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Living on the drifting sea ice: polar bears walk on a food conveyor belt

Figure caption: Polar bears travel and hunt on the sea ice, a platform that can drift many kilometers per day. To understand their home range, and that of other marine species, we need to account for drift. Photo by Andrew Derocher

 

By Marie Auger-Méthé...

Increasing temperature may compensate for lower amounts of dead wood in driving richness of saproxylic beetles

Dicerca berolinensis favors sun exposed dead wood of European beech.

By Joerg Muller

Saproxylic insects are strongly influenced by temperature but also require specific dead wood features, and thus interaction between the two factors is likely....

Local human impacts decouple natural biophysical relationships on Pacific coral reefs

Remote coral reefs of the Pacific Ocean. Remote, uninhabited reefs such as these give us a glimpse into the natural structuring forces of ecological communities in a world without humans and highlight the important fact that not all coral reefs look the same. Natural...

Niche models and translocation experiments: do they predict different responses to climate change?

A metapopulation model had three stages: seeds, rosettes, and juveniles. The model included vital rates of Carlina vulgaris individuals when grown in their home territory. To incorporate responses of life history traits to climate change, these rates were altered...
 

Species’ roles in food webs show fidelity across a highly variable oak forest

Silk button galls formed by the gall wasp (Neuroterus numismalis) located on the leaves of European Oak. Photo by Riikka Kaartinen.
 

Boundaries in the ocean and the cons on having a long larval life

Large scale pattern of coastal currents for the east coast of North America. Currents are represented as the annual average of current speed (m/s) in grids of 100km, the data was extracted from Lumpkin and Garrafo 2005...
 

OUR ICEBERG MAY NOT BE MELTING BUT THE WIND IS DEFINITELY TURNING!

An Adélie penguin look around for an easy access to the sea from Pétrels Island. Photo by Timothée Poupart. by Yan Ropert-Coudert Complete breeding failure of a large number of individuals is a rare event in Nature. So when the 34 000 Adélie penguins from the...

New studies on fairy circles need to account for new observations on their spatial patterns

The fairy circles of Namibia are currently subject to a lively debate on their origin, and they provide a textbook example of how progress is made in science. Hypotheses that were commonly accepted are challenged by a set of new observations that favor

Ranking the ecological causes of dispersal in a butterfly

Experimental evidence of the major role played by the degradation of environmental conditions in the initiation of dispersal

by Delphine Legrand and Michel Baguette

 

Dispersal is a key process in biology, from population and community...

Can better conference location planning reduce science’s carbon footprint?

The 2014 International Biogeography Meeting in Miami, FL, attracted 409 attendees from > 40 countries. Photo: K. J. Feeley.

 

Responsible academia: Optimizing conference location to reduce greenhouse gas emissions

Written by J.T....

Poor dispersal destines many grassland species to dark diversity

Hyper-diverse ecosystems can be even richer: poor dispersal destines many grassland species to dark diversity

When counting plant species within a few square meters, northern European grasslands are among the most species-rich communities in the world...

Butterfly dispersal across Amazonia and its implication for biogeography

Marking an individual Morpho achilles (Nymphalidae, Morphini) in Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest. Photo by P. J. DeVries.

 

By Carla Penz, Phil DeVries, Jarle Tufto and Russ Lande

Spatial movement plays a fundamental role in ecological and...

Have behavioural ecologists given up on the search for the fundamental niche?

Have behavioural ecologists given up on the search for the fundamental niche?

by Manuela Panzacchi

No, not at all. Although, strictly speaking, fundamental niches are inestimable theoretical constructs, they are too important to be forgotten....

What drives plant richness and endemicity in east Asian islands?

 

The role of climate and geohistorical factors in driving plant richness patterns and endemicity on the East Asian continental islands

Written by: Kubota Yasuhiro (Associate Professor), Shiono Takayuki (Postdoctoral Fellow), Kusumoto Buntarou (...

Tree cover and shade tolerance shape plant species distributions

Shade understory and light penetrating through the tree canopy. Photo by Diego Nieto Lugilde.

By Diego Nieto-Lugilde, Jonathan Lenoir and...

Interspecific variation in damselfly–water mite associations


Enallagma ebrium with Arrenurus water mites

 

Phenology and regional occurrence explain interspecific variation in damselfly-water mite associations

by Julia J. Mlynarek

 

When near a water body it is...

Amphibians closer to the pole respond stronger to global warming

By Tobias Uller

 

In a warmer world, spring will be earlier. The increase in temperature is not the same across the globe, however, and the highest rate of warming is found at high latitudes. It is therefore not very surprising that,...

Webinar on niche modeling and the use of MaxEnt

By Professor Rob Anderson

In this seminar, I will first provide an overview of my perception of the field of ecological niche modeling, within the larger arena of biodiversity informatics, and then provide worked examples with tropical mammals.  In framing the field, I...

Latitudinal variation in resistance and tolerance to herbivory of a salt marsh shrub

By Steve Pennings and Kazimierz Więski.

A new study by Kazimierz Więski and Steven Pennings contributes to the biogeography of plant antiherbivore strategies. Plants can resist herbivore's...

A good hypothesis is a matter of scale

Old-growth longleaf pine vegetation in the Croatan National Forest, North Carolina. Photograph by Kyle Palmquist.

By Jes Coyle. Read full study here.

Graduate students at the...

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