In this issue…

This special conference issue features ecological news and reports from EcoTas13, the 5th joint conference of ESA and the New Zealand Ecological Society, held in November of 2013 in Auckland, NZ.

Our regular student and lab feature articles focus on fire ecology research, which was motivated primarily by the devastating bushfires that hit Sydney in October of 2013 and the particularly heated (sorry, no pun intended) political and environmental discourse that followed.