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Virtual Issue: Forests and Global Change

The organisers of the 2011 BES Annual Symposium highlight that the conference will “address emerging themes in forest ecology based on new data from spatially dispersed permanent plot networks, fully mapped stands and satellite imagery”. Undoubtedly, one of the motivating factors in putting together this meeting has been the development of new methods and tools for studying forests.

Methods in Ecology and Evolution was launched with the aim of promoting such new methods, and to facilitate the uptake of new approaches by the reseach community. Although a young journal we have already published on a wide range of topics, and in this virtual issue we highlight a set of new methodological papers that are particularly relevant to forest ecology and climate change.

We hope that in highlighting these papers we will encourage you to read the journal, and consider us as a forum for your future methods-related research. If your institution has not yet signed up for Methods in Ecology and Evolution, your librarian can request free access for the rest of 2011.

Autumn Leaves Image
Photograph courtesy of Junichiro Aoyama, licensed under CC-BY 2.0

Carbon Sequestration

Estimating the wood density of species for carbon stock assessments
by Olivier Flores and David A. Coomes

Climate Change

A framework for assessing threats and benefits to species responding to climate change
by Chris D. Thomas, Jane K. Hill, Barbara J. Anderson, Sallie Bailey, Colin M. Beale, Richard B. Bradbury, Caroline R. Bulman, Humphrey Q. P. Crick, Felix Eigenbrod, Hannah M. Griffiths, William E. Kunin, Tom H. Oliver, Clive A. Walmsley, Kevin Watts, Nicholas T. Worsfold and Tim Yardley

Non-intrusive monitoring of atmospheric CO₂ in analogue models of terrestrial carbon cycle
by Martin Lukac, Alexandru Milcu, Dennis Wildman, Rob Anderson, Tom Sloan and Phil Ineson

Practical Methods

Experimentally testing the role of foundation species in forests: the Harvard Forest Hemlock Removal Experiment
by Aaron M. Ellison, Audrey A. Barker-Plotkin, David R. Foster and David A. Orwig

A new model for predicting understorey leaf area from biomass in eucalypt forest to test the ecohydrological equilibrium theory
by Craig Macfarlane, Timothy Lardner, Karis Patterson, Andrew H. Grigg

Digital data collection in forest dynamics plots
by Faith Inman-Narahari, Christian Giardina, Rebecca Ostertag, Susan Cordell and Lawren Sack

Heating up the forest: Open-top chamber warming manipulation of arthropod communities at Harvard and Duke forests
by Shannon Pelini, Francis Bowles, Aaron Ellison, Nicholas Gotelli, Nathan Sanders and Robert Dunn

Databases

A generic structure for plant trait databases
by Jens Kattge, Kiona Ogle, Gerhard Bönisch, Sandra Díaz, Sandra Lavorel, Joshua Madin, Karin Nadrowski, Stephanie Nöllert, Karla Sartor and Christian Wirth