The search for generality is perhaps the greatest driver of modern ecology and probably also the greatest source of ecological angst. Thoug...

A recent evaluation of the state of science around the world run by 3M found that 86% of the 14,000 people surveyed believed that they knew...

Like the blind men and the elephant, perspective drives understanding in ecology. The temporal and spatial scale of analysis (let alone the...

There are several popular approaches to the goal of finding generalities in ecology. One is essentially top down, searching for generalitie...

It seems that ecologists have been complaining that no one writes single author manuscripts anymore since at least the 1960s. de Solla Pric...

The relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning is so frequently discussed in the ecological literature that it has its own ...

In a time when most news about human impacts on the Earth's biodiversity seems to be negative, a new paper in Nature provides a glint of...

In case you missed it, a new paper in Royal Society Open Science from seven popular ecology blogs discusses the highlights and values of sc...

The last post here  mused on the connection between (but also, distinctness of) the scientific goals of "understanding" and ...

When we learn about the scientific method, the focus is usually on hypothesis testing and deductive reasoning. Less time is spent on conside...

At a time of immense ecological change (such as the Anthropocene), organisms have a few options. They can move, tolerate, adapt, or, in fail...

Sometimes I find myself defending the value of microcosms and model organisms for ecological research. Research systems do not always have t...

Community ecologists talk about communities as experiencing particular processes in a rather general way. We fall into rather Clementsian la...

Williams, L. J., et al. 2017. Spatial complementarity in tree crowns explains overyielding in species mixtures. - Nature Ecology & Evolu...