Past Outstanding Paper Award Recipients
2011
The recipients of the 2011 award are Heather Berkley, Bruce Kendall, Satoshi Mitarai, and David Siegel for their paper entitled "Turbulent dispersal promotes species coexistence", published in Ecology Letters 13:360-371. This paper uses spatially explicit simulations and analytical approximations to demonstrate that, for species with dispersed larvae and sessile adults, stochastic larval dispersal driven by environmental turbulence can result in decorrelated settlement patterns that enable long-term coexistence of competing species. The paper demonstrates how the nuanced interplay between species traits and their abiotic environment can drive population-scale processes, and illustrates how multiple sources of variation contribute differently to long-term community dynamics.
Congratulations to the authors!
2010
James O'Dwyer and Jessica Green (2009), for their paper entitled "Field theory for biogeography: A spatially explicit model for predicting patterns of biodiversity," found in Ecology Letters 13: 87-95. Using mathematical methods more commonly found in quantum physics, the authors derive the species-area relationship for a spatially explicit neutral model that includes dispersal and generalizes a previous prediction about beta diversity.
Congratulations to the authors!
Last updated on: 1 September2011
Jennifer Nelson