Ecology Podcast

Alan Knapp talks to Brian Steidinger, the winner of the 2015 Haldane Prize for Early Career Research, about his paper "Variability in potential to exploit different soil organic phosphorus compounds among tropical montane tree species" (Functional Ecology, 29:1, pp 121–130) Soil phosphorus is as essential as water for plant growth, but its low availability in some areas forces plants to develop di...

Jason Kolbe discusses his paper (Kolbe, J. J., Battles, A. C. and Avilés-Rodríguez, K. J. (2015), City slickers: poor performance does not deter Anolis lizards from using artificial substrates in human-modified habitats. Funct Ecol. doi:10.1111/1365-2435.12607) with Functional Ecology editor, Duncan Irschick How do lizards adjust to life in the city? Urbanization transforms natural environments in...

Journal of Ecology blog editor Pierre Mariotte interviews the 2014 Harper Prize winner Michiel Veldhuis.

In this podcast Andrew Suggitt interviews Owen Greenwood about their paper ‘Using in situ management to conserve biodiversity under climate change’ published in the Journal of Applied Ecology - http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2664.12602/full.

Emma Sayer and Ken Thompson talk about Emma's virtual issue: Making the Most of Microbes: http://www.functionalecology.org/view/0/virtualIssues/VI_mostofmicrobes.html Microorganisms carry out a large number of fundamental processes that underpin ecosystem function. The enormous diversity and high functional overlap of soil microbes in particular makes this an exciting but challenging area of resea...

Thomas Hasper and Johan Uddling talk to FE Editor Alan Knapp about their recent paper "Water use by Swedish boreal forests in a changing climate." The ongoing increases in atmospheric CO2 and temperature have the potential to alter the flux of water vapor through plant leaf ‘stomata’, tiny and actively regulated pores in the leaf surface, but relatively little is known about the water-use response...

JEC: David Gibson interviews Scott Collins by Ecology Podcast

Executive Editor, David Gibson, interviewed Carol Thornber at ESA 2015 about all things aquatic ecology.

Robbie Wilson talks to Amy Hahs about using urban ecosystems to expand fundamental ecological knowledge. Amy Hahs guest-edited our latest Special Feature: Ecology of Organisms in Urban Environments with Karl Evans. You can read the Special Feature here: http://www.functionalecology.org/view/0/specialfeatures.html#urbaneco

Droughts are predicted to become increasingly frequent and intense in Amazonia, and empirical evidence for the vulnerability of Amazonian trees to drought has grown over the past decade. Little is known, however, about the mechanisms or the diversity of drought tolerance in tropical trees and, it has been difficult to quantify drought tolerance in tropical trees, due to a lack of consensus on a re...

Alan Knapp talks to Anita Narwani and Patrick Venail about their new Extended Spotlight: Community Phylogenetics and Ecosystem Functioning: http://j.mp/FE29I5

Duncan Irschick talks to Coleman M. Sheehy III about how arboreality and the associated gravitational stress on blood circulation have influenced the evolution of tail length in snakes. Since their evolutionary origins about 100 million years ago, snakes have diversified into a wide variety of aquatic, burrowing, terrestrial, and arboreal habitats where they experience various levels of gravitatio...

In celebration of Fascination of Plants Day on 18 May 2015: Journal of Ecology's Executive Editor, David Gibson, has interviewed Anthony Davy about the Journal's Biological Flora of the British Isles series.

Alan Knapp talks to the 2014 Haldane Prizewinner Scott Ferrenberg about his paper, "Smooth bark surfaces can defend trees against insect attack: resurrecting a ‘slippery’ hypothesis". The concept of smooth bark on trees and shrubs acting as an anatomical defence against epiphytic vegetation and phytophagous insects has, for some time, fallen out of favour. Ferrenberg and Mitton, in a study of bark...

The Editors of the Journal of Ecology are pleased to honour Professor Deborah Goldberg in our continuing Eminent Ecologist series. Deborah is the Elzada U. Clover Collegiate Professor and Chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan, USA. More than that, Deborah is a hugely influential community ecologist having published a large body of highly cited wo...

Hal and Rob are two of the co-authors on "The COMPADRE Plant Matrix Database: an open online repository for plant demography" http://bit.ly/10M3OZG

Stephanie Green explains why generalist lionfish are really 'picky eaters' and how their feeding habits will affect invaded Caribbean fish communities. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2656.12250/abstract

Katie Field, Associate Editor for Functional Ecology, talks to Ken Thompson about her new Virtual Issue: Mycorrhizal networks in ecosystem structure and functioning. The vast majority of land plants form mutualistic symbioses with soil-dwelling fungi known as mycorrhizas, which can link many plants in a common mycelial network. These networks can be enormous, with around 200m of mycorrhizal fungal...

Survival of the weakest seems an unlikely title for paper in ecology, but that is exactly what they found in their Haldane prizewinning paper, as Kyle Demes explains in this podcast. Demes, K. W., Pruitt, J. N., Harley, C. D.G., Carrington, E. (2013), Survival of the weakest: increased frond mechanical strength in a wave-swept kelp inhibits self-pruning and increases whole-plant mortality. Functio...

Reichmann, L. G., Sala, O. E. (2014), Differential sensitivities of grassland structural components to changes in precipitation mediate productivity response in a desert ecosystem. Functional Ecology, 28: 1292–1298. doi: 10.1111/1365-2435.12265 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2435.12265/abstract

In this podcast, Robbie Wilson discusses a recent paper showing that long term exposure to a neonicotinoid pesticide ca damage bees’ ability to forage for pollen – and may be changing their choices of which flowers to visit – with co-author Nigel Raine. This study, conducted at Royal Holloway University of London by Nigel Raine and Richard Gill, monitored bee activity using Radio Frequency Identif...

Cynthia Chang talks with Alan Knapp on her paper: Chang, C. C., Smith, M. D. (2014), Resource availability modulates above- and below-ground competitive interactions between genotypes of a dominant C4 grass. Functional Ecology. doi: 10.1111/1365-2435.12227 Plants compete for essential resources like light, water, and nitrogen, and understanding how plants coexist when these resources are limiting...

At INTECOL 2013, Methods’ Associate Editor, Barb Anderson, interviewed a number of delegates and asked them: What method has transformed your field the most, during your career? Visit the Methods blog to find out who gave the answers: http://bit.ly/1gULB02

At INTECOL 2013, Methods’ Associate Editor, Barb Anderson, asked a number of delegates what method they would like to be invented. Visit the Methods blog to find out who gave the answers: http://bit.ly/1jGiUEO

Music credit: - Artist: Josh Woodward http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Josh_Woodward/ - Song: Once Tomorrow (Instrumental Version) http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Josh_Woodward/Breadcrumbs/JoshWoodward-Breadcrumbs-NoVox-09-OnceTomorrow