Pulse disturbances in age-structured populations: Life history predicts initial impact and recovery time.

Understanding population responses to discrete 'pulsed' environmental disturbances is essential to conservation and adaptive management. Populations of concern can be driven to low levels by disturbance, and understanding interspecific differences in recovery trajectories is necessary for evaluating management options. We analysed single-species models to investigate the demographic and management factors determining the two components of population 'resilience': the magnitude of initial impact on population abundance, and duration of the recovery time.

Pelagic marine refugia and climatically sensitive areas in an eastern boundary current upwelling system.

Refugia are areas relatively buffered from contemporary climate change that enable the persistence of valued physical, ecological, or sociocultural resources. Spatially identifying refugia is important for conservation and applied management. Yet the concept of refugia has not been broadly extended to marine ecosystems.

The use of mesoscale eddies by juvenile loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) in the southwestern Atlantic.

Marine animals, such as turtles, seabirds and pelagic fishes, are observed to travel and congregate around eddies in the open ocean. Mesoscale eddies, large swirling ocean vortices with radius scales of approximately 50-100 km, provide environmental variability that can structure these populations. In this study, we investigate the use of mesoscale eddies by 24 individual juvenile loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) in the Brazil-Malvinas Confluence region.

Eight decades of sampling reveal a contemporary novel fish assemblage in coastal nursery habitats.

In order to adequately monitor biodiversity trends through time and their responses to natural or anthropogenic impacts, researchers require long time series that are often unavailable. This general lack of datasets that are several decades or longer makes establishing a background or baseline of diversity metrics difficult - especially when attempting to understand species composition changes against a backdrop of climate and ecological variability. Here, we present an analysis of a community of juvenile nearshore fishes based on nearly 8 decades of highly standardized Norwegian survey records.