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Editor's Choice June

editor
5 June 2015
The first paper by Christoph Mensen and colleagues “ Stressor-induced biodiversity gradients: revisiting biodiversity–ecosystem functioning relationships”, uses biodiversity gradients to test to which degree a realistic loss of species due anthropogenic stressors...

Adult performance: driven by environmental effects or offspring size?

editor
29 May 2015
When organisms grow up to reproductive maturity, they are shaped by the environment that surrounds them and the way they interact with it. Intrinsic effects shape this interaction, and are a product of an organisms’ phenotype. In early development, size is postulated...

Invasive success and the evolution of enhanced weaponry

editor
26 May 2015
The success of invasive plants is often attributed to the production of chemicals that are highly inhibitory against naïve neighbours at the introduced range (‘novel weapons hypothesis’). However, invasive populations could not only possess such novel weapons, but...

Amur tigers: how they choose where and what to eat

editor
22 May 2015
We know that the distributions of carnivore populations across the globe depend heavily upon where prey species are available. Prey availability depends not only on prey density but also on prey accessibility which is affected, in part, by the configuration of...

Ecosystem engineers and physical forces in synergy

editor
22 May 2015
Seed dispersal is a critical process in the life history of flowering, often involving multiple steps both horizontally and vertically. For many plant species, seed burial i.e. vertical seed movement can have mighty consequences for seed fate, plant recruitment and...

Importance of fear in ecology

editor
19 May 2015
Fear, the anticipation of a potentially imminent danger, is taking over most decisions in modern human societies, from neighborhood watch program to foreign policy decisions. However, fear is not limited to human species and is now believed to influence almost all...

Sex-ratio in wild horses

editor
19 May 2015
Ecologists have long been interested in the prominent role that the sex ratio plays on population processes, including sexual selection, evolutionary trajectories, and population dynamics. As such, I (we) were interested in investing the determinants of sex ratio...

Can medium-term studies predict long-term patterns?

editor
18 May 2015
Long-term studies, either survey or experiments, have been identified as crucial tool of ecology since decades. However, and in particular in the case of experimental manipulations, they remain rarely reported in the literature and because their time scale is not...

What can nestedness metrics tell us about birds?

editor
18 May 2015
The prevalence of nestedness in ecological communities has been studied and debated for over twenty years. These studies have all dealt with the concept of compositional nestedness, i.e. the ordered composition of species assemblages. However, this traditional approach...

You are where you eat.

editor
18 May 2015
Central place foragers make consistent returns to a central place between foraging bouts, generally a den or a nest. Territorial animals often aggressively defend their territories and as such regularly monitor the boundaries of their home range. Home range development...

Keystone predators in invaded communities

editor
8 May 2015
The importance of keystone predators in structuring biological communities and ecosystems has been one of the cornerstones of ecology. Surprisingly though, almost nothing is known about the effect of keystone predators in systems that are dominated by non-natives...

Cover May

editor
8 May 2015
The cover of Oikos' May Issue shows a "male Soay sheep in his full glory" and is taken by Tim Coulson. Together with Emily G. Simmonds, Tim has written one of the Editor's Choice papers in the May Issue " Analysis of phenotypic change in relation to climatic drivers in...

Editor's Choice May

editor
8 May 2015
Oikos publishes novel work of great synthetic value on a wide range of organisms. For the May issue, two vertebrate papers were chosen as editor's choice. The work of Hance Ellington and Dennis Murray provides synthesis on the impact of hybridization on ecological...

Warming the tundra: how do invertebrates and plants respond?

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...

Forest ecosystems: does tree diversity matter?

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...

Why bigger is not only bigger

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...

Ecological release in the sand

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...

What drives diversity patterns?

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...

Spatial structure in ecosystems

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...

Urbanisation and biodiversity

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:...

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