Journal of Applied Ecology offers a two-year mentoring opportunity for early career researchers to gain experience of the Associate Editor role on a journal. Each mentee works with an assigned Senior Editor mentor and the Editorial Office. They have the opportunity to gain insights into the publishing and review processes as they handle submissions in an Associate Editor capacity.

We’re pleased to welcome nine new mentees for 2019-2020. Get to know them here:

Shekhar Biswas
East China Normal University, China
Shekhar’s research interests lie at the interface of community ecology, spatial ecology and disturbance ecology. He is interested in understanding how species and functional diversity is maintained in heterogeneous landscapes; and how ecological stressors (e.g. global climate change, disturbance, land use change, biological invasions etc.) interact with key ecological processes to shape the patterns of biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services across spatial scales. He is also interested in the spatial analyses of species and functional diversity to identify assembly processes. Shekhar employs both theoretical and empirical approaches to comprehensively address these questions. Website

Kiran Dhanjal-Adams
Swiss Ornithological Institute, Switzerland
Kiran’s research focusses broadly on movement ecology, ranging from developing R packages and methods to analyse biologging data; to understanding what impacts movement decisions (e.g. carry-over effects, landscape use and energetic trade-offs) and researching dynamic and spatial aspects of conservation planning for mobile species. Kiran is also broadly interested in population ecology, disturbance ecology, invasive species, remote sensing, connectivity, law enforcement, cost-benefit analyses, protected area management and structured decision making. Website

Alexandro B. Leverkus
University of Alcalá, Spain
Alexandro’s main research topics are natural disturbances, chiefly wildlife, and plant regeneration. He has explored ecosystem regeneration after wildfire, the effects of post-fire management, and the biotic and abiotic processes affecting post-fire regeneration. He is currently studying the performance of oaks along environmental gradients, combining demographic, morphological and physiological data in greenhouse and field experiments to gain insights on the drivers of plant abiotic stress. He is also interested in seed dispersal and predation. He is also conducting a systematic review on the effects of post-disturbance logging on ecosystem services. Website

Ignasi Montero-Serra
University of Queensland, Australia
Ignasi is interested in developing and applying quantitative tools to understand the responses of marine ecosystems to multiple stressors to guide conservation actions. His recent work has combined field surveys, population and spatial models, and principles of life-history theory to predict the dynamics of threatened Mediterranean gorgonians. He focuses on temperate and tropical benthic ecosystems, but the methods he uses and develops are often applicable to a wider range of systems. Currently, he is using spatially-explicit ecosystem models to explore the role of adaptive process in the future of tropical coral reefs. Website

Brittany A. Mosher
Pennsylvania State University, USA
Brittany is a postdoctoral researcher working closely with the US Geological Survey’s Amphibian Research and Monitoring Initiative (ARMI). Her research includes developing new statistical methods, assessing impacts of disease on amphibian distributions and demography, and designing optimal sampling protocols for a variety of amphibians and pathogens. Much of her work involves developing or using innovative quantitative tools to help managers and conservationists make decisions in an uncertain world. Website

Ricardo Ribeiro de Castro Solar
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil
Ricardo’s main research goal is to understand major causes and consequences of biodiversity dynamics in natural and human-modified habitats. He is interested in investigating biodiversity dynamics and functioning over multiple spatial scales and has been working on the effects of global change drivers on tropical biotas. While he doesn’t have a preference for any specific taxon, terrestrial and aquatic invertebrates, birds and trees are the groups he most often works with. Website

Claire E. Wainwright
University of Washington, USA
Claire is a plant ecologist interested in community assembly, succession, and applications of ecological theory to restoration. Her research focuses on the interactive effects of disturbance, invasion, and environmental change on vegetation dynamics in semi-arid ecosystems. Website

Elizabeth Wandrag
Institute of Applied Ecology, University of Canberra, Australia
Lizzie’s research focuses on the factors that control the distribution and abundance of species, and, in particular, on understanding the causes and consequences of species losses through extinction, and species gain through the invasion of non-native species. She is especially interested in applying a range of experimental, observational and quantitative techniques to examine: the role of biotic interactions in determining where species occur; how species losses or invasions disrupt biotic interactions; and the implications of these disruptions for native plant communities. Website

Gaowen Yang
Institut für Biologie, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
Gaowen’s research focuses on the mechanisms that drive ecosystem stability to sustain our grassland and agricultural ecosystem. He has nine years of research experience on temperate grassland with emphasis on the effects of fertilization, mycorrhizal suppression, grazing and reseeding on the variations in ecosystem functions. He has an interest in whether and how soil biodiversity in general and specific soil biota groups, such as arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, rhizobia, and soil pathogens, influence ecosystem stability under environmental changes. Website

Interested in applying for the Associate Editor Membership Opportunity? We re-open applications in July and details will be available here.