Josh Brian

Aerial view on the 60 plots of the TWINWIN experiment surrounded by grass and agricultural fields. The plots vary in color that represent the different undersown treatments. In the background is a road, buildings and forests. The sky is blue with some white clouds.

🚨📃🧪 New paper out: "Impacts of diverse undersown cover crops on seasonal soil microbial properties". Rashmi Shrestha used the #TWINWIN experiment to show that undersowing crops with diverse plant mixtures, particularly including legumes has beneficial effects on soil microbial life and function 1/6

30.06.2025 16:01 — 👍 21    🔁 5    💬 3    📌 1

Expertly led by a v. talented undergrad and funded by a
@kingscollegelondon.bsky.social undergrad research fellowship. So grateful to work in an institution providing funding for these sorts of projects!

12.05.2025 10:34 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

We actually found that the areas referred to by single scale terms varied by an average of 4.7 orders of magnitude across the plant ecology literature!! This has huge implications for comparing between studies based on their scale terms, and for understanding scale dependence.

12.05.2025 10:34 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

Lost in Space: When Spatial Scale Terms Blur Actual Study Size in Plant Community Ecology Scale terms, which include both ecological (e.g., ‘local’, ‘regional’) and methodological (e.g., ‘plot’, ‘quadrat’) characteristics are frequently used in plant community ecology. We show that the ar...

Thrilled to see this out @jvegsci.bsky.social! We looked at spatial scale terms in plant community ecology - terms like 'local' or 'regional'. The implication is that these terms convey ecological info and so be fairly consistent across studies. But are they?

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

12.05.2025 10:34 — 👍 2    🔁 1    💬 1    📌 0

Multiple transitions to high l‐DOPA 4,5‐dioxygenase activity reveal molecular pathways to convergent betalain pigmentation in Caryophyllales Many specialized metabolic pathways have evolved convergently in plants, but distinguishing multiple origins from alternative evolutionary scenarios can be difficult. Here, we explore the evolution .....

Excited to share a new paper with Sandra Guerrero-Rubio and @docbroc.bsky.social on the convergent evolution of betalains, now published in @newphyt.bsky.social! nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/.... A 🧵

06.05.2025 12:24 — 👍 11    🔁 8    💬 1    📌 0

Hawaiian caterpillar patrols spiderwebs camouflaged in insect prey’s body parts Lepidoptera is the most herbivorous of all the insect orders, with predatory caterpillars globally comprising less than 0.13% of the nearly 200,000 moth and butterfly species. Here, we report a specie...

Stuff like this is why I love ecology - one of the coolest natural history papers I have read in years...

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

25.04.2025 08:31 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

Joshua Brian: Release from aboveground enemies increases seedling survival in grasslands 2024 HARPER PRIZE SHORTLIST: For the next two weeks, we are featuring the articles shortlisted for the 2024 Harper Prize. The Harper Prize is an annual award for the best early …

The blog about our Harper Prize-shortlisted paper is now up @journalofecology.bsky.social! Read on for a summary of what we found, and what got me into (and keeps me in) ecology!

jecologyblog.com/2025/03/26/j...

04.04.2025 10:33 — 👍 2    🔁 1    💬 0    📌 0

So excited to see my paper on the shortlist for the Harper Prize, amongst some amazing work!! (Definitely lots to add to my reading list!)

(You can find my paper here: besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....)

20.03.2025 11:28 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

A mechanistic framework of enemy release The enemy release hypothesis as an explanation for (a) increased exotic performance is the product of (b) three factors, which are modulated by (c) seven contexts. Three factors: 1) the difference in...

Pleased that my 2023 paper on enemy release was one of the top-10 cited articles in Ecology Letters from that year! If you missed it, check it out again here:

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

19.03.2025 13:34 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

Pre‐ and postinfection priority effects have contrasting outcomes for parasite prevalence in host populations Parasite species frequently co-occur more or less than expected by chance. These nonrandom co-occurrence patterns can be driven by pre- or postinfection priority effects: parasites are more or less l...

V. pleased to see this published! Priority effects are important in determining host-parasite dynamics. Here, I show there are different types of priority effect, and they have very different consequences for host populations...

esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

26.02.2025 09:06 — 👍 2    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

Sampling mass mortality events to enable diagnoses: A protocol using freshwater mussels Many taxa around the globe are threatened by often unexplained mass mortality events (MMEs), which can decimate populations and compromise key ecosystem functions. One example of a highly threaten...

Very pleased to have played a small part in this recent paper about sampling mass mortality events now out in @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social
(using freshwater mussels as an example) - something regrettably gaining more and more relevance!

besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

10.02.2025 16:05 — 👍 6    🔁 1    💬 0    📌 0