British Ecological Society Prize for Michiel Veldhuis

Michiel Veldhuis, PhD student at the Conservation Ecology research group (GELIFES institute) , has won the Harper Prize 2014. The prize is awarded annually by the British Ecological Society to the best research paper published in its journals by an early career scientist. Veldhuis won the Harper Prize for his paper in the Journal of Ecology in 2014 , entitled ‘ A novel mechanism for grazing lawn formation: large herbivore-induced modification of the plant–soil water balance’.

The prize, which includes £250, a year's BES membership plus a year's subscription to the journal, will be presented to Michiel Veldhuis at the British Ecological Society’s annual meeting in Edinburgh in December 2015.

Veldhuis’s study investigated the role of large herbivores such as impala, plains zebra and white rhino in creating spatial heterogeneity through the creation of grazing lawns in tropical savanna. Previous work suggested that these grazing lawns were initiated and maintained through positive feedback on nutrient availability between large grazing herbivores and nutrient-rich lawn grasses.

By contrast, Veldhuis and his co-authors found through careful investigation and measurement that defoliation and soil compaction may initiate grazing lawns through a change in plant-soil water balance favouring drought-tolerant lawn species. Their proposed mechanism of grazing lawn formation is general enough for worldwide applicability, especially for grasslands during dry seasons.

The paper, 'A novel mechanism for grazing lawn formation: large herbivore-induced modification of the plant–soil water balance' by Michiel Veldhuis, Ruth A. Howison, Rienk W. Fokkema, Elske Tielens, and Han Olff (Journal of Ecology, volume 102, issue 6, pp. 1506 – 1517), is available at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2745.12322/abstract