FunctionalEcologists.com is the official blog of Functional Ecology, a journal of the British Ecological Society. We explore the stories and the people behind the published research.

Who We Are

Anna Doty – blog editor (adoty@csub.edu)

Anna is an Assistant Professor at California State University, Bakersfield. Anna’s works on unravelling the complex set of evolutionary adaptations animals employ to cope with environmental constraints, both in controlled settings and in the wild. In particular, she is interested in investigating how animals respond physiologically to the direct or indirect consequences of disturbance, such as thermoregulatory and behavioral responses to fire.

“I am primarily interested in scientific communication and accessibility, particularly for undergraduate/graduate students and early career researchers. I hope to promote FunctionalEcologists as a sounding board for new and aspiring scientists to draw inspiration from recently accepted papers in Functional Ecology, hindsight discussions, and from more personal anecdotal information from our interviews. Ultimately, I would like to foster confidence in researchers to do great science and publish their important findings, while concurrently providing accessible scientific summaries and explanations of research and spotlights on ecology and ecologists.”

Hugo Saiz – blog editor (saizhugo@gmail.com)

Institute of Plant Sciences, University of Bern, Switzerland 
Hugo is a researcher at the Institute of Plant Sciences, University of Bern, Switzerland. Hugo’s research focuses on understanding the role that biotic interactions play in plant communities. Particularly, he is interested in developing methods to characterize biotic interactions in plant communities, and unraveling the connection between interactions, environmental drivers and ecosystem functioning.

“Traditionally, research papers have been the “way to go” for scientists to communicate their findings. However, these papers only show a limited part of what working in sciences means, and are mostly intended for readers with a scientific background. This limits the communication between scientists and citizens, a particularly daunting problem for ecology as society environmental concern increases every year. FunctionalEcologists is the perfect platform to present the other side of ecology, showing the history behind research work, highlighting ecological relevant findings and giving the opportunity to ecologists in any career stage to tell what they love about ecology.”

You can read Anna and Hugo’s introduction post here.

Rowena Gordon – assistant editor (admin@functionalecology.org)

Rowena is the assistant editor for Functional Ecology. She is responsible for coordinating the peer review process for Functional Ecology, managing the editorial board, and maintaining our social media presence via twitter, facebook, and Functional Ecology’s plain language summary blog. Rowena previously worked on open-access journals for Hindawi and BMC and at Scientific Reports.

What we publish

Behind the Paper
In Behind the Paper, researchers tell us the story behind a recent publication in Functional Ecology: what inspired the authors to do the research, how project developed and what wider impact might the work have.

Community+Ecology
This section looks at community news and events, including conference reports, awards and general updates from the world of ecological research.

Hindsight
In this series, researchers look back at the history of a research field or highlight a historical piece of research that was -and is- significant to them, looking at both classic and forgotten papers, and exploring how past research shapes our current knowledge

Ecologist’s Diary
In our Ecologist’s Diary column, we follow four ecologists from different fields in their daily work. These researchers take us along the ups and downs of their field and lab work. As well as our regular contributors, we also publish field-to-lab stories from other ecologists.

Journal Content
This section is for news directly related to the journal Functional Ecology, including new issues, special features, awards, policies and editorial board changes.