Revisiting Soule 1985

In a paper published in Bioscience in 1985, Michael Soule laid out his vision for a new discipline called Conservation Biology to "provide principles and tools for preserving biological diversity". Soule envisioned Conservation Biology as a "crisis discipline" in which "one must act before knowing all the facts", using a "mixture of science and art", …

Revisiting Stachowicz et al. 1999

In a paper published in Science in 1999, Jay Stachowicz, Robert Whitlach and Richard Osman showed, using experimental communities of sessile marine invertebrates that invasion success was lower in more species rich communities. The like reason for this pattern was that space, which was the limiting resource in the system, was more fully and efficiently …

Revisiting Carvalho & Vasconcelos 1999

In a paper published in Biological Conservation in 1999, Karine Carvalho and Heraldo Vasconcelos examined the effects of forest fragmentation on litter-dwelling ants in Central Amazonia. Their results suggested that litter ant communities were structured both by edge and isolation effects in these fragments. Twenty-one years after the paper was published, I asked Karine Carvalho …

Revisiting Coulson et al. 2001

In a paper published in Science in 2001, Tim Coulson, Edward Catchpole, Steve Albon, Byron Morgan, Josephine Pemberton, Tim Clutton-Brock, Mick Crawley, and Bryan Grenfell examined the effect of density, climate and demography on population fluctuations in Soay sheep on the St. Kilda islands in the United Kingdom. Coulson and colleagues' found that age and …

Revisiting Torchin et al. 2003

In a paper published in Nature in 2003, Mark Torchin, Kevin Lafferty, Andrew Dobson, Valerie McKenzie and Armand Kuris provided evidence to suggest that reduced parasite load in their introduced range might contribute to an exotic species' invasive success. Using data from 26 exotic species from a variety of taxa, Torchin and colleagues found that …

Revisiting Johnson 1993

In a paper published in Ecological Applications in 1993, Nancy Collins Johnson showed, experimentally, that fertilization of soil leads to the selection of Arbuscular Mycorrhizal (AM) fungi that are inferior mutualists. Johnson found that fertilization, both, alters the species composition of AM fungal communities and that big bluestem plants colonized with AM fungi and other …

Revisiting Wilcove 1985

In a paper published in Ecology in 1985, David Wilcove provided experimental evidence in support of the idea that nest predation could be the cause for the decline of migratory songbirds in small woodlots in North America. Using fresh quail eggs places in artificial nests, Wilcove showed that predation was higher in smaller than in …

Revisiting Haddad et al. 2003

In a paper published in Ecology in 2003, Nick Haddad,  David Bowne, Alan Cunningham, Brent Danielson, Douglas Levey, Sarah Sargent and Tim Spira, synthesized findings from a large-scale experiment to show that corridors aided movement between habitat patches, although the strength of the effect varied across taxa. Fourteen years after the paper was published, I …

Revisiting O’Brien et al. 1983

In a paper published in Science in 1983, Stephen O'Brien, David Wildt, David Goldman, Carl Merril and Mitchell Bush showed that the cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus) had extremely low levels of genetic diversity, a pattern that they interpreted as resulting from a population bottleneck. This study was one of the first to apply genetic tools to …

Revisiting Scheffer et al. 2001

In a paper published in Nature in 2001, Marten Scheffer, Steve Carpenter, Jonathan Foley, Carl Folke and Brian Walker reviewed the evidence for large-scale shifts between alternate stable states in different ecosystems, the patterns that emerge from such shifts, and its implications for the management of these ecosystems. Fifteen years after the paper was published, …