Scientists have known for some time now that the land and seas in the Arctic act as a sink for atmospheric carbon. In a new review paper in the journal Ecological Monographs, ecologists now have a sense of just how much carbon the Arctic has historically handled – up to a whopping 25 percent of the world’s carbon flux. David…
Photo by Phillip ‘Scooter’ Trosclair. Birds are often touted as the monogamists of the animal kingdom, with most bird species mating with the same individual and displaying biparental care, sometimes for many years. Their cousins, the reptiles, are no match for their faithfulness: most reptiles show no mate fidelity, let alone parental care. But a new study in the journal…
A new study out in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry suggests a natural remedy to the negative effects of pesticides to plants. A group of plant hormones called brassinosteroids have been shown to reduce the toxicity of crops, if they’re doused with it before pesticide application. Jing Quan Yu of Zhejiang University and his colleagues treated cucumber plants…
A paper out in the October issue of Ecological Applications puts forth a new use for light detection and ranging technology, or LiDAR: the prediction of bird habitats. LiDAR technology uses laser imaging techniques to develop maps of forest vegetation structure by sending laser beams from aircrafts that fly over a study area. In this case, the scientists sampled the…
We often think of vegetated areas as being ecologically friendly; that is, plants are good for the environment, right? But it turns out that even that statement has caveats. In a study out in this month’s Ecological Applications, researchers have found that some exotic trees in Hawaii can use water at a rate of more than twice that of native…
Princeton University Press has a new ecology book out, edited by Simon Levin, titled The Princeton Guide to Ecology. The book includes chapter contributions from more than 120 ecologists, and although its contents span the regular suspects — autecology (apparently this term is enjoying a revival) and population, community, ecosystem and landscape ecology — about a third of the book…
Convergent evolution of large functional traits is not uncommon in nature; consider that wings have evolved in several lineages of animals to broaden niches that animals can fill. But more specific convergence, especially in sexual and territorial signals, is rare at best and stirs controversy in the scientific world. On the surface, it would seem that if two species converge…
The British Ecological Society is convening its annual conference today at the University of Hertfordshire. The three-day conference has 35 sessions and includes several keynote speakers, including Paul Collier, an economist at Oxford University and author of The Bottom Billion. Marc Cadotte over at The EEB and Flow is attending the meeting and has said he will be blogging about…
Soil erosion in a wheat field near Washington State University. Soil erosion has always been a big problem for ecosystems, and often increases with decreased ecosystem health, such as the dry conditions often encouraged by climate change. We normally think of rivers and glaciers as the most powerful eroders, but a study out today in Nature Geoscience finds that agriculture…
As fires cloak the San Gabriel Mountains in southern California, workers are attempting to carry out controlled burns along the perimeter of the fire. Firefighters battle part of the blaze in Glendale, CA. Photo courtesy Gina Ferazzi for the Los Angeles Times. These burns will reduce the amount of fuel around the current fire so that if the fire reaches…
Bird songs are among the most complex and fascinating forms of animal communication. Tiny differences in bird songs can often result in “dialects”, where populations of the same species have slightly different variations on the same songs. In a study out today in Naturwissenschaften, ornithologists have taken it a step further. Some skylarks can not only differentiate among songs of…
This post isn’t quite about ecology. But it’s about a phenomenon that many ecologists have ample experience with. A study out last week in Current Biology found that when people get lost in the wilderness, they actually do walk in circles. Jan Souman of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, and his colleagues set volunteer hikers…