It is almost midnight and I am still enjoying the sunlight that enters the windows of my hotel room. I am in Eastern Finland, trying hard to get some sleep (not easy if your body tells you it is not dark enough yet). On my flight in from London, an opinion piece in the New York Times caught my attention and changed my views on … Continue reading Tuesday taster: 20/06/2017
Our latest issue out now, with a cover from Sonia Bejarano et al’s paper The shape of success in a turbulent world: wave exposure filtering of coral reef herbivory. Continue reading “31.06 – Behind the cover”
In our first Hindsight, Dr. Ken Thompson takes us back to his PhD research and points out one –perhaps forgotten– follow up study from Van Assche & Van Nerum that may have you asking if there is such thing as plant intelligence.
In Insights we discover the story behind and beyond a recent publication in Functional Ecology: What inspired the authors to do the research, how the project developed, leading to the final publication and what implications their results might have on the scientific community and on society.
This week, Ellie Goud of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University, Ithaca, USA, discusses her recent paper on the use of non-destructive plant traits as a proxy for carbon fluxes from peatland ecosystems.
Did you know that bird feather structure relates very nicely to its habitat preference? If you want to know more about this, and how this is phylogenetically determined, read this paper by Péter Pap and colleagues. One of my recent favourites in Functional Ecology is this paper by Grégoire Freschet and Catherine Doumet, who discuss very neatly which root sampling strategies can better inform about … Continue reading Tuesday Tasters: 13/06/2017
In Ecologist’s Diary, we follow four ecologists from different fields in their daily work. Through regular updates, by means of columns, pictures and video, these enthusiastic researchers take us along the ups and downs of their field and lab work. Below they introduce themselves and give us a taste of what their posts are about. Continue reading “Ecologist’s Diary – meet the researchers!”
By Bjorn Robroek
Over the last few months, my life has changed drastically. I left the beautiful mountains of Switzerland behind, exchanging them for the rolling hills of Southwest England when I took up a lectureship in ecology at the University of Southampton. One week into my new position at Southampton, I found myself teaching plant and invertebrate ecology to 50 undergrads in Andalusia, Spain– a fantastic experience that reminded me how broad the field of ecology is. Ecology comes in many different flavours, and ecologists are also a varied group, with different interests, experiences and backgrounds. I am extremely chuffed to launch functionalecologists.com, a blog for the journal Functional Ecology. To understand ecology takes a wide range of approaches, and I hope that this blog will show the many different ways that Functional Ecology can offer different aspects of ecology to ecologists. Continue reading “Welcome, Functional Ecologists!”
Functional Ecologists 