Featured in Functional Ecology this week is a paper by Yunhai Zhang and his colleagues, which describes how mowing reduces the stability of temperate grassland primary production under nitrogen addition. Very interesting read!

If you are following the debate on gender equality and woman in STEM, here are some good recent reads:

• Why Men Don’t Believe the Data on Gender Bias in Science
• If there were no barriers to men’s participation, we would all be doing it: a unique perspective on how to be a male ally to women in ecology

… and you can support those who actively voice the problem: https://500womenscientists.org

In the coffee corner of my workplace someone has put up a paper which discusses some lifestyle changes that can help you reduce your carbon emissions (Wynes & Nicholas 2017 Environ. Res. Lett. 12:074024;). In the graph below, you can see the average (and country specific) potentials for reduction for some lifestyle actions.

Family size reduction is number one, but I find that a tricky one. It seems a bit ‘black and white’ to me. The transport/travel actions are thought provoking. A happy bicycle commuter myself, I am all in favour of more bikes on the road (or is it my Dutch genes?), but I understand this is not possible for all of us. One of the things you could think of though is how to travel to your next conference. I will travel to the next British Ecological Society meeting in Ghent by train from Southampton (UK). Why not do the same?

Enjoy your week,

Bjorn

Bjorn Robroek is the blog editor for Functional Ecologists.