In a paper in Science in 1977, David Schindler showed, using whole-lake experiments, that natural biological mechanisms can compensate for deficiencies in carbon and nitrogen in lakes affected by eutrophication, but no such mechanisms exist for phosphorous. Based on his findings, Schindler...
Ecology
Revisiting Janzen 1966
In 1966, Daniel Janzen published a paper in Evolution in which he synthesized his empirical work on different pairs of interacting ant and Acacia species in the neotropics, and discussed the possible origins and evolution of these mutualisms. Fifty years after the paper was published, I asked Dan...
Revisiting Jones et al. 1994
In a paper published in the journal Oikos in 1994, Clive Jones, John Lawton and Moshe Shachak introduced the term "Ecosystem Engineer" into the ecological lexicon and laid out a research agenda to explore, identify and quantify ecosystem engineering carried out by living organisms. Twenty-two...
Revisiting Simberloff and Wilson 1969
In a paper published in Ecology in 1969, Daniel Simberloff and E.O. Wilson reported the findings of a "defaunation experiment" they conducted on mangrove islands in the Florida Keys, to test the Theory of Island Biogeography proposed by Robert MacArthur and E.O. Wilson. In addition to this paper,...
Revisiting Menge 1976
In 1976, Bruce Menge published a paper in Ecological Monographs reporting the results of his experimental and observation studies on the factors structuring the rocky intertidal community along the New England coast in northeastern United States. This paper, which came six years after the...
Revisiting Pimm et al. 1988
In a paper published in The American Naturalist in 1988, Stuart Pimm, Lee Jones and Jared Diamond explored existing mathematical models and developed theoretical predictions about how risk of extinction would vary between species. Pimm and colleagues then put these predictions to test using a...
Revisiting Kraft et al. 2008
In 2008, Nathan Kraft, Renato Valencia and David Ackerly published a paper in Science providing field evidence that suggested that niche-based processes structured the plant community in an Amazonian forest. Kraft et al.'s study came at a time when there was a debate raging in the ecological...
Revisiting Levin 1998
In 1998, in an invited paper in the journal Ecosystems, Simon Levin made a case for the value of viewing ecosystems as complex adaptive systems, in particular to understand the relative roles of the environment and self-organisation in determining system properties. At the end of the paper, Levin...
Revisiting Schluter and McPhail 1992
In 1992, Dolph Schluter and Don McPhail published a paper in The American Naturalist in which they provide evidence for ecological character displacement among species of stickleback fish that live in the lakes of coastal British Columbia. In the paper, Schluter and McPhail also provide a...
Revisiting Loreau and Hector 2001
In a 2001 paper in Nature, Michel Loreau and Andy Hector described a new method, based on the Price equation, to partition the "selection effect" and the "complementarity effect" of biodiversity on ecosystem function, and demonstrated its use on data from the BIODEPTH experiments (BIODiversity...