editor
26 September 2017
This work is the fruit of the long-lasting cooperation with Jan Habel and Luc Lens who acquainted me, being rather a theoretical ecologist, to East African bird ecology, conservation, and evolution. Environmental – trait relationships are a hot topic and thus I mailed...
editor
19 September 2017
Positive interactions among species have been described as supporters of biodiversity in resource limited or high stress ecosystems. However, the area that these species are supported is rarely quantified. In deserts, shrubs can facilitate annual plants and allow them...
editor
12 September 2017
Plant-soil feedback is a powerful concept to capture plant-induced change in the soil and their knock-on effects on plant performance. Most knowledge on plant-soil feedbacks comes from greenhouse studies where a single plant is tested on the soil conditioned by another...
editor
8 September 2017
In ecological communities, every species needs to interact with other species in order to survive and prosper. These ecological interactions are extremely varied in typology, magnitude, and mechanisms, as one would guess given the overwhelming diversity of life forms...
editor
5 September 2017
The cover for our September Issue relates to the paper "Plant–soil negative feedback explains vegetation dynamics and patterns at multiple scales" by Vincenot et al. Description: Simulated plant-soil negative feedback reproduces vegetation ring formation as visible in...
editor
5 September 2017
The forum by Flombaum and colleagues puts the role of sampling effects for productivity maximisation central when invasions come into play. To date, most insights into the relevance and importance of biodiversity for ecosystem functioning point at the primary...
editor
15 August 2017
Food webs are complex arrangements of interconnected species, with the food web of a specific ecosystem containing hundreds of species and thousands of interactions between them. From an energetics perspective, food webs can be viewed as networks of energy pathways in...
editor
23 May 2017
Understanding only arises from organising knowledge to reveal relationships and patterns - what the Periodic Table did for chemistry. Biology is inherently difficult to organise and find general patterns. For example, different bits of biology have referred to the ‘...
editor
23 May 2017
In communities of competing prey species of different food quality, predators may supplement their diets of low-quality prey with high-quality prey, leading to indirect interactions between different prey species. We show that this interaction not only ensures the...
editor
9 May 2017
Humans are not the only species to hedge their bets against uncertainty. No habitat is completely predictable and organisms –from microorganisms to vertebrates– living in fluctuating environments may exhibit bet-hedging strategies, which are believed to have evolved to...
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