Day three of the INTECOL / British Ecological Society meeting here in London. I was asked to give a talk on a paper that influenced my thinking as an ecologist. Biology was never what I expected to do – I started out in physics, then found that ecology was closer to my heart – more…

Summer is ending, and I’ve migrated back to Copenhagen for the rest of the year. Being an ecologist, one of the first places I went to visit was the botanical garden and the university’s geological museum. I stumbled upon an exhibit of the Flora Danica – a guide to all the plants of Denmark, published…

The Colorado Rockies have an image as an unspoiled place – high mountains, dark forests, beautiful meadows. Such wild places are on the decline – as Sanderson et al. pointed out in 2002, the global human footprint continues to increase, leaving us only small fragments of ‘the last of the wild’. Ellis et al. (2010)…

Interaction networks can describe many interesting things – human social systems, like facebook, but also complex engineered systems like the internet, or animal societies. The past century has seen the development of an area of mathematics called graph theory, which can be used to describe the structure of these networks. There are statistics that describe…