Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
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-driven nutrient cycling influences aquatic ecosystem functioning by altering energy flow as well as the movement and transformation of nutrients. In hypereutrophic lakes, zooplankton nutrient recycling has largely been considered negligible due to the high concentrations of available nutrients. A recent comparative analysis found that zooplankton community composition may influence [...]
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 [...]
Published: 2021-10-15
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Geography, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Plant Sciences
Tidal marshes are not only lost to human disturbance but also face the threat of sea level rise (SLR). However, current earth system models used to estimate future changes in wetland extent omit wetland’s real responses to SLR without field observations. We synthesised global data on sediment accretion rate (SAR) and surface elevation change (SEC) for tidal marshes and developed a mathematical [...]
Published: 2021-09-17
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Biology, Hydrology, Remote Sensing
Forest and savanna ecosystems naturally exist as alternative stable states. The maximum capacity of these ecosystems to absorb perturbations without transitioning to the other alternative stable state is referred to as ‘resilience’. Previous studies have determined the resilience of terrestrial ecosystems to hydroclimatic changes predominantly based on space-for-time substitution. This [...]
Published: 2021-09-09
Subjects: Agriculture, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Wheat is a staple crop that is critical for feeding a hungry and growing planet, but its nutritive value has declined as global temperatures have warmed. The price offered to producers depends not only on yield but also grain protein content (GPC), which are often negatively related at the field scale but can positively covary depending in part on management strategies, emphasizing the need to [...]
Published: 2021-07-01
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Glaciology, Life Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Sustainability
Glaciers are among the least explored environments on Earth, especially from a perspective of nutrient stoichiometry. In this study, we documented and compared the nutrient availabilities (concentrations) and composition (stoichiometric ratios) of nutrients (C, N, and P) in six distinct habitats of a glacier terminus in the Yangtze River Source area, including surface ice (SI), basal ice (BI), [...]
Published: 2021-06-24
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Paleobiology, Paleontology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Sampling variations in the fossil record distort estimates of past biodiversity. However, compilations of global fossil occurrences used in these analyses not only reflect the geological and spatial aspects of the fossil record, but also the historical collation of these data. Here, we demonstrate how the legacy of colonialism as well as socio-economic factors such as wealth, education and [...]
Published: 2021-04-20
Subjects: Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Ludfordian strata exposed in the Burgen outlier in eastern Gotland record a time of initial faunal recovery after a global environmental perturbation manifested in the Ludfordian Carbon Isotope Excursion (LCIE). Vertebrate microfossils in the collection of the late Lennart Jeppsson, hosted at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, hold the key to reconstruct the dynamics of faunal immigration and [...]