For the September issues, we chose the forum paper of Caplat et al. as editor’s choice. The paper arose from a special symposium at the 2011 ESA meeting in Austin, and synthesizes how insights from invasion ecology can help us understanding species responses to climate change. The paper does not aim to provide a systematic review or meta-analysis of the literature, but instead focusses on the useful concepts and insights generated from invasion processes relevant to climate change ecology of plants. The authors particularly focus on processes related to movement and especially the settlement phase and the expected impacts of altered species distributions on recipient ecosystems. While Oikos does not have a special focus on applied ecological research, we do stimulate the translation of fundamental insights into a global change or societal context. This appears especially important in the context of species management, both with respect to conservation and control under future scenarios of climate change.
Polley and colleagues report that plant functional traits improve diversity-based predictions of temporal stability of grassland productivity. The study uses measures of aboveground net primary productivity from an 11 years lasting experimental study in Texas. The authors varied levels of species richness and abundances of perennial grassland species and assessed how species abundance patterns and functional traits linked to the acquisition and processing of essential resources could be used to improve richness-based predictions of community stability. The system showed large fluctuation in annual precipitation inducing shifts in the plant community responses. Results indicate that the temporal stability of grassland primary production may depend as much on species abundances and functional traits linked to plant responses to precipitation variability as on species richness alone.