A big cello produces a lower pitched sound than a small violin. A large cup of hot water will cool more slowly than a small one. When the size of a bridge is increased, the design must...
editor
24 April 2015
When a population encounters a newly-formed habitat, colonizers of the new habitat often undergo “ecological release,” meaning that they expand their ecological niche in the new habitat compared to their original habitat. Ecological release usually occurs because in a...
editor
21 April 2015
Protist microcosm experiments including 15 different species (left photos, clockwise: Blepharisma, Euglena gracilis, Paramecium bursaria and Colpidium) were used to test the effect of active dispersal along dendritic versus linear networks (right photo), and subsequent...
editor
21 April 2015
Ecologists have long been interested in the spatial structure of communities, that is, any non-random spatial organization in the distribution of communities. If communities are spatially structured, sites near each other are compositionally more similar than the more...
editor
10 April 2015
How does urbanisation affect organisms with different mobility and specialisation degree? At which distance does urbanisation affect these different organisms? These are the key questions that are addressed in the Oikos' paper "Impacts of urbanisation on biodiversity:...
editor
10 April 2015
Slow moving animals, like snails, pay a high price for moving the wrong way. If they send each other information about the best choice via chemical signals, they could optimize their movement decisions considerably. Photograph of the great pond snail Lymnaea stagnalis...
editor
7 April 2015
Plant diversity, typically measured as the number of plant species at a local site, plays a primary role in regulating and maintaining many ecosystem processes such as decomposition rates, plant growth, and resistance against disturbance. In addition, plant diversity...
March was a hectic project month in Belgium, with a series of important deadlines. A shame that I did not provide blog notes for our editor’s choices for March - they are great. Timothee Poisot and colleagues published a forum paper on the context-dependency of species...
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