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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
Read more about the article Predator versus practice: exploring predation and land management as drivers of small antelope occurrence
Study species; A = subset of the most common managed ungulates encountered (A1 = eland, A2 = bonsmara cattle, A3 = sheep), B = mesopredator (caracal), C = small antelope (C1 = steenbok, C2 = common duiker).
2020 / News

Predator versus practice: exploring predation and land management as drivers of small antelope occurrence

The way that we manage land influences species occurrence and interactions. However, in their recent study investigating species co-occurrence along the west coast of South Africa, Debbi Winterton, Nicola van Wilgen and Jan Venter discovered that intensive management of small areas also makes it difficult to detect ecological drivers.

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7 April 2020