editor
11 February 2020
Photo by: Francois Brassard Written by: Mark Wong "The cryptic impacts of invasion: functional homogenization of tropical ant communities by invasive fire ants" (Wong et al. 2019) Ecologists are increasingly appreciating the multifaceted nature of biodiversity, which...
editor
14 January 2020
Beetles come in all shapes and sizes. [Source: Insects Unlocked project at the University of Texas at Austin]. "An inordinate fondness for species with intermediate dispersal abilities" (Ashby et al. 2019) JBS Haldane, one of the most influential evolutionary...
editor
13 November 2019
Most wildlife populations live in habitats that show variation in biotic and abiotic conditions across space and time. This means any given species needs to find ways to deal with such variation in environmental conditions (e.g., local adaptation, phenotypic plasticity...
editor
30 April 2019
I always am fascinated by the possibility of tweaking certain parameters and seeing their effects on a given process or a pattern. Experiments are usually my way of doing it. During my post-doc at iDiv, my office was next to a fungal ecologist-Ainhoa Martinez. We often...
editor
2 April 2019
Anyone who has had an aquarium or a garden pond is likely to be familiar with the concept of water plants (macrophytes) helping to keep the water clean. In freshwater lakes, macrophytes are doing exactly that. Recall the lakes that you may have visited—you might notice...
editor
26 March 2019
Simple observations can sometimes lead to unexpected scientific discoveries. In 1996, wildlife biologist and educator Dick Thiel was musing about the abundance of North American porcupines (Erethizon dorsatum) near his home in central Wisconsin. That winter he started...
editor
18 March 2019
Our study reports the results of the first broad-scale field study investigating the ecological role of Australia’s largest terrestrial predator, the dingo, in tropical savannah ecosystems. We did this by comparing the abundances of herbivores, an introduced...
editor
5 March 2019
Water has a control over vegetation. Whether there is too much or too little of it, it has an impact on the spatial patterns of plants, mosses and lichens. This is evident in arid ecosystems – about but what about cold ecosystems which are considered as temperature...
editor
19 February 2019
When an animal ingests a seed, how long does it take for the seed to pass through its gut? This is an important question for plant ecologists, because seed retention time (SRT) can determine the distance the seed can travel. A number of studies have measured SRT for a...
editor
13 February 2019
As I child, I could only dream about the Amazon Rainforest. Few places had such a stronghold on my imagination – a mystical and remote place teeming with unparalleled diversity and exotic creatures. But when, decades later, I made my inaugural trip to Manaus, Brazil, I...
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