Over the next few weeks, we will be posting blogs from ecologists across the globe on how the Coronavirus pandemic is affecting them and their research. In this post, Mehdi Abedi discusses how this is affecting researchers – and students – in Iran.
Continue reading “Ecology during Covid – Iran”
Renato Morais, a Ph.D. student at James Cook University in Australia, gives us a ‘behind-the-scenes’ view of his research on the energetic effects of coral mortality, related to his recent publication in Functional Ecology entitled “Severe coral loss shifts energetic dynamics on a coral reef”.
Continue reading “Renato Morais: Mass coral mortality affects energetic functioning of coral reefs”
This post from Functional Ecology Executive Editor Chuck Fox shows some initial analyses of submissions to the BES journals during the COVID-19 pandemic. Whilst he doesn’t find any noticeable changes in submissions in the short period since COVID-19 disruptions have been imposed on society, he notes that the pandemic is likely to affect scientific output and that some members of our community will probably be affected more than others.
Continue reading “The representation of women as authors of submissions to ecology journals during the COVID-19 pandemic”
Public awareness and perception of zoonoses has dramatically increased in the last few months due to COVID-19. We invited Drs. Christian Imholt and Anna Obiegala, expert disease ecologists, to explain their perspectives on the emergence of zoonotic diseases in the context of human interference and habitat disturbance.
Continue reading “Land-use, biodiversity and zoonotic diseases”
Dr. Ana Alexandre, a postdoc at Centro de Ciencias do Mar at University of Algarve, presents in this Insights the findings of she and her colleagues on her latest paper titled, “Ocean warming increases the nitrogen demand and the uptake of organic nitrogen of the globally distributed seagrass Zostera marina”.
Continue reading “Ana Alexandre: Seagrass nutrition altered by ocean warming”
Dr. Keith Sockman, an Associate Professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, participates in our latest installation of Insights by discussing with us his paper, co-authored with Dr. Allen Hurlbert, titled, “How the effects of latitude on daylight availability may have influenced the evolution of migration and photoperiodism”.
Continue reading “Keith Sockman: Exploring link between latitude, daylight, and migration”
2021 Update: The research discussed in this blog has been shortlisted for the 2020 Haldane Prize for early career researchers.
Andrii Zaiats, a PhD student at Boise State University, talks about his research into neighbouring plant interactions and competition for water, Intraspecific variation in surface water uptake in a perennial desert shrub – his first peer-reviewed publication.
Continue reading “Andrii Zaiats: Surface roots in a high desert shrub”
Dr. Zenon Czenze is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pretoria, soon to begin a Lecturer position at the University of New England in Armidale. Here, Dr. Czenze shares his team’s observations that led to the paper “Regularly-drinking desert birds have greater evaporative cooling capacity and higher heat tolerance limits than non-drinking species.”
Amy Brunton Martin talks about her new paper, Orchid sexual deceit affects pollinator sperm transfer, which shows the costs of being fooled for an orchid pollinator, and highlights the importance of considering both sides of a relationship when looking at deceptive interactions in nature.
Continue reading “Amy L. Brunton Martin: Sexually deceptive orchids elicit sperm wastage – a cost for pollinators!”
In this post, Svenja Kleinschmidt talks about her recent paper, Potential growth more than functional traits explain successional habitat filtering in rainforest trees.
Functional Ecologists 