Early Career Researcher prizewinners

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Alan Knapp's podcasts

Podcasts for the journal Functional Ecology

Functional Ecology

National Tree Week

Survival of the weakest seems an unlikely title for paper in ecology, but that is exactly what they found in their Haldane prizewinning paper, as Kyle Demes explains in this podcast.

Demes, K. W., Pruitt, J. N., Harley, C. D.G., Carrington, E. (2013), Survival of the weakest: increased frond mechanical strength in a wave-swept kelp inhibits self-pruning and increases whole-plant mortality. Functional Ecology, 27: 439–445. doi: 10.1111/1365-2435.12067
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2435.12067/abstract

FE: Haldane Prizewinner Kyle Demes talks to Duncan Irschick about the advantages of fragile fronds

Alan Knapp talks to the 2014 Haldane Prizewinner Scott Ferrenberg about his paper, "Smooth bark surfaces can defend trees against insect attack: resurrecting a ‘slippery’ hypothesis". The concept of smooth bark on trees and shrubs acting as an anatomical defence against epiphytic vegetation and phytophagous insects has, for some time, fallen out of favour. Ferrenberg and Mitton, in a study of bark beetle attack on Pinus flexilis – a pine species that exhibits both smooth and rough bark surfaces – set out to test the role of bark defence against insects. 
http://www.functionalecology.org/view/0/fecBESYoungInvestigator2014.html

Haldane Prizewinner Scott Ferrenberg talks to Alan Knapp about resurrecting a ‘slippery’ hypothesis

 Duncan Irschick talks to Coleman M. Sheehy III about how arboreality and the associated gravitational stress on blood circulation have influenced the evolution of tail length in snakes. Since their evolutionary origins about 100 million years ago, snakes have diversified into a wide variety of aquatic, burrowing, terrestrial, and arboreal habitats where they experience various levels of gravitational stress on blood circulation. At the extremes, these stresses range from low to none in fully aquatic species living in essentially “weightless” environments, to relatively high in climbing species, especially arboreal forms specialized for climbing trees. As a result, arboreal snakes exhibit many adaptations for countering the effects of gravity on blood circulation, including relatively tight tissue compartments in the tail. However, patterns of tail length in relation to arboreal habitats and gravity have not been previously studied.

You can read the paper, "The evolution of tail length in snakes associated with different gravitational environments" here: 

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2435.12472/abstract

FE: Duncan Irschick talks to Coleman Sheehy on arboreality, gravitational stress & snake tail length

Alan Knapp talks to Anita Narwani and Patrick Venail about their new Extended Spotlight: Community Phylogenetics and Ecosystem Functioning: http://j.mp/FE29I5

FE: Community phylogenetics and ecosystem functioning with Anita Narwani and Patrick Venail

Droughts are predicted to become increasingly frequent and intense in Amazonia, and empirical evidence for the vulnerability of Amazonian trees to drought has grown over the past decade.  Little is known, however, about the mechanisms or the diversity of drought tolerance in tropical trees and, it has been difficult to quantify drought tolerance in tropical trees, due to a lack of consensus on a relevant tree functional trait, practical to measure for the hundreds of tree species occurring in tropical forests. 

In this study, Isabelle Marechaux and her co-authors looked at leaf water potential at wilting or turgor loss point (πtlp), which determines tolerance of leaves to drought stress. By using a new method based on a demonstrated association between πtlp and another trait, the leaf osmotic water potential at full hydration, they were able to estimate πtlp for 165 trees of 71 species, at three sites within forests in French Guiana. This dataset represents a significant increase in information for tropical tree species, revealing a wider range of drought tolerance than previously found in the literature and indicating a potential for highly diverse species responses to drought within forest communities. Given the weak correlations between πtlp and traditionally measured plant functional traits, vegetation models seeking to predict forest response to drought should integrate improved quantification of comparative drought tolerance among tree species.


FE Alan Knapp talks to Isabelle Marechaux on predicting drought tolerance for Amazonian forest trees

Thomas Hasper and Johan Uddling talk to FE Editor Alan Knapp about their recent paper "Water use by Swedish boreal forests in a changing climate." 

The ongoing increases in atmospheric CO2 and temperature have the potential to alter the flux of water vapor through plant leaf ‘stomata’, tiny and actively regulated pores in the leaf surface, but relatively little is known about the water-use responses of boreal forests. In their study, the authors examined the water-use responses of Swedish boreal forests to climate change by using long-term monitoring as well as experimental data. They used climate and runoff data of large-scale boreal landscapes from the past 50 years to explore historical trends and patterns, as well as we examining explicit tree water-use responses to elevated [CO2] and/or air temperature in a whole-tree chamber experiment using mature Norway spruce trees. Their findings have important implications for projections of the future hydrology of European boreal coniferous forests, indicating that changes in precipitation and standing biomass are more important than effects of elevated [CO2] or temperature on tree transpiration rates.

Hasper, T. B., Wallin, G., Lamba, S., Hall, M., Jaramillo, F., Laudon, H., Linder, S., Medhurst, J. L., Räntfors, M., Sigurdsson, B. D. and Uddling, J. (2015), Water use by Swedish boreal forests in a changing climate. Funct Ecol. doi:10.1111/1365-2435.12546
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2435.12546/abstract

FE: Alan Knapp Thomas Hasper & Johan Uddling on water use in boreal forests in a changing climate

Journal of Ecology blog editor Pierre Mariotte interviews the 2014 Harper Prize winner Michiel Veldhuis. 

Interview with 2014 Harper Prize Winner Michiel Veldhuis

Alan Knapp talks to Brian Steidinger, the winner of the 2015 Haldane Prize for Early Career Research, about his paper "Variability in potential to exploit different soil organic phosphorus compounds among tropical montane tree species"
(Functional Ecology, 29:1, pp 121–130)

Soil phosphorus is as essential as water for plant growth, but its low availability in some areas forces plants to develop different strategies to acquire it. Mycorrhizal associations, symbiotic associations between a fungus and a vascular plant, represent the most common strategy for access to the different pools of soil P by plants and it therefore seems reasonable to assume that different symbiotic fungal species will be differently able to exploit this non-renewable resource and that non-mycorrhizal species could have a competitive disadvantage. Brian Steidinger and his co-authors tested this hypothesis by comparing phosphatase enzyme activity and performance of five tropical tree species belonging to different functional groups: arbuscular mycorrhizal angiosperms, arbuscular mycorrhizal conifers, ectomycorrhizal angiosperms and non-mycorrhizal proteoid plants. 
- See more at: http://www.britishecologicalsociety.org/grants-awards/honours_awards_prizes/prize-for-the-best-paper-by-a-young-author/haldane-prize

FE Alan Knapp interviews Haldane Prizewinner Brian Steidinger

Do more diverse mixtures of plants function more efficiently and take up more carbon? Previous studies have suggested this occurs frequently in grasslands when species are mixed. Other studies have now suggested that the same can be true of genetic mixtures within a species.
In this podcast, Dylan G. Fischer talks about the results of the first forest ecosystem-scale experiment designed to test if more diverse mixtures of genetic stock result in more productive forests

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2435.12733/full

FE: Alan Knapp talks to Dylan G Fischer

In this episode, Ken Thompson talks to Rannveig Jacobsen, recently shortlisted for the Haldane Prize for Early Career researchers for her paper, "Exclusion of invertebrates influences saprotrophic fungal community and wood decay rate in an experimental field study". You can find this paper, along with the other shortlisted papers, here: http://bit.ly/Haldane2018

FE:  Ken Thompson talks to Rannveig Jacobsen about the influence of insects on decomposer fungi

Chuck Fox and Jane Hill chat about Functional Ecology's new experiment looking at single vs double-blind review. You can find out more about this experiment here: http://j.mp/BES_DoubleBlind

Jane Hill interviews Chuck Fox about FE's new Single vs Double-blind experiment

"Breaking down leaves is basically hard work, so if the fungi have the option of an easier life, they take it?"

Why - and how - do algae slow the rate of leaf decomposition in aquatic ecosystems? In this podcast, Ken Thompson interviews Hal Halvorson about his paper "Periphytic algae decouple fungal activity from leaf litter decomposition via negative priming", recently shortlisted for Functional Ecology's Haldane prize.
(Find this and the other shortlisted papers at http://j.mp/2019HaldaneShortlist).

FE Ken Thompson & Hal Halvorson: algae, fungi and leaf decomposition

"It seems that both groups are picking the flowers when they're feeding - they're walking about and you can see them pick flower after flower after flower after flower."

In this podcast, Jurene Kemp talks about her paper, Cryptic petal coloration decreases floral apparency and herbivory in nocturnally closing daisies - recently shortlisted for Functional Ecology's Haldane Prize.
(Find this and the other shortlisted papers at j.mp/2019HaldaneShortlist).

FE: Ken Thompson &  Jurene Kemp: Daisies that close at night use colour to hide from herbivores

JEC: Interview with Harper Prize 2012 winner Simon Doxford

Terries Williams talks to Emma Sayer about Hunters vs Hunted, Narwhales vs iPhones, the difficulties of bribing grizzly bears and her new paper on new perspectives on the energetic costs of survival at the top of the food chain - the first ever Calow-Grace review.
Read the paper here:
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2435.13649

FE: Terrie Williams talks to Emma Sayer on the costs of surviving at the top of the food chain

Podcasts from the British Ecological Society