Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Published: 2023-10-03
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Trophic state (TS) characterizes a waterbody’s biological productivity and depends on its morphometry, physics, chemistry, biology, climate, and history. However, multiple TS operational definitions have emerged to meet use-specific classification needs. These differing operational definitions can create inconsistent understanding, can lead to miscommunication, and can result in siloed [...]
Published: 2023-09-27
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
What is benthic habitat mapping, how is it accomplished, and how has that changed over time? We query the published literature to answer these questions and synthesize the results quantitatively to provide a comprehensive review of the field over the past three decades. Categories of benthic habitat maps are differentiated unambiguously by the response variable (i.e., the subject being mapped) [...]
Published: 2023-09-22
Subjects: Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
General microbial patterns of biogeography can be established based on sedimentary DNA (sedDNA) retrieved from diverse inland aquatic ecosystems, provided that certain variable environmental factors are taken into consideration in order to trace the admixture of prokaryotic sedDNA preserved in lacustrine sediments from source to sink. These include several watershed characteristics, such as [...]
Published: 2023-09-01
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations
The functioning and structure of most European forests are actively shaped by intensive human use. Harvesting of wood is one of the key processes of forest management, making it a crucial element to include in any large-scale analysis of forest ecosystems. Yet, our understanding of how forests are harvested across Europe is limited, as the true harvest regimes – a realisation of decisions made by [...]
Published: 2023-08-30
Subjects: Engineering, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Understanding sequestration of organic carbon (C) in agroecosystems is of primary importance for greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting in managed ecosystems, as well as to allow informed land use management. However, a broader application of precise C accounting is currently constrained by a limited number of direct flux measurements. Aside well-studied ecosystems (via the eddy-covariance technique), [...]
Published: 2023-08-17
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Soil Science
Microbial carbon use efficiency (CUE) is defined as the proportion of microbial biomass growth C versus substrate C uptake, and thus provides a useful measure of microbially driven accumulation and loss of soil organic carbon (SOC) 1. In a recent study published in Nature 2, the authors use a data-driven machine learning approach to conclude that CUE promotes global SOC storage based on a [...]
Published: 2023-08-07
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The Nama Group, Namibia (≥550.5 to <538 million years ago, Ma) preserves one of the most diverse metazoan fossil records of the terminal Ediacaran Period. We report numerous features that may be biological in origin from the shallow marine, siliciclastic, lowermost Mara Member (older than ca. 550.5 Ma) from the Tsaus Mountains. These include forms that potentially represent body fossils, [...]
Published: 2023-08-02
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
This study presents the ostracod clumped-isotope (∆47) thermometer, a new tool that provides quantitative temperature and hydrological reconstruction from lacustrine systems, which are among the best archives to reconstruct continental paleotemperature variations. The relationship between ∆47 and the temperature at which ostracod shell crystallized, is determined by measuring ∆47 on different [...]
Published: 2023-07-29
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Boulders are globally widespread and influence landscape processes across hillslopes, coasts, rivers and extra-terrestrial settings. Boulders are described as particles, sufficiently large, that the movement of an individual grain promotes substantial geomorphic change. Moving beyond this conceptual definition, however, requires a somewhat arbitrary decision of how to define a minimum boulder [...]
Published: 2023-07-06
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
In high-mountain landscapes, biological resources such as organic carbon (OC) are often limited and heterogeneously stored in poorly developed soils, snow, ground ice and glaciers. Climate change influences the dynamics of OC mobilization to- and processing into- the recipient streams. These patterns can vary from seasonal (e.g., snow melt in spring) to daily (e.g., ice melt in summer) depending [...]
Published: 2023-06-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
Seaweed cultivation for atmospheric CO2 sequestration requires full accounting of net primary production (NPP). In addition to large amounts of observable biomass produced, a fraction of NPP is released as dissolved organic carbon (DOC), which can fuel heterotrophic metabolisms or resist remineralization and contribute to carbon export and sequestration. We currently lack the ability to predict [...]
Published: 2023-06-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
The frequency and intensity of ecosystem disturbances is increasing due to climate change. However, the structure of trophic interactions within food webs may mediate the resistance and resilience of ecosystems to disturbance events. In aquatic ecosystems, high connectivity between benthic and pelagic food chains (i.e., benthic-pelagic coupling) is theorized to generate more pathways for [...]
Published: 2023-06-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Climate, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Geology, Life Sciences, Paleobiology, Paleontology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Tectonics and Structure
1. Global Plate Models (GPMs) aim to reconstruct the tectonic evolution of the Earth by modelling the motion of the plates and continents through time. These models enable palaeobiologists to study the past distribution of extinct organisms. However, different GPMs exist that vary in their partitioning of the Earth’s surface and the modelling of continental motions. Consequently, the preferred [...]
Published: 2023-06-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
Sequestration of carbon dioxide via sinking of farmed seaweed into the ocean is a promising strategy to the ever-growing need to achieve negative emissions of carbon dioxide. A key component to the durability of the strategy is the method to which seaweed biomass is conveyed to the seafloor. The purpose of this white paper is to introduce four different conveyance techniques, plans for how each [...]
Published: 2023-06-02
Subjects: Engineering, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
There is a growing interest in sequestering carbon dioxide via cultivation and sinking of seaweed in the ocean. Robust quantification of the viability of this marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR) strategy requires deployment and interrogation of computer simulations that resolve coupling between turbulent oceanic circulation, biogeochemical fluxes, and cultivated seaweed with regional [...]