Blog

Are you a helper?

drupaladmin
6 December 2012
Do you have any “helper” around you? Maybe are you one yourself? “Helpers” are those researchers who regularly provide valuable feedback to their colleagues’ manuscripts and to scientific discussions. Who regard this feedback as part of the research, and a part of...

Top of the pops

drupaladmin
4 December 2012
You can now find a list of the most cited Oikos papers 2011, that were published in 2009 and 2010, on our webpage. On top of the list, is "A consumer's guide to nestedness analysis" by Werner Ulrich, Mário Almeida-Neto and Nicholas J. Gotelli. Here is a short...

Are women too busy householding to write Nature papers?

drupaladmin
30 November 2012
Do you remember the Correspondence in Nature about contributions by women to Nature News and Views , that I wrote about here earlier this autmun? Obviously, the paper made the editor's of Nature to analyze their situation and to come up with a solution to the problem...

Do we publish too much?

drupaladmin
29 November 2012
H-index, Impact Factor, citations, number of publications per year – metrics all around the scientist. The currency of science. Has it gone that far that the metrics is about to kill scientific quality? This “quantity mantra” – the obsession with measuring scientific...

New Editor: Matty P. Berg

drupaladmin
28 November 2012
Let me introduce you to our new Subject Editor, Dr. Matty P. Berg, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. - What gets me out of bed every morning is the question what determines the diversity and composition of soil fauna communities, Matty says. What's you...

Seed size have demographic consequences

drupaladmin
27 November 2012
So those small small seeds produced by plants have actually big effects on plant demography. Read more in the Early View paper "Non-native conditions favor non-native populations of invasive plant: demographic consequences of seed size variation?" by José L. Hierro et...

Heavy work in community ecology

drupaladmin
23 November 2012
When I did an undergraduate project at Silwood Park, my supervisor, Hefin Jones used to say that ecological research is about 10 % inspiration and 90% transpiration. And this is exactly what Winfried Voigt report about in his story about his and his colleagues Early...

With inspiration from the past

drupaladmin
22 November 2012
Sometimes it's worth bringing good old science back into the light. Hideyuki Doi and Terutaka Mori were inspired by two papers from 1932 and 1953 about species abundance distirbution and brought them into modern days' science. Read the paper "The discovery of species–...

Sex in plants depends on their neighbours

drupaladmin
21 November 2012
Root competition appears to effect sex allocation in plants. Åsa Lankinen and her colleagues have studied this in the Early View paper "Allocation to pollen competitive ability versus seed production in Viola tricolor as an effect of plant size, soil nutrients and...

Effects of monoculture on plant litter decomposition

drupaladmin
16 November 2012
In the new early view paper "Do physical plant litter traits explain non-additivity in litter mixtures? A test of the improved microenvironmental conditions theory", Marika Makkonen and co-workers, present a new theory on decomposition rates. Here's their own summary...

How good isn't a reject?

drupaladmin
15 November 2012
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote here about the close connection between failure and success . And associated it with improvement of a manuscript due to a reject. Now, I also found some scientific support for this. Vincent Calgno and his co-workers have tracked the...

Why red leaves?

drupaladmin
13 November 2012
At least here in southern Sweden, the autumn colours have been fantastic this year! As an evolutionary ecologist one starts wonder: why does trees differ in level of coloration? Is it only a benefit to the tree? Or are there costs associated with it as well? And why...

New Oikos SE

drupaladmin
12 November 2012
It's really nice to be able to present yet another new Oikos Subject Editor: Shawn Wilder, University of Sidney, Australia. 1. What's you main research focus at the moment? My main research focus now is examining the nutritional requirements of spiders and comparing...

How the aphids got their spots...

drupaladmin
8 November 2012
...is explained in Miroslav Kummel et al.'s new online paper "How the aphids got their spots: predation drives self-organization of aphid colonies in a patchy habitat". A short summary is given here by Miroslav: Spatial self-organization is the ability of a system to...

New pollination network model

drupaladmin
7 November 2012
In the new paper "Adaptive foraging allows the maintenance of biodiversity of pollination networks" Fernanda S. Valdovinos and her colleagues present a new population-dynamics model for plant-pollinator interactions: Here's Fernanda's summary of the model: One of the...

Per Brink award winner 2013

drupaladmin
6 November 2012
We are very happy to congratulate Dr. Sharon Strauss, University of California, to being the winner of the Per Brink award 2013. Sharon will be awarded the Per Brink prize at the Oikos meeting in Linköping, Sweden in February 2013. Here is a presentation of Sharon: My...

Jessica Abbott - new SE

drupaladmin
5 November 2012
We are very happy to welcome Dr. Jessica Abbott as new Subject Editor for Oikos. And of course, we want to know more about Jessica so: Jessica, what is your research about? At the moment my main research focus is on how sexual antagonism influences an organism's...

Exotic invaders are modified by natives

drupaladmin
2 November 2012
Alien, invasive species are an increasing threat to biodiversity. In their paper "Competitive outcomes between two exotic invaders are modified by direct and indirect effects of a native conifer", Kerry Metlen and co-workers has studied what two invasive species - a...

Don't forget to laugh...

drupaladmin
1 November 2012
Humour is an important creativity booster. And science can be oh so serious sometimes. Check out this site when you need to laugh... And don't ever believe that we editors, at various stages, are lacking empathy or an understanding of the consequences of our decisions...

Battlefield study: Grasshoppers vs. wolf spiders

drupaladmin
30 October 2012
That predator-prey interactions can be temperature-dependent is something that Angela Laws and Anthony Joern shows in the new Early View paper in Oikos "Predator–prey interactions in a grassland food chain vary with temperature and food quality" Read their background...

Pages

Subscribe to Blog

Recent Comments & Hot Topics