Insights into Oikos papers

The price of safety

The world is a dangerous place for a small insect. With so many would-be predators, many insects turn to chemical defences in order to protect themselves. These chemicals range from the toxic to the merely smelly or bad tasting. They all have one purpose however, to...

Which hosts do root hemiparasitic plants chose from a plant community?

As a part of my PhD I wanted to test the quality of 13 different host species for the hemiparasite Rhinanthus alectorolophus, and I planned to include also one host mixture, because this might be the more natural host environment for the parasite. But which mixture...

Towards a common fire strategy scheme for plants and animals

One of the unifying approaches in ecology is to search for common strategies, that is, types of mechanisms and responses to environmental factors and disturbances. Plant strategies to persist in fire-prone ecosystems (and the traits involved) are nowadays quite well...

MOOSE ARE DRIVERS OF CHANGE INFLUENCING ADAJACENT STREAM ECOSYSTEMS

Moose have altered the direction of forest regeneration following spruce budworm outbreak and created vast areas of spruce-moose savannah – particularly in Cape Breton Highlands National Park (see above picture). We conducted a field study to investigate whether the...

How does urbanization affect herbivory?

Urban environments are expanding at a rapid rate with over half of the human population residing now in cities. This fast development promises dramatic changes on physical environment, ecological communities and local and global ecosystems in the coming decades. For...

How robust are the patterns of density-dependence and sex-bias in dispersal?

Organisms disperse from one place to another for a variety of reasons, including search for food or mates and escape from stress. One of the factors that influence dispersal is population density. We investigated three issues on the effects of population density on...

Photosynthetic performance and species success

During ecological successions, the differences in physiological performances of co-occurring species contribute to trigger the changes in plant community composition: however, plant physiology and vegetation dynamics are rarely investigated together. A long term...

How environmental noise and harvest affect population synchrony....

We show proportional harvesting of species increases the spatial region undergoing simultaneous population depletion on the arrival of an unfavorable random environmental change. This increase in population spatial coherence may have important consequences for...

Can community diversity predict predator abundance?

Riparian habitats, which include streams and the surrounding land, are sites of material and energy exchange between land and water. Predators that use these areas, such as river otter and mink, rely on both systems for cover and prey (i.e., fish, crayfish, muskrat)...

Cover June

The cover for our June issue shows Grey reef sharks swim along the forereef at Palmyra Atoll. Blacktip reef sharks are rarely seen on these deeper forereef habitats, likely due to competitive interactions between the species. We thank Yannis Papastamatiou for the...

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