Friday Linkfest: Vagueness in ecology, and was I wrong about tropical forest recovery?

Those of you who read my latest post on defining resilience will know I just spent two days discussing what resilience is. It is somewhat ironic, then, that over on Dynamic Ecology on Jeremy Fox just put up a blog post discussing situations when vagueness in ecology can be useful. Considering that he has previously been a stickler for precision he is very open to vagueness, but only when it is productive. For example the concepts of ‘species,’ ‘ecosystem’ and, even ‘ecology’ are fairly vaguely defined – but very few people would argue that they aren’t useful…

Thompson-Reuters have just released their Impact Factors for the year. Exciting, right?  Methods in Ecology and Evolution have moved up to be the 9th highest ranked journal in ecology, and have a blog post about this. Worth reading if only for Bob O’Hara’s recognition that the whole system is a bit ridiculous.

A really nice looking new paper out this week shows that animals with bigger prey, that forage in three dimension tend to have bigger home ranges. Not usually my topic, but I was blown away by how good the figures looked in this paper.

In case you missed it, our paper on the response of different functional groups to forest recovery just came out a week or two ago, you can read a blog post on it here and see the open-access paper here.

For those of you into r and stats, here is a nice ggplot2 cheat sheet that is easily searchable (HT Dynamic Ecology).

A paper that challenges the conclusions of some of my work on forest regeneration has just come out in PNAS. The paper suggests that the characteristics of tropical forests recovering from clearance are highly idiosyncratic. One of our previous studies suggested that these recovery trajectories are relatively predictable, but I am open to the possibility we were wrong. I think this is one paper I need to have a proper read of and write a full post about…