On December 4, 2018, members of Mordecai, Peay, and Fukami Labs met to talk about the papers published in 2018 that each of us liked the most. These papers, the best papers of 2018 according to us, are listed below. (If you are curious about the papers we picked before, check out our 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017 lists.)

Best papers of 2018


Akçakaya HR, Bennett EL, Brooks TM, Grace MK, Heath A, Hedges S, Hilton-Taylor C, Hoffmann M, Keith DA, Long B, Mallon DP. 2018. Quantifying species recovery and conservation success to develop an IUCN Green List of Species. Conservation Biology 32: 1128-1138. Link

Barabás G, D'Andrea R, Stump SM. 2018. Chesson's coexistence theory. Ecological Monographs 88: 277-303. Link

Batstone RT, Carscadden KA, Afkhami ME, Frederickson ME. 2018. Using niche breadth theory to explain generalization in mutualisms. Ecology 99: 1039-1050. Link

Beale CM, Courtney Mustaphi CJ, Morrison TA, Archibald S, Anderson TM, Dobson AP, Donaldson JE, Hempson GP, Probert J, Parr CL. 2018. Pyrodiversity interacts with rainfall to increase bird and mammal richness in African savannas. Ecology Letters 21: 557-567. Link

Bernhardt JR, Sunday JM, Thompson PL, O'Connor MI. 2018. Nonlinear averaging of thermal experience predicts population growth rates in a thermally variable environment. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B 285: 20181076. Link

Corrales A, Henkel TW, Smith ME. 2018. Ectomycorrhizal associations in the tropics - biogeography, diversity patterns and ecosystem roles. New Phytologist 220: 1076-1091. Link

Delmont TO, Eren AM. 2018. Linking pangenomes and metagenomes: the Prochlorococcus metapangenome. PeerJ 6: e4320. Link

Dietze MC, Fox A, Beck-Johnson LM, Betancourt JL, Hooten MB, Jarnevich CS, Keitt TH, Kenney MA, Laney CM, Larsen LG, Loescher HW. 2018. Iterative near-term ecological forecasting: needs, opportunities, and challenges. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115: 1424-1432. Link

Di Marco M, Watson JE, Currie DJ, Possingham HP, Venter O. 2018. The extent and predictability of the biodiversity-carbon correlation. Ecology Letters 2: 365-375. Link

Fletcher Jr RJ, Didham RK, Banks-Leite C, Barlow J, Ewers RM, Rosindell J, Holt RD, Gonzalez A, Pardini R, Damschen EI, Melo FP. 2018. Is habitat fragmentation good for biodiversity? Biological Conservation. 226: 9-15. Link

Glassman SI, Weihe C, Li J, Albright MB, Looby CI, Martiny AC, Treseder KK, Allison SD, Martiny JB. 2018. Decomposition responses to climate depend on microbial community composition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115: 11994-11999. Link

Graham NA, Wilson SK, Carr P, Hoey AS, Jennings S, MacNeil MA. 2018. Seabirds enhance coral reef productivity and functioning in the absence of invasive rats. Nature 559: 250-253. Link

Holl KD, Reid JL, Oviedo-Brenes F, Kulikowski AJ, Zahawi RA. 2018. Rules of thumb for predicting tropical forest recovery. Applied Vegetation Science 21: 669-677. Link

Kergunteuil A, Röder G, Rasmann S. 2018. Environmental gradients and the evolution of tri-trophic interactions. Ecology Letters, published early online. Link

Lofgren L, Nguyen NH, Kennedy PG. 2018. Ectomycorrhizal host specificity in a changing world: can legacy effects explain anomalous current associations? New Phytologist 220: 1273-1284. Link

MacDonald AJ, Larsen AE, Plantinga AJ. 2018. Missing the people for the trees: identifying coupled natural-human system feedbacks driving the ecology of Lyme disease. Journal of Applied Ecology, published early online. Link

Menge DN, MacPherson AC, Bytnerowicz TA, Quebbeman AW, Schwartz NB, Taylor BN, Wolf AA. 2018. Logarithmic scales in ecological data presentation may cause misinterpretation. Nature Ecology & Evolution 2: 1393-1402. Link

Morin M, Pierce EC, Dutton RJ. 2018. Changes in the genetic requirements for microbial interactions with increasing community complexity. eLife 7: e37072. Link

Probandt D, Eickhorst T, Ellrott A, Amann R, Knittel K. 2018. Microbial life on a sand grain: from bulk sediment to single grains. The ISME Journal 12: 623-633. Link

Ratzke C, Denk J, Gore J. 2018. Ecological suicide in microbes. Nature Ecology & Evolution 2: 867-872. Link

Quintero I, Jetz W. 2018. Global elevational diversity and diversification of birds. Nature 555: 246-250. Link

Schimel JP. 2018. Life in dry soils: effects of drought on soil microbial communities and processes. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 49: 409-432. Link

Shi M, Lin XD, Chen X, Tian JH, Chen LJ, Li K, Wang W, Eden JS, Shen JJ, Liu L, Holmes EC. 2018. The evolutionary history of vertebrate RNA viruses. Nature 556: 197-202. Link

Tjørve E, Calf Tjørve KM, Šizlingová E, Šizling AL. 2018. Great theories of species diversity in space and why they were forgotten: the beginnings of a spatial ecology and the Nordic early 20th-century botanists. Journal of Biogeography 45: 530-540. Link

Voyles J, Woodhams DC, Saenz V, Byrne AQ, Perez R, Rios-Sotelo G, Ryan MJ, Bletz MC, Sobell FA, McLetchie S, Reinert L. 2018. Shifts in disease dynamics in a tropical amphibian assemblage are not due to pathogen attenuation. Science 359: 1517-1519. Link