Publications by authors named "H Feuchtmayr"

Identifying the scaling rules describing ecological patterns across time and space is a central challenge in ecology. Taylor's law of fluctuation scaling, which states that the variance of a population's size or density is proportional to a positive power of the mean size or density, has been widely observed in population dynamics and characterizes variability in multiple scientific domains. However, it is unclear if this phenomenon accurately describes ecological patterns across many orders of magnitude in time, and therefore links otherwise disparate observations.

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Declining oxygen concentrations in the deep waters of lakes worldwide pose a pressing environmental and societal challenge. Existing theory suggests that low deep-water dissolved oxygen (DO) concentrations could trigger a positive feedback through which anoxia (i.e.

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Article Synopsis
  • Plastic debris is widely found in freshwater ecosystems, but assessing its distribution is challenging due to a lack of consistent data.
  • A standardized survey of 38 lakes and reservoirs identified that plastic pollution is present in all studied locations, indicating these ecosystems are significantly affected by plastic contamination.
  • The study reveals that urbanized lakes and large bodies of water with specific characteristics are particularly susceptible to high levels of plastic, stressing the need to consider these freshwater areas in pollution management efforts.
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Species may cope with warming through both rapid evolutionary and plastic responses. While thermal performance curves (TPCs), reflecting thermal plasticity, are considered powerful tools to understand the impact of warming on ectotherms, their rapid evolution has been rarely studied for multiple traits. We capitalized on a 2-year experimental evolution trial in outdoor mesocosms that were kept at ambient temperatures or heated 4°C above ambient, by testing in a follow-up common-garden experiment, for rapid evolution of the TPCs for multiple key traits of the water flea .

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