Top 7 in Ecology

A snapshot of the most highly ranked articles in ecology, from Faculty of 1000

Written byBob Grant

| 3 min read

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Temperate broadleaf and mixed forest in GermanyWIKIMEDIA, OLIVER HEROLD

1. Dialing back extinction rates

A widely-used, indirect method of estimating how quickly species will vanish based on how much of their habitat is lost likely overestimates actual extinction rates. Calculating the loss of species based on habitat shrinkage usually misjudges extinction rates because the area required to remove the last individual of a species is almost always much larger than the area needed to encounter the first individual.

F. He and S.P. Hubbell, "Species-area relationships always overestimate extinction rates from habitat loss," Nature, 473:368-71, 2011. Free F1000 Evaluation

2. Energy flux in water and on land

Increasing the flow of energy through ecosystems makes them less stable by increasing the ratio of consumers to resources available. And it turns out that watery ecosystems are ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
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From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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