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This site offers tools that can be adopted by institutions to help promote transparency in ecology and evolution. At this point, these tools consist of checklist questions that journals can adopt to help authors comply with TOP (Transparency and Openness Promotion) guidelines and to help reviewers and editors assess that compliance.

A resource for the ecology and evolutionary biology community to facilitate transparent and comprehensively reported systematic reviews and meta-analyses.

Peer review is widely considered fundamental to maintaining the rigor of science, but it is an imperfect process. In that context, it is noteworthy that formal standards or guidelines for peer reviews themselves are rarely discussed in many disciplines, including ecology and evolutionary biology. Some may argue that a dearth of explicit guidelines is not a problem. After all, a tremendous amount of effective peer reviewing happens every day. However, there are reasons to expect that well-constructed guidelines in the form of checklists could be useful for improving certain aspects of peer review), such as promoting transparency of reviewed manuscripts, and that such checklists might be widely and enthusiastically adopted by many reviewers. Although some journals already provide checklists to reviewers, most of these checklists are quite limited in scope and do not substantially improve the rigor of the review process. There are also guidelines that seek to explain the general process of peer review. Instead we propose a short list of important questions that reviewers can use to help authors produce more transparent and reliable manuscripts. We want to empower excellent peer review because it helps promote the production of high quality scientific publications.

Poster given at Botany 2015, Edmonton, Canada. July 27, 2015.

Poster presented at the Ecological Society of America's 100th annual meeting in Baltimore, MD on August 11th, 2015.

Talk given at Botany 2015 in Edmonton, Canada. July 28, 2015.

Oral Presentation at the 99th Ecological Society of America Meeting, Sacramento, CA.

Globalisation has facilitated the spread of alien species, and some of them have significant impacts on biodiversity and human societies. It is commonly thought that biological invasions have accelerated continuously over the last centuries, following increasing global trade. However, the world experienced two distinct waves of globalisation (~1820-1914, 1960-present), and it remains unclear whether these two waves have influenced invasion dynamics of many species. To test this, we built a statistical model that accounted for temporal variations in sampling effort. We found that insect and plant invasion rates did not continuously increase over the past centuries but greatly fluctuated following the two globalisation waves. Our findings challenge the idea of a continuous acceleration of alien species introductions and highlight the association between temporal variations in trade openness and biological invasion dynamics. More generally, this emphasises the urgency of better understanding the subtleties of socio-economic drivers to improve predictions of future invasions.

Research focusing on among-individual differences in behaviour ('animal personality') has been blooming for over a decade. Central theories explaining the maintenance of such behavioural variation posits that individuals expressing greater "risky" behaviours should suffer higher mortality. Here, for the first time, we synthesize the existing empirical evidence for this key prediction. Our results did not support this prediction as there was no directional relationship between riskier behaviour and greater mortality; however there was a significant absolute relationship between behaviour and survival. In total, behaviour explained a significant, but small, portion (5.8%) of the variance in survival. We also found that risky (vs. "shy") behavioural types live significantly longer in the wild, but not in the laboratory. This suggests that individuals expressing risky behaviours might be of overall higher quality but the lack of predation pressure and resource restrictions mask this effect in laboratory environments. Our work demonstrates that individual differences in behaviour explain important differences in survival but not in the direction predicted by theory. Importantly, this suggests that models predicting behaviour to be a mediator of reproduction-survival trade-offs may need revision and/or empiricists may need to reconsider their proxies of risky behaviours when testing such theory.

Plant‐soil feedback (PSF) theory provides a powerful framework for understanding plant dynamics by integrating growth assays into predictions of whether soil communities stabilise plant–plant interactions. However, we lack a comprehensive view of the likelihood of feedback‐driven coexistence, partly because of a failure to analyse pairwise PSF, the metric directly linked to plant species coexistence. Here, we determine the relative importance of plant evolutionary history, traits, and environmental factors for coexistence through PSF using a meta‐analysis of 1038 pairwise PSF measures. Consistent with eco‐evolutionary predictions, feedback is more likely to mediate coexistence for pairs of plant species (1) associating with similar guilds of mycorrhizal fungi, (2) of increasing phylogenetic distance, and (3) interacting with native microbes. We also found evidence for a primary role of pathogens in feedback‐mediated coexistence. By combining results over several independent studies, our results confirm that PSF may play a key role in plant species coexistence, species invasion, and the phylogenetic diversification of plant communities.

Environmental change can result in substantial shifts in community composition. The associated immigration and extinction events are likely constrained by the spatial distribution of species. Still, studies on environmental change typically quantify biotic responses at single spatial (time series within a single plot) or temporal (spatial beta diversity at single time points) scales, ignoring their potential interdependence. Here, we use data from a global network of grassland experiments to determine how turnover responses to two major forms of environmental change - fertilisation and herbivore loss - are affected by species pool size and spatial compositional heterogeneity. Fertilisation led to higher rates of local extinction, whereas turnover in herbivore exclusion plots was driven by species replacement. Overall, sites with more spatially heterogeneous composition showed significantly higher rates of annual turnover, independent of species pool size and treatment. Taking into account spatial biodiversity aspects will therefore improve our understanding of consequences of global and anthropogenic change on community dynamics.