Guest post by Carsten Dormann (Uni Freiburg) / @CarstenDormann The relationship between species richness and ecosystem function is a field of ecology that has always puzzled me. I learned the scientific rope in a department of vegetation ecologists: vegetation was the result of environmental conditions, and indeed a substantial part of their research was to…
I have strayed on quite applied territory, by coauthoring a paper on the biodiversity impacts of the recently enacted reform of the EU common agricultural policy (CAP) in tomorrow’s issue of Science. I hope the opening paragraph does a good job at summarizing the main point. In December 2013, the European Union (EU) enacted the…
Fairy circles are circular vegetation-free patches with diameters of a few meters that occur in arid regions of Africa, particularly in Namibia. There has been a great deal of discussion about their origin, with hypothesis ranging from termites over modification of the environment by certain plants to purely geological / physical mechanism such as wind…
It’s funny who reads your posts, one cannot be careful enough 😉 – Science contacted me regarding my recent note on Jennifer Couzin-Frankel’s piece “Shaking up Science”, asking to spread the information that there will be a live web chat on that topic: At 3pm EST Thursday, February 7, Science magazine will be running a…
Last week’s Science issue had an interesting News Focus about “Two journal editors [that] take a hard look at honesty in science and question the ethos of their profession” With a bit too much pathos for my taste, but informative nevertheless, the article gives background on Ferric Fang and Arturo Casadevall, two microbiologists, and their…
I said this before: it’s fascinating to see phylogenetic and phylogeographic methods being applied to linguistic and anthropological studies. A new example of that is a paper in Science, “Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family” led by Remco Bouckaert that came out today. They use BEAST with basic vocabulary data from…
Polar bears, by Alan D. Wilson (naturespicsonline.com: [1]) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Here’s something for the lovers of cute fluffy white mammals: a new study in science lead by Frank Hailer uses nuclear markers to infer the time at which polar bears split up from their ancestral brown bear lineage. Previous analysis, based on…
theoretical ecology 