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 database of annual breeding censuses of birds carried out by …

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 community about the importance of niche vs. neutral processes …

Revisiting Stearns 1976

 In 1976, Stephen Stearns published a paper in the Quarterly Review of Biology that reviewed and organized the theoretical ideas, available at the time, about the evolution of life-histories, and provided a vision for future research in this area. This paper, which went on to become a 'classic' in the ecology and evolution literature, was …

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 proposed six questions that, according to him, …

Revisiting Weir et al. 2002

In a study published in Science in 2002, Alex Weir, Jackie Chappell and Alex Kacelnik demonstrated that New Caledonian crows can bend wires into the shape of hooks to access food. This study was probably the first report of an animal purposefully modifying an object to use as a tool. Fifteen years after the paper …

Revisiting Hill 1991

In 1991, Geoffrey Hill published a paper in Nature describing the results of his field experiments with house finches which showed that: 1. females choose to mate with brightly-coloured males; 2. males with brightly-coloured plumages tended to contribute more to parental care and were also likely to be of better "genotypic quality". Twenty-five years after …

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 conceptual framework in the form of six criteria that need …

Revisiting Milinski and Bakker 1990

In 1990, Manfred Milinski and Theo Bakker published a paper in Nature providing experimental evidence in support of the Hamilton-Zuk hypothesis. Milinski and Bakker showed, through experiments on three-spined stickleback, that: 1. the intensity of a male's red color is correlated with his physical condition; 2. females choose males based on red color intensity; 3. …

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 and Ecological Processes in Terrestrial Herbaceous ecosystems: experimental manipulations of …