In this post Emily Waddell, a Phd candidate at the UK Centre of Ecology and Hydrology in Edinburgh, talks about her experience working in Tropical forest in South-East Asia, the importance of functional traits for community tolerance to invasive species and her future plants on ecological research in oil palm plantations.
Jiri Dolezal, researcher at the Institute of Botany of Czech Academy of Sciences, presents his latest manuscript ‘Contrasting biomass allocation responses across ontogeny and stress gradients reveal plant adaptations to drought and cold’, discusses how plants manage to survive 80 years and highlights the importance of moving beyond scientific dogmas.
Continue reading “Jiri Dolezal: surving drought, cold and time”
In our this new Insight, André Franco, a research scientist at Colorado State University presents his last work “‘Root herbivory controls the effects of water availability on the partitioning between above and belowground grass biomass”, shows the strong connection between above- and belowground processes and tells us how a soil scientist arrived to ecology.
Dr. Melanie Pollierer, Researcher at University of Göttingen, summarizes her latest publication “Isotope analyses of amino acids in fungi and fungal feeding Diptera larvae allow differentiating ectomycorrhizal and saprotrophic fungi-based food chains”, where she and her colleagues show a novel methodology to identify different fungal guilds along food chains. She highlights the relevance of their findings and shares her experience as a young researcher in Germany.
Continue reading “Melanie Pollierer: Saprotrophic and ectomycorrhizal fungi and their consumers can be separated using amino acid fingerprints”
Dr. Maud Ferrari, Professor in the Department of Veterinary Biomedical Sciences at the University of Saskatchewan, discusses with us her paper titled, “The fading of fear effects due to coral degradation is modulated by community composition”, the broader impact of her research, and her interest in ecology.
Jana Doudová, research at the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague, explains his work ‘Along with intraspecific functional trait variation, individual performance is key to resolving community assembly processes’, highlights how plant facilitation can be present in productive ecosystems and tells her history about how she got fascinated by plants.
Dr. Carlos Garcia-Robledo, Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut, discusses with us his recently accepted paper, “Evolutionary history, not ecogeographic rules, explains size variation of tropical insects along elevational gradients.”
In this series we share the experiences of ‘globetrotters’ in ecological sciences, who have traveled all over the world during their research career. In this post, Dr Dinesh Neupane discusses with us his experience moving between Nepal and the United States for his Ph.D.
In this post John Grunseich, a Masters Student in the Helms Lab talks about his new paper Risky roots and careful herbivores: Sustained herbivory by a root‐feeding herbivore attenuates indirect plant defences out now in the latest issue of Functional Ecology.
In this post, Jorge Ari Noriega, a Colombian researcher working in functional ecology, shares his experience in researching during times of conflict and difficulty – and hope.
Continue reading “War, Pandemics, and Biodiversity research: a complicated blend in Colombia”
Functional Ecologists 