Tag Archives: Environment

How to not be swamped by your microclimate data

Microclimate data are finally finding their way more routineously into ecological models – and rightly so. Hooray for that! The growing availability of in-situ measurements is helping us bridge the gap between the coarse world of macroclimate and the fine-scale … Continue reading

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A tale of homogenisation

I’ve always been intrigued by ecological scaling – it’s literally in my title: Assistant Professor in Ecological Scaling. One of the main reasons we care so much about scaling is that ecological theories don’t always hold up when we change … Continue reading

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Mapping the past to predict the future

Long-term followers of this blog know I’ve always been fascinated by species distribution changes. We’ve tracked non-native species moving into mountains and cities, studied how mountain plants travel up and down slopes along roads, and explored how microclimate – and … Continue reading

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Monocultures

Our EcoFracNet biodiversity monitoring project is gathering momentum. Over the past months, we’ve been roaming the Netherlands, clipboards in hand, from endless heathlands to city parks, to record plant diversity in hundreds of 1 m² plots. With several hundred plots … Continue reading

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Soil microbes care little about your climate gradients

We had a hunch: the biogeography of soil microbial communities was going to be messy. Even less than plants or animals, microbes aren’t paying attention to the broad-brush macroclimatic gradients that ecologists often use to explain species distributions. They live … Continue reading

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Extremes

I’ve just returned from a field visit to northern Sweden – above the Arctic Circle. It was close to thirty degrees Celsius this week. We nearly got burned off the mountain. This kind of heat is no longer unusual. It … Continue reading

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