I have been in Lopé National Park, Gabon, for the last few weeks, helping Dr. Sam Moore as he leads up Oxford’s field campaign to sample the functional diversity of these forests in collaboration with Gabon’s national parks agency and the Wildlife Conservation Society. The forests are unique in still having large elephant populations, a…

We just had a new paper on community assembly concepts come out in Ecology Letters. The focus of the work is on predictability. Making community ecology useful for applications like conservation, land management, or agriculture requires the ability to predict the future rather than simply explain the past. Strong predictions are a key property of…

On a recent December afternoon, I cycled out into the countryside on frost-covered lanes in search of the European starling (Sturnus vulgaris). I knew the species mostly as a very ordinary bird, found commonly in urban environments in the United States after its introduction from Europe for reasons of poetry. For a non-birder, it had…

In research, proper choice of a field site is key to the success of a project – and so too for conferences. The International Biogeography Society hosted its annual meeting in Tucson, Arizona this January. The weather was sunny and warm, and the desert was an ecologically fascinating place to bring a few hundred ecologists…