Blog

Drought – increase or decrease in herbivore abundance?

editor
7 October 2014
Grasshoppers tend to increase in abundance during drought, no decree, or increase…Find out which and when in the Earl View Oikos paper “Water stress in grasslands: dynamic responses of plants and insect herbivores” by Paul A. Lenhart and co-workers. Below is their...

What exactly can network models predict?

editor
3 October 2014
Ecological networks quantify the diversity of direct and indirect interactions taking place in nature. However, due to their complexity, ecologists rely heavily on the use of metrics to summarize aspects of network structure thought to be of biological importance. Many...

What causes bat dialects?

editor
30 September 2014
Bat acoustic signals might seem rather simple. yet, there are individual differences. The background to these variations are studied in the Early View paper “Geographical variation in echolocation vocalizations of the Himalayan leaf-nosed bat: contribution of...

Costs of living in a nest

editor
26 September 2014
Nests are extremely important for males’ fitness when reproduction and parental care are associated with these structures. The possession of a nest and its conditions may determine male attractiveness (due to female reproductive decisions) and offspring survival (due...

Towards the catastrophic collapse?

editor
23 September 2014
There is concern that climate change will disrupt the temporal schedules of interactions between plants and their pollinators or seed dispersers. This can make communities vulnerable to other ecological threats, for example habitat destruction. In our paper “Robustness...

Finding the food in complex environments

editor
19 September 2014
Many animals locate resources and orient in rather complex environments like vegetation, coral reefs or leaf litter. How does the presence of a stimulus affect animal movement in such complex environments? And what is the relative contribution of a stimulus vs. the...

What are the processes responsible for the effects of habitat loss?

editor
12 September 2014
When habitat is lost so are species. One way of investigating the processes underlying this pattern is to pay attention to the identity (not only the number) of species. What happens to between-site differences in species composition when habitat loss transforms...

Modelling white storchs

editor
12 September 2014
Understanding lifetime tracks and fitness of long distance avian migrants. This is the title of our DFG-funded German-Israeli Project Cooperation and it is also our quest for several years. Within this project, we aim to explore how movement, survival and reproduction...

Better being early?

editor
9 September 2014
If invaders do better by early arrival and growing, will native species also benefit from being early? Not necessarily, as found in the Early View paper “Priority effects vary with species identity and origin in an experiment varying the timing of seed arrival” by Elsa...

Pollinator decline effects on plants

editor
5 September 2014
How pollinator decline affect plant-plant interactions for pollinator is studied in the Early View article ‘ Experimental reduction of pollinator visitation modifies plant-plant interactions for pollination’ by Amparo Lázaro and co-workers. Several studies have...

From rich to poor – what happens in the soil?

editor
2 September 2014
What happens with plants, microbes and animals during soli transition from mull to mor? Find out in the Early View paper "Coordination of aboveground and belowground responses to local-scale soil fertility differences between two contrasting Jamaican rain forest types...

Frugivory and seed dispersal

editor
22 August 2014
What is it that determines if a bird should deposit a seed from a fruit in a specific place or not? I the Early View paper "Seed dispersal in heterogeneous landscapes: linking field observations with spatially explicit models" , Jessica E Lavabre ad colleagues combines...

How much do asexual plants actually change?

editor
19 August 2014
A sexual reproduction system should confer higher mutation rates and hence evolutionary rate than asexual ones. Is it really so? Find out in the Early View paper “Asexual plants change just as often and just as fast as do sexual plants when introduced to a new range”...

Do invasive species alter litter nitrogen release?

editor
11 August 2014
Can invasive species actually alter their environment so that more nutrients are available for them? Find out in the Early View paper "Non-additive effects of invasive tree litter shift seasonal N release: a potential invasion feedback" by Michael J. Schuster and...

Tuna-tern facilitation

editor
27 June 2014
How do seabirds cooperate with tunas to find more fish? Find out in the Early View paper " Facilitative interactions among the pelagic community of temperate migratory terns, tunas and dolphins" by Holly F Goyert and co-workers. Below is their short summary of the...

How do behavioral changes affect ecosystems?

editor
24 June 2014
That predators affect prey populations and vice versa is well known. But how does the prey's behavioral responses to predators affect populations of the prey's prey? This was studied by Bradley Carlson and Tracy Langkilde in the Early View paper "Predation risk in...

Carbon flow between lakes and ground

editor
17 June 2014
How carbon moves from terrestrial food-webs to aquatic ones are studied in the new Early View paper "Boomerang ecosystem fluxes: organic carbon inputs from land to lakes are returned to terrestrial food webs via aquatic insects" by K. Scharnweber and co-workers. Below...

How does climate change affect pollination phenology?

editor
13 June 2014
What is climate change doing to plant–pollinator interactions? In the last decade, ecologists have focused on the possibility that climate change will shift the seasonal timing (phenology) of plants relative to their pollinators, reducing temporal overlap between...

Coping with novel climates: lessons from a range-expanding raptor

editor
10 June 2014
Many animals are breeding earlier and earlier in response to a gradually changing climate – but what happens when a species encounters a dramatically different climatic regime such as a complete reversal of the summer-winter rainfall pattern? In our article, “...

Editor's Choice June

editor
4 June 2014
Papers published in Oikos should meet the principal criteria to generate synthesis in ecology. Synthesis can be created in different ways and definitively obtained when long-term data sets, novel analytical tools and good hypotheses are merged. The first editor’s...

Pages

Subscribe to Blog

Recent Comments & Hot Topics