Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Published: 2023-03-15
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Nature-based solutions (NbS) are increasingly assessed in sustainable urban projects to improve human welfare and biodiversity. Particularly, the design, implementation and assessment of NbS are in most cases spatial and context-dependent, and just NbS must also be included in the agenda. To this end, alternative paradigms such as transdisciplinary and action research can play a fundamental role [...]
Published: 2023-02-20
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Forest Sciences, Geography, Life Sciences, Nature and Society Relations
Real-world environmental problems are typically vast, urgent, and complex. Confronted with such problems, we are often tempted to act fast by pulling together little bits and pieces from different fields and simply adding these to pre-existing models and frameworks. Seldom, though, do we pause long enough to look whether and for how long those larger structures we build can support reliable [...]
Published: 2022-11-21
Subjects: Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Microbiology, Planetary Sciences
Earth’s geosphere and biosphere have coevolved over time, influencing each other’s stability and keeping our planet habitable for most of its 4.543 billion years of history. Biogeochemical cycles play a key role in controlling this interaction, connecting long-term geological cycles and the much faster evolution of the Earth’s outer biologically dominated envelopes. A small set of [...]
Published: 2022-11-17
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences
Climate change and reduction in nutrient loads have significant effects on primary production and phytoplankton growth dynamics. Since in the last few decades in many regions, nutrients in lakes were reduced simultaneously as the climate changed. Yet, it remains unclear which of the two has impacted primary production the most. In this study, we couple the General Ocean Turbulence Model with the [...]
Published: 2022-08-23
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Categorical Data Analysis, Climate, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Multivariate Analysis
Climate change and development of data-oriented methods are appealing for new climate classification schemes. Based on the most widely used Köppen-Geiger scheme, this article proposes a neural network based climate classification method from a data science perspective. In conventional schemes, empirically handcrafted rules are used to divide climate data into climate types, resulting in certain [...]
Published: 2022-07-11
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Geochemistry, Geology, Geomorphology, Soil Science
A review of the localities in continental rocks where H2-rich gases have been reported, showed that they are mainly located near gold deposits. Two types of geomorphological features known as markers of gas venting in sedimentary basins were also systematically observed near orogenic gold deposits on satellite images. They consist in both barren ground depressions and high densities of small (< [...]
Published: 2022-06-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Cyanotoxins such as microcystin pose a serious threat to aquatic ecosystems and human health. As such, there is a pressing need understand the production, movement, and storage of microcystin in lentic waterbodies. We constructed a biogeochemical cycle for microcystin through a comprehensive literature synthesis, identifying four major pools and nine fluxes. This conceptual model can be used as [...]
Published: 2022-05-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Bigmouth buffalo (Ictiobus cyprinellus) is a large-bodied planktivore inhabiting shallow waterways in North America and subjected to unregulated harvest throughout much of their native range. Despite high harvest pressure on some populations, we know little about the ecosystem-level effects of lowering bigmouth buffalo densities. To evaluate the effect of bigmouth buffalo density on lower trophic [...]
Published: 2022-02-19
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology
Atlantic sand fiddler crabs (Leptuca pugilator) exhibit an extreme case of sexual dimorphism with the male crabs wielding an enlarged dominate claw that can account up to 40% of an individual’s total body mass. The salt pans found in marine marshes are commonly colonized by fiddler crabs and have limited coverage from avian predators, making the ability to quickly run back their burrows, an [...]
Published: 2022-02-17
Subjects: Biochemistry, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences
Consumer nutrient recycling influences aquatic ecosystem functioning by altering the movement and transformation of nutrients. In hypereutrophic reservoirs, zooplankton nutrient recycling has been considered negligible due to high concentrations of available nutrients. A comparative analysis (Moody and Wilkinson, 2019) found that zooplankton communities in hypereutrophic lakes are dominated by [...]
Published: 2021-11-17
Subjects: Agriculture, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences
Spatial stratification of landscapes allows for the development of efficient sampling surveys, the inclusion of domain knowledge in data-driven modeling frameworks, and the production of information relating the spatial variability of response phenomena to that of landscape processes. This work presents the rassta package as a collection of algorithms dedicated to the spatial stratification of [...]
Published: 2021-10-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biogeochemistry, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Plant Sciences, Software Engineering, Statistics and Probability
Reliable estimates of canopy light transmission are critical to understanding the structure and function of vegetation communities but are difficult and costly to attain by traditional field inventory methods. Airborne laser scanning (ALS) data uniquely provide multi-angular vertically resolved representation of canopy geometry across large geographic areas. While previous studies have proposed [...]
Published: 2021-10-29
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biodiversity, Biogeochemistry, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Plant Sciences
Soil moisture is a key limiting factor of plant productivity in boreal and montane regions, producing additional climate feedbacks through evaporation, regeneration, mortality, and respiration. Understory solar irradiation – the primary driver of surface temperature and evaporative demand – remains poorly represented in vegetation models due to a lack of 3-D canopy geometry. Existing models are [...]
Published: 2021-10-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Plant Sciences
The population structure of forests is shaped by balancing the opposing forces of regeneration and mortality, each of which influence C turnover rates and are sensitive to climate. Regeneration underlies the migrational potential of forests to climatic change and remains underserved in modeling studies. Our objective was to test the hypothesis that warming may reduce tree regeneration rates while [...]
Published: 2021-10-29
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
While radiative forcing and thus land surface temperatures have been shown to positively correlate with fire severity, precipitation, and lightning strike frequency, the effects of human activity on fire regimes remain difficult to disentangle from geophysical drivers given co-variation between these factors. Here, I analyze fire regimes in the 1919-2012 period across Canada and compare national [...]