editor
2 December 2014
Human activities drastically reduce biodiversity at various taxonomic levels. While much of the current effort in research and biological conservation focuses on species diversity, the importance of intraspecific genetic diversity is sometimes overlooked. At the same...
editor
1 December 2014
Decades of ecological research have focused on interactions between herbivores and the chemical defenses of plants. However, far less is known about how effective physical defenses (spines, thorns, etc.) are against mammalian herbivores. It has been argued that co-...
Walk through a grassland at the peak of summer and you will quickly become aware of how many grasshoppers inhabit the area. But what effect do these grasshoppers and other insect herbivores have on the plant community you are walking through? How does the effect of...
We welcome Professor Leif Egil Loe, Aas, Norway to the Oikos Editorial Board. Who is Leif Egil then? I asked some questions to get to know him better: 1. What's you main research focus at the moment? Most of what I am working on is related to ungulate ecology. I am...
editor
25 November 2014
Global biodiversity is constantly declining, and up-to-date research has shown that biodiversity loss affects the functioning of ecosystems and the services they provide to humans. Biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relations have yet mainly been analyzed in...
At first sight, these nematodes all look the same. Nevertheless, they each belong to a different species. Such cryptic species- species that morphologically look the same but show genetic divergence- are more different than we first might think. Previous research...
editor
18 November 2014
Find out what role predation plays in the transfer of less complex parasites in the Early View paper "The underrated importance of predation in transmission ecology of direct lifecycle parasites" by Giovanni Strona. Below is his short summary of the study: Predation is...
Variation in size between sexes is something that we associate mainly with animals. But what about plants? Do female plants have larger elves than males? Find out in the Early View paper in Oikos “Sexual size dimorphism in island plants: the niche variation hypothesis...
editor
14 November 2014
In our new paper “Marine biodiversity and ecosystem functioning: what’s known and what’s next?” just published online early in Oikos, we synthesise our current understanding of the functional consequences of changes in species richness in the marine realm. For those...
editor
12 November 2014
Conservation biologists and climate change researchers are worried by the observed phenological changes, that is, timing of biological events. These concerns are partly motivated by the expected species-specific and thus potentially non-parallell phenological shifts...
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