In a paper published in Developmental Biology in 2001, Scott Gilbert laid out a vision for the reintegration of developmental biology and ecology. While in its early days, developmental biology paid great attention to the environmental context, in the twentieth century the focus of the discipline...
Conservation
Revisiting Johnsingh 1983
In a paper published in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society in 1983, AJT Johnsingh reported the findings of his study on large mammalian predators and prey in Bandipur Tiger Reserve, Karnataka. This study formed part of Johnsingh's PhD dissertation on dholes, likely the first PhD in...
Revisiting Daniels et al. 1992
In a paper published in PNAS in 1992, RJ Ranjit Daniels, NV Joshi and Madhav Gadgil reported that bird richness declined with increasing woody plant diversity and vertical stratification in natural evergreen forests in Uttara Kannada district of the Western Ghats, India - a pattern that ran...
Revisiting Chapin 2004
In an article published in World Watch magazine in 2004, Mac Chapin critiqued the work and style of functioning of three big conservation NGOS -- World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Conservation International (CI), and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) -- , especially in relation to their neglect of indigenous...
Revisiting Pauly et al. 1998
In a paper published in Science in 1998, Daniel Pauly, Villy Christensen, Johanne Dalsgaard, Rainer Froese and Francisco Torres Jr., using the Food and Agriculture Organisation's (FAO's) global fisheries catch data, showed that the mean trophic level had declined over the period of 1950 to 1994....
Revisiting Şekercioğlu et al. 2002
In a paper published in PNAS in 2002, Çağan Şekercioğlu, Paul Ehrlich, Gretchen Daily, Deniz Aygen, David Goehring and Randi Sandi showed. using data from forest fragments in Costa Rica, that the ability to move through the deforested matrix was the best predictor of persistence of understory...
Revisiting Likens et al. 1970
In a study published in Ecological Monographs in 1970, Gene Likens, F. Herbert Bormann, Noye Johnson, Don Fisher and Robert Pierce compared nutrient budgets between a control forested catchment and a catchment that was deforested and regrowth prevented for two years through the application of...
Revisiting Ostrom & Nagendra 2006
In a paper published in PNAS in 2006, Elinor Ostrom and Harini Nagendra synthesized the findings of a long-term research program aimed at understanding how institutional factors affect forests managed under different kinds of tenure. Bringing together satellite images, socio-ecological studies in...
Revisiting Soule 1985
In a paper published in Bioscience in 1985, Michael Soule laid out his vision for a new discipline called Conservation Biology to "provide principles and tools for preserving biological diversity". Soule envisioned Conservation Biology as a "crisis discipline" in which "one must act before knowing...
Revisiting Stachowicz et al. 1999
In a paper published in Science in 1999, Jay Stachowicz, Robert Whitlach and Richard Osman showed, using experimental communities of sessile marine invertebrates that invasion success was lower in more species rich communities. The like reason for this pattern was that space, which was the...