Last year, Functional Ecology welcomed 15 new Associate Editors from 9 different countries to the journal as part of the cross-journal open call for AEs. Read more about our new associate editors and their interests below.
Department of Biology, University of Oklahoma, USA
Dan is a community and ecosystem ecologist, and is interested in how community structure and ecosystem function covary across multiple spatial scales. He works in stream and riparian ecosystems using quantitative, landscape, observational and experimental approaches. He is particularly interested in food webs and stable isotopes. Website.
Centre d’Etudes Biologiques de Chizé, France
Frédéric Angelier is a physiological and behavioural ecologist whose research interests focus on the role of physiology in mediating life-history trade-offs in wild vertebrates. He is especially interested in understanding how physiological mechanisms may constrain or enhance the ability of wild animals to cope with ongoing environmental changes. Specifically, his work focusses on eco-physiological processes, such as stress physiology, telomeres regulation, endocrinology, energy metabolism and the physiological regulation of parental care. He works on vertebrate species, both in the field and in the laboratory. Website.
Institute of Integrative Biology, University of Liverpool, UK
Seth is an evolutionary ecologist who largely works on the interactions between hosts and parasites. Through a series of questionable life decisions, this work has become increasingly genomic. He uses these newish genomic approaches to try and understand how insects are able to display surprisingly complex immunological characteristics like specificity in response and resistance, and immune memory, when these hosts lack the adaptive immune responses of vertebrates. More details of Seth’s work can be found at his website (seth.barribeau.com).
Depto. Biología de Organismos y Sistemas, Universidad de Oviedo, Asturias, Spain
Dani has been studying plant-animal interactions for more than 20 years. In that time, he’s studied the functionality of these interactions from population, community, and even landscape ecology approaches. More recently, he has focussed on ecological interactions, seeking to answer how the structure of interaction networks drive the magnitude and the stability of ecosystem functions and services, and how the spatial configuration of landscape conditions and the biodiversity-ecosystem function link. Website
The Centre for Functional Ecology at the University of Coimbra, Portugal
Ruben started off as an ornithologist, but rapidly become fascinated by biotic interactions and network theory as a tool to frame important conservation issues such as biodiversity loss, biological invasions, biocontrol and refaunation at the community level. Besides ecological networks, his main interests are in understanding the process of seed dispersal by animals, and particularly its relationship with general island biogeography and community assembly rules. In 2013, Ruben established a research group on ecological networks based in Portugal. He has participated in projects in the Azores, Galapagos, Mozambique, São Tomé, Seychelles and mainland Portugal, and established a large and long-lasting network of international collaborators. Website.
Northern Arizona University, USA
Liza is an evolutionary ecologist and geneticist whose research focuses on plant-herbivore interactions and the evolution and genetics of plant defense. She is particularly interested in the relative impacts of genetic and environmental effects on plant phenotypes. Her research generally focuses on Mimulus and Populus species. Website
Laboratoire de Biométrie et Biologie Évolutive, University of Lyon (University Claude Bernard Lyon 1), France
Jean-François is an evolutionary biologist who is particularly interested in the evolution of actuarial and reproductive senescence across vertebrates. More specifically, he is working to understand how environmental conditions and physiological performance shape the variability of senescence patterns observed across species, populations and individuals. He is using a wide range of approaches including comparative analyses and observational studies. Jean-François’s other research topics notably include sexual selection and sperm competition. Website.
School of Biology and Ecology, University of Maine, USA
Danielle is an evolutionary and ecological physiologist primarily interested in the comparative energetics and the evolution of mammalian temperature regulation. She uses field and laboratory experiments, to seek to understand how rigidity or flexibility in metabolism and body temperature regulation affects the energetics of a species, and how their evolutionary history has shaped these patterns. Website.
Departamento de Biología Animal, Biología Vegetal y Ecología. Universidad de Jaén, Spain.
Antonio is a plant evolutionary ecologist whose work focusses on the evolution of complex traits with a relevant ecological function in the context of adaptation. In particular, he is interested in understanding the ecological, genetic and evolutionary basis underlying natural variation in plant traits related to tolerance and resistance to biotic and abiotic stress and traits involved in plant-animal interactions. At the same time, he is also interested in knowing how changes in the land-use and fragmentation affect taxonomic, functional and genetic diversity, species interactions and ecosystem services. Website.
Institute of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics (IBED) at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Elly is a soil ecologist interested in the interaction between plant communities and soil communities including micro-, meso- and macro-fauna. She is specifically interested in how food web interactions drive the soil community composition in the root-zone. She has looked at carbon flows through the soil food web with the use of stable isotopes on the effects of soil community change in a successional gradient. Currently, she is investigating the influence of plant root exudates on soil community assemblages with a special interest for mutualistic and potential plant pathogenic fungi. Website and twitter.
School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, University of Washington, USA
Jan’s research aims at understanding how fish populations in marine and freshwater ecosystems respond to changes in environmental conditions, harvesting, and other sources of mortality. He works on a variety of topics including fisheries ecology, effects of climate change, shifts in population demographic structure, and consequences of intraspecific trait variation. Methods to investigate these topics include structured population models, simulation modeling, Bayesian inference and other statistical methods, lab experiments and fieldwork. Currently, much of his research focusses on the ecology of Pacific salmon. Website.
Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (BiK-F), Germany
Matthias studies the community ecology and biogeography of species interactions. His studies investigate how ecological and evolutionary factors structure mutualistic interaction networks between plants and animals. One of his main interests is the identification of functional traits that organize these networks and determine their associated ecosystem functions. He mostly works on seed dispersal and pollination by birds in tropical systems. Website.
Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo, Norway/em>
Yngvild is interested in the role of intraspecific trait variation for biological processes at different scales, from individuals to communities. Using demographic model frameworks like matrix models and integral projection models, she investigates the underlying mechanisms involved in biological responses to climate change and other external factors such as harvesting. Her research combines theoretical modeling with empirical applications on various organisms from the field and in the lab. Website.
Cyrille Violle
Centre d’Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive, CNRS, France
Cyrille uses a trait-based characterization of organisms (plants, animals, microbes) to answer questions in functional ecology, community ecology, biogeography and agroecology. In particular, he investigates the mechanisms driving biotic interactions and species coexistence, the role of intraspecific and interspecific variability in community assembly processes, and the ecological and evolutionary drivers of species traits, trade-offs and ecological strategies.
South China Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou, PR. China
Faming is a biogeochemist whose work looks at how human perturbations of terrestrial ecosystems affect ecosystem biogeochemistry cycling and the response of plants and soil microbes. Much of his research focusses on tropical forests and coastal wetlands, which have the highest biomass or C sequestration rate on the planet, and are also hotspots for biogeochemical cycling. Thus, his work aims not only at understanding the basic biogeochemical processes occurring in these ecosystems, but also examining how humans are impacting elemental cycling in these ecosystems and predicting those responses to global changes. Website
You can find profiles on all of our Associate Editors here If you’re interested in becoming an Associate Editor, you can check out the video from our “Becoming an Associate Editor” webinar.
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