In experiments, high plant diversity usually leads to high ecosystem function and stability. But in nature, the same factors that determine plant species diversity may also affect stability. This means the results of BEF experiments don't always apply to natural systems. doi.org/10.1002/ecy....

A salinity gradient mediates plant diversity–function–stability relationships across a coastal marsh landscape

Ecosystem function and stability are often positively related to species richness in experiments, but in nature, abiotic gradients may over-ride or obscure the effects of richness on function and sta...

doi.org

Now out in Ecology Letters 🥳

Using Modern Coexistence Theory to Understand Community Disassembly

Community disassembly examines how extinctions reshape ecological communities. Here, we introduce the community disassembly graph, which uses invasion growth rates (IGRs) to identify extinction-drive....

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Joe Brennan@biologyjoe87.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Excited to share a new pre-print in collaboration with @sebastianschreiber.bsky.social, "Using Modern Coexistence Theory to understand community disassembly"! We set out to understand how techniques used to study coexistence can be extended to understand community disassembly. (1/X)

Really interesting take on the future of ecology in an AI world. The take home: experiments and long-term studies will have increasing value. @jdrakephd.bsky.social onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

AI, Comparative Advantage, and the Next Decade of Ecological Research

Click on the article title to read more.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Biotic interactions biogeography: A framework for understanding how species interactions shape biodiversity patterns across scales 🧪🌐https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3003813

Biotic interactions biogeography: A framework for understanding how species interactions shape biodiversity patterns across scales

Biogeography and ecology have long developed in parallel. This Essay explores how new data on species interactions across large scales now allow their integration, opening fresh insights into how biod...

journals.plos.org

"We didn't become biodiversity scientists to preside over decay." — Becky Chaplin-Kramer Eight times more papers document biodiversity loss than recovery. We're better at describing what's broken than understanding how to fix it. That needs to change. More here 👇

We're great at documenting decline and surprisingly bad at understanding recovery

Recovery, rewilding, and why we're measuring the wrong things (Nexus Notes #30)

predirections.substack.com

Collecting wild seed is one of the biggest challenges in restoration ecology. How do you identify reproductive plants across landscapes? We show how drones could provide a solution, predicting flower production of a native shrub: doi.org/10.1016/j.ra... #rangelands #sagebrush ​

Really nice memoriam to Robert Ricklefs by Brian McGill: dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2026/06/11/r... Ricklefs got ecologists to think big: about the role of history, biogeography & macroevolution on ecological patterns. More than anyone, his work shaped the course of my career.

Robert Ricklefs – in memoriam

Robert Ricklefs, a giant of ecology, passed away on Sunday. It is hard to overstate the extensive impact Bob had on the field. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in the US,…

dynamicecology.wordpress.com

New paper out today in Ecology Letters! We use Modern Coexistence Theory and Metabolic Theory to get general predictions for the effect of temperature on competition. Led by brilliant postdoc @kaleighedavis.bsky.social and @joeybernhardt.bsky.social, with Po-Ju Ke, Patrick Thompson and Mary O'Connor

General Predictions for the Effects of Warming on Competition

We combined two major theories in ecology to investigate whether warming may have general effects on competition for shared resources. We found that species' niche and fitness differences both decrea...

dx.doi.org

Honored to have one of my photos on the cover of @nature.com And thrilled to be part of this #ForestGEO study led by Yuanzhi Li and Chengjin Chu 🌴 🌳 🌐 doi.org/10.1038/s415... Photo caption: Sunrise over a tropical forest near Danum Valley Field Centre, Sabah, Malaysia

As the climate warms, animals are being forced to shift their ranges to survive.🐾 Research led by Kayley Breslin & tessgrainger.bsky.social @integrativebiology.bsky.social using beetles found warmer temperatures can accelerate both movement & population growth. www.uoguelph.ca/cbs/news/202...

FWIW, I don’t think the major problem in my field, or related ones, is that people need to move faster & produce more. I read a lot of papers as part of the job, and I’m increasingly convinced we’d benefit from fewer papers and better ones, not more mediocre work produced ever more “efficiently.”

Robert MacArthur's "favorite part of ecology, [is] the part that combines the adventure of field work in varied places with the discipline of making nontrivial theory. It is the part best done by field naturalists, but naturalists who know what science is all about." Describes Brian to a tee!

"When energy is scarce, evolution selects dormancy" Commentary by Chris Kempes in @pnas.org www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

When energy is scarce, evolution selects dormancy | PNAS

When energy is scarce, evolution selects dormancy

pnas.org

Devastating loss of Dr. Adriana Romero-Olivares this week. She was an amazing mycologist, a leader in her field, & my friend & collaborator. This is a tremendous loss for mycology, science, & the world. There is a meal train for her husband & two small children www.mealtrain.com/trains/l3kg64

Meal Train for Jovani Catalan (Spouse of Adriana Romero Olivares)

Hi all, Please help out the family of Adriana Romero Olivares. Her husband, Jovani, and kids can be helped with meals over the next weeks as Adriana recovers.

mealtrain.com

Dr. Asmeret Asefaw Berhe@aaberhe.com · 3mo ago

Prof. Adriana Romero-Olivares, UC Riverside, was doing incredible work on how fungi and ecosystems respond to global change. A rising voice, a dynamic scientist and educator, a young mother, wife and daughter gone far too soon. A huge loss. Her family, students and community are in my thoughts.

Prof. Adriana Romero-Olivares, UC Riverside, was doing incredible work on how fungi and ecosystems respond to global change. A rising voice, a dynamic scientist and educator, a young mother, wife and daughter gone far too soon. A huge loss. Her family, students and community are in my thoughts.

especially her husband, Dr. Jovani Catalan Dibene, and her two young children. With deepest sympathy, Joel L. Sachs Professor & Chair, Evolution Ecology & Organismal Biology

Dear Colleagues, It is with immense sadness and shock that I share the passing of Dr. Adriana Romero Olivares, a brand-new Assistant Professor in the Department of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology at UC Riverside. www.mealtrain.com/trains/l3kg64

Meal Train for Jovani Catalan (Spouse of Adriana Romero Olivares)

Hi all, Please help out the family of Adriana Romero Olivares. Her husband, Jovani, and kids can be helped with meals over the next weeks as Adriana recovers.

mealtrain.com

If you'd like to support her family, you can do so here: www.mealtrain.com/trains/l3kg64

Meal Train for Jovani Catalan (Spouse of Adriana Romero Olivares)

Hi all, Please help out the family of Adriana Romero Olivares. Her husband, Jovani, and kids can be helped with meals over the next weeks as Adriana recovers.

mealtrain.com

New exciting work 🧪by Kai Huang and team: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Topography‐Mediated Soil Moisture Controls Forest Hillslope‐Scale NO and N2O Emissions

Conceptual diagram illustrating soil NO and N2O emissions along a temperate forest hillslope. Left panel: Automated soil gas chambers were deployed along a forest hillslope to measure high-resolution...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

New paper with Victor Felix and Pej Rohani in J. R. Soc. Interface. doi.org/10.1098/rsif...

A single autoregressive integrated moving average with exogenous variable outperforms ensembles of autoregressive models for forecasting influenza hospitalizations in the contiguous United States

Abstract. Infectious disease forecasting is important to public health decision-making, particularly for mitigating the burden of seasonal influenza. We pr

doi.org

Excited to share a new article from the lab & wonderful co-authors. We argue that habitat fragmentation research needs to be recalibrated to focus on changes over time. We hope that doing so will advance understanding, isolate attribution, and diminish heated debate. www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...

Resurrecting habitat fragmentation as a process over time

Habitat loss and fragmentation occur over time. Despite this truism, understanding the effects of habitat fragmentation has, in recent years, predominantly focused on interpreting snapshots of current...

cell.com

Antifragility: A Cross-Cutting Concept for Understanding Ecological Responses to Variability by Wickman et al. Available now ahead of print! www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

This fortnight’s Nexus Notes connects models, techno‑optimism, moral courage, Welsh stick chairs (!), and why so many arguments talk past each other. There’s a deeper pattern here about models, responsibility, and perspective. 🔗👇 predirections.substack.com/p/knowing-mo...

Knowing more, understanding less

Models, optimism, moral courage, and the limits of knowing (Nexus Notes #26)

predirections.substack.com

New paper by Mackenzie Hoogshagen showing how contributions of diet & genetic background shape geographic variation in parasite infection outcomes across monarch butterfly populations - Ecological Entomology - share.google/s9s2Alqm9fQU...

The contributions of host diet and genetic background to shaping parasite infection outcomes in monarch butterflies across natural populations

We experimentally tested the roles of diet and genetic background in shaping monarch butterfly resistance to its protozoan parasite using monarchs from North America, Puerto Rico and hybrids. We fou.....

share.google

In another experiment, we show how immigration can shift the balance between ecological selection and drift in shaping turnover in gut microbiomes across individual caterpillars and through development. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

With a landscape-scale experiment, we show how regional processes (immigration & species pool size) can alter the importance of species sorting and mitigate spatial homogenization of plant communities. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Regional Processes Mediate Ecological Selection and the Distribution of Plant Diversity Across Scales

This experiment quantifies how species pool size and immigration influence plant community assembly in restored grasslands. Our findings reveal that greater immigration (seed arrival) and smaller spe...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Petrol hit $3.40/L this week. One shock and the whole system wobbled. We’ve built a society so optimised that it’s become brittle — supply chains, food systems, infrastructure, all running with no slack. Society is optimising for efficiency. Ecosystems optimise for resilience.

We built a fragile society

Modern society has optimised for efficiency at the expense of resilience

predirections.substack.com

Becoming a parent is much worse for women in academia vs men, because women do 5 times (!!!) the amount of childcare than men www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Motherhood derails women’s academic careers — these data reveal how and why

Mothers in academia take on considerably more childcare-related responsibilities than do fathers.

nature.com

The 2026 National Science Foundation budget is $8.75 Billion.

First 6 Days of Iran War Cost U.S. $11.3 Billion, Pentagon Says

nytimes.com

Nature is THE predatory journal. Not because it publishes junk or operates via unethical practices, but because they know how much they are coveted and price gouge. No society affiliation, just pure corporate greed.

Jonathan Tonkin@jdtonkin.bsky.social · 5mo ago

😱🤯 -- Just looked up the cost to go gold open access at Nature Eco Evo: US$12850! That's $21,600 NZD. That's the same cost as a Royal Society Master's Scholarship! This has gone too far. Absolutely bonkers.