32.06– Behind the cover
Congratulations to Daniel Fitzgerald, winner of the 2017 Haldane Early Career Researcher Award
We are happy to announce the winner of Functional Ecology‘s JBS Haldane Early Career Researcher Award for the best paper in the journal from an early career author. This year, the award was won by Daniel Fitzgerald for his paper, Using trophic structure to reveal patterns of trait‐based community assembly across niche dimensions In this paper, Daniel Fitzgerald and co-authors use stable isotopes to gather information about the ecology, namely the trophic niche, of fish species from the Xingu River, in Brazil, bypassing the need to directly observe the organisms in their habitat. By combining stable isotope data with quantitative trait data, the team was able to advance our understanding of the importance of certain trophic traits for this, and potentially other, fish assemblies.
In addition, we would selected two authors of Highly Commended papers. Mathias Christina, for his paper Importance of deep water uptake in tropical eucalypt forest and Gesche Blume-Werry, for her paper Root phenology unresponsive to earlier snowmelt despite advanced above‐ground phenology in two subarctic plant communities. You can find out more about Gesche’s work in her InSite/Out posts for the blog.
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Welcome on board!
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.
Meet the editors: Lara Ferry, Senior Editor
Lara worked as an Associate Editor on Functional Ecology, before becoming our newest Senior Editor (replacing Duncan Irschick) in October.
Hello! I am very excited to be a part of the FE team in a new way. 
My background and training are in Functional Morphology, broadly speaking. I am interested in novel traits, how they evolve and perform, and their ecological consequences. I work largely with aquatic organisms, studying traits related to feeding and respiration. I am currently at Arizona State University. My PhD is from the University of California Irvine, and I was a post doc at the University of California Davis.
My goals for FE include to promote it widely and to (continue to) attract the highest quality papers. Among other things, I would like to see our blog, Twitter feed and YouTube channels followed by more people. So, I am happy to see that, since you are reading this, you are reading our blog! I look forward to meeting many of you at the annual meetings, and I welcome comments and concerns at any time. Please do not hesitate to reach out.
