I think there are two main reasons: first, the paper summarizes information on the issue of how climate affects ecological processes in both marine and terrestrial environments—and by so doing, cross-fertilizes these to sub-disciplines of ecology. Second, I think a reason for this paper having been picked up so well is that it discusses the issue of climate-ecology interaction within the more classical issues of ecology such as density dependence and density independence within populations and ecological systems. Density dependence represents the within-system interaction, such as behavioral mechanisms within populations and predator-prey feedback interactions, and density independence represents external effects, such as climate. The issue of which process (density dependence or density independence) is the more important regulatory mechanism has been a key topic of discussion among ecologists for about three-quarters of a century. Today there is general agreement that they are both important. We have placed climate effects into this picture, and, among other things, show that the degree of density dependence may be modified by climatic external effects. An additional reason for our paper having been highly cited is that we have a research team of good terrestrial ecologists and good marine ecologists, as well as top-level climatologists and statistical modelers. As a result, we are able to speak with authority on the broad array of issues we cover in the review. In other words our paper crosses the traditional boundaries of scientific sub-disciplines.

No, as a review paper, there is no new discovery as such and no new methodology presented. We do, however, present a synthetic view on the interaction between ecology and climate fluctuations. We also summarize new approaches to modeling the population dynamics effect of climate fluctuations—in which we specifically show that what statisticians typically see as fixed parameters may in fact more properly be seen as functions of climate.

I personally think that the significance of our paper is to show how classical ecological issues as we learn about them in ecology text books are directly relevant when trying to understand what the ecological effects of climate fluctuations (and climate change) may be. By so doing, we contribute to bringing mainstream ecology into the field of ecology-climate interaction—the importance of which, of course, is profound since we do need the best possible expertise when faced with the threat of climate change.

I became interested in the ecological effects of climate change since, for many years, I have been interested in and worked on how the performance (reproduction, survival, and the like) of an organism is affected by other living organisms (be it of the same species or other species) and how it is affected by external non-biotic factors (such as climate). There is an interesting asymmetry here. There is in general a reciprocal effect between the effects of one organism on another organism, whereas there is no such reciprocal effect (at least not to the same degree) between climate and the performance of organisms: climate affects the performance of organisms whereas the organisms affect the climate to a (relatively) negligible degree. This is indeed a conceptually interesting asymmetry, which I've had a great deal of fun working on over the years. For me it is personally gratifying that it is this very asymmetry we must appreciate if we are to understand the interaction between climate and ecology.