Special Features

Read the latest Special Features from Journal of Ecology:

Centenary Symposium Special Feature
Editors: Michael Hutchings, David Gibson, Richard Bardgett and Mark Rees
Special Feature in Volume 100, Issue 1 - Centenary Special Issue 

Journal of Ecology was the first ecological journal in the world. It was established as the official publication of the newly formed British Ecological Society in 1913 under the leadership and guidance of the Society’s first President, Sir Arthur Tansley FRS (1871–1955). The pages of Journal of Ecology have hosted many of the most influential papers in plant ecology.
In celebration of the Journal’s 100th anniversary, a Centenary Symposium was held during the British Ecological Society’s Annual Meeting in Sheffield, UK, in September 2011. A group of internationally-renowned researchers were invited to talk on topics in which the Journal has published major contributions over the last century, and in which significant progress is currently being made. The contributors to the Centenary Symposium produced written versions of their papers for publication in the Journal of Ecology’s Centenary Special Issue. The papers in this Centenary Symposium Special Feature cover a wide range of topics, so there is something to interest every reader. Some of the topics and ideas dealt with in this set of papers were not even remotely within Tansley’s sphere of thought when Journal of Ecology was being launched by the British Ecological Society in 1913. The Journal editors are confident that the ten papers presented in this Special Feature are significant contributions to the literature, and that they will be widely-read for many years to come
 

Ecological Consequences of Climate Extremes
Guest Editors: Melinda Smith and Alan Knapp
Special Feature in Volume 99, Issue 3
Global climate change is expected to increase both the frequency and intensity of climate extremes, such as severe drought, heat waves and periods of heavy rainfall, and there is an urgent need to understand their ecological consequences. A major challenge for advancing our understanding of the ecological consequences of climate extremes is being able to attribute climate extremes as the drivers of extreme ecological responses, defined as extreme climatic events (ECEs). The papers in this issue represent a cross-section of the emerging field of climate extremes research, including an examination of the palaeo-ecological record to assess patterns and drivers of extreme ecological responses in the late Quaternary, experiments that assess a wide range of ecological responses including the role of ecotypic variation in determining responses to climate extremes, landscape-scale quantification of the ecological consequences of a recent ECE in the desert south-west of the USA, and an alternative approach to impose realistic climate extremes on a broad range of organisms and ecosystems. Combined, the eight papers in this Special Feature provide conceptual, empirical and technical perspectives on the approaches ecologists are using to better understand the importance of this widespread but understudied aspect of global climate change.
 

Plant-mediated Interactions between Above- and Below-ground Communities
Guest Editor: Martin Heil
Special Feature in Volume 99, Issue 1
Typical higher plants root firmly in the soil and expose their leaves to air and sun. In spite of this obvious anatomical integration of a plant’s aerial compartment with the below-ground world, scientists only recently have started to realize that plants also mediate interactions between above-ground and below-ground communities that usually are physically separated from each other. The articles in the Special Feature demonstrate that the systemically induced plant responses to local interactions with one type of organism can have multiple effects on numerous other species, be they insects, fungi or bacteria, and that these effects can alter the fitness of the interacting partners and thus the community structure at multiple trophic levels.

Advances in Plant Demography using Matrix Models
Guest Editors: Roberto Salguero-Gómez and Hans de Kroon
Special Feature in Volume 98, Issue 2
Matrix projection models have become the prevalent technique in the toolbox of plant ecologists addressing ecological and evolutionary questions at the demographic level. These questions refer to some of the great challenges in conservation ecology today, including estimation of extinction risks in endangered species, determination of compatible harvesting practices for population sustainability, and responses of populations to global climate change. The nine manuscripts of this Special Feature add to the already extensive field of plant demography with methodologies that allow for the exploration of plant population responses in more realistic scenarios, where the stochastic nature of the natural environment is fully taken into account.

Facilitation in Plant Communities
Guest Editors: Rob Brooker and Ray Callaway
Special Feature in Volume 97, Issue 6
Facilitative, i.e. beneficial, plant–plant interactions are recognized as a common feature of plant communities, particularly in more severe environments. Despite the recent considerable interest in the topic, we still have much to learn about these ecological processes, and researchers interested in facilitation in plant communities have only recently started to come together as a community. The papers in this Special Feature thus pull together information from a wide range of fields where there are clearly links to be made to the study of plant facilitation, but where progress in making these links has, to date, been slow. In addition to attempting to broaden the scope of plant facilitation research, the papers address fundamental issues within plant community ecology, such as the regulatory role of facilitation for biodiversity andcommunity dynamics, or the possible application of an understanding of facilitation for conservation.

Plant–Soil Interactions and the Carbon Cycle
Guest Editors: Richard Bardgett, Gerlinde De Deyn and Nicholas Ostle
Special Feature in Volume 97, Issue 5
This Special Feature explores recent advances in understanding about the ways in which plants and soils interact to influence ecosystem carbon dynamics.
It was generated by bringing together scientists with different expertise in ecosystem carbon dynamics at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the British Ecological Society, held at Imperial College London. Experts ranged from those working on plant physiological controls on carbon dynamics at local scales, to those exploring how major shifts in vegetation might feedback on soil carbon cycling at regional and global scales. The six papers address a wide range of questions about plant–soil interactions and the carbon cycle, and illustrate some of the major advances that have been made and challenges that remain in this rapidly growing field.

Dispersal
Guest Editors: James M. Bullock and Ran Nathan
Special Feature in Volume 96, Issue 4
Plants are generally sessile organisms, but dispersal of seeds or other diaspores links the life cycle of an immobile individual to processes at local, landscape and biogeographic scales. Studying plant dispersal across multiple scales requires the development of new statistical, simulation and mathematical models to predict dispersal more precisely and to use the better data to understand ecological processes at these scales. This Special Feature, consisting of 12 papers, examines the current state of knowledge about plant dispersal and illustrates the major advances that have been made in this rapidly growing field over the last few years.

 

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