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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A lowland tropical evergreen forest in East TimorWIKIMEDIA COMMONS, HINRICH KAISER

1. Biology manifesto

This classic paper describes the flaws in the current biological paradigm by pointing out how difficult it would be to use biological methods to fix a broken radio. The trouble? Most of the discipline is descriptive but not predictive, and lacks a formal language. Taking a page from engineering may help biologists make sense of complex living systems, the author argues.

Y. Lazebnik, "Can a biologist fix a radio?—Or, what I learned while studying apoptosis," Cancer Cell, 2:179-82, 2002. Free F1000 Evaluation

2. Diversity doesn't follow productivity

Although ecologists have long subscribed to a hump-shaped model for the relationship between the primary productivity and plant species richness in a particular area—as productivity rose, the model holds, so does species richness, until some ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
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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