Jamie Waterman is a PhD Candidate at the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, Western Sydney University studying the mechanisms behind plant defences against insect herbivores. In this insight, he discusses his recent paper Short‐term resistance that persists: Rapidly induced silicon anti‐herbivore defence affects carbon‐based plant defences.

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Anna Katharina Pilsbacher introduces her M.Sc. work at the Arctic University of Norway ‘Interfering with neighbouring communities: Allelopathy astray in the tundra delays seedling development’, speaks about the importance of understudied interactions and her journey from ecology to linguistics.

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Andrew Eagar, a phd candidate at the Kent State University, presents his article “Dominant community mycorrhizal types influence local spatial structure between adult and juvenile temperate forest tree communities” where he studied plant-soil feedbacks at community level, and talks about his passion for research.

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In our latest Insight, Bingwei Zhang of Beijing Normal University at Zhuhai talks about the importance of trait plasticity in regulating species performance under environmental change, for his latest paper ‘Species responses to changing precipitation depends on trait plasticity rather than trait means and intraspecific variation’.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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”