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Read more about the article We need to stop looking through rose-coloured glasses – plant biodiversity in the face of climate change
Word cloud of some of the species that contributed to increased richness in 151 studies listed by Vellend et al. [8] that had taxonomic data available. The font size of species names is proportional to the number of global biogeographic regions where they are naturalized. Different species indicated by the same font colors are naturalized in the same number of regions. For illustrative purposes, only species that have been documented as naturalized in at least 20 biogeographic regions (n=186) are included. Most of these are common invasive species such as wall speedwell Veronica arvensis (A, Rasbak / CC-BY-SA-157 3.0), Bermuda grass Cynodon dactylon (B, Forest and Kim Starr / CC-BY-SA-3.0), ribwort plantain Plantago lanceolata (C, Forest and Kim Starr / CC-BY-SA-3.0) and common knotgrass Polygonum aviculare (D, Matt Lavin / CC-BY-SA-3.0).
2020 / News

We need to stop looking through rose-coloured glasses – plant biodiversity in the face of climate change

In an article recently published in Current Biology, an international team led by C·I·B Research Associate Jaco Le Roux suggest that care should be taken when conveying scientific data related to biodiversity impacts caused by climate change, as policy makers often make decisions based on scientific evidence.

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18 May 2020
Read more about the article Acacia-released phytochemicals help invasive and native species establishment
From left to right researchers Jonathan, Florencia and Ana in the mission of collecting samples in the field.
2020 / News

Acacia-released phytochemicals help invasive and native species establishment

Over the past decade research has been done towards understanding the role of phytochemicals in the success of plant invasions. This research has led to the well-known Novel Weapon Hypothesis, which suggests that the release of certain phytochemicals by alien plants can inhibit the early development of native species that have not previously experienced them, thus granting alien species a competitive advantage.

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15 May 2020
2020 / News

Make Open Access publishing fair and transparent!

The scientific publication landscape has dramatically changed in environmental sciences (and beyond) since the onset of this millennium by two closely interconnected trends: the widespread emergence of online-only journals that drastically reduced the costs for scientific publishers, and the increasing success of Open Access publishing journals, i.e. journals that have reversed the revenue generation from a reader-pays to an author-pays approach.

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11 May 2020
Read more about the article Mapping invasion hypotheses
Consensus map of invasion hypotheses created by Enders et al. (2020)
2020 / News

Mapping invasion hypotheses

The field of invasion biology has accumulated a number of hypotheses and concepts - some of these are overlapping or redundant, a few others even contradictory. This has led to the situation that invasion biologists are having an increasingly hard time to maintain an overview of the discipline’s important ideas.

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21 April 2020