Publications by authors named "J A Koslow"
Article Synopsis
- Climate warming is significantly altering ocean ecosystems, particularly in the Northeast Pacific, due to phenomena like El Niño and recent marine heatwaves, notably from 2014 to 2016.
- Ichthyoplankton, or larval fishes, serve as key indicators of these changes, as their abundance and diversity were analyzed across four ecoregions from 1981 to 2017 to understand ecosystem responses to climate fluctuations.
- The analysis revealed that the marine heatwave caused a decline in ichthyoplankton in some areas, like the Gulf of Alaska, while others, like Oregon and southern California, saw an increase in warmer-water species, indicating varied impacts depending on the specific marine ecosystem.
The degree to which ecosystems are regulated through bottom-up, top-down, or direct physical processes represents a long-standing issue in ecology, with important consequences for resource management and conservation. In marine ecosystems, the role of bottom-up and top-down forcing has been shown to vary over spatio-temporal scales, often linked to highly variable and heterogeneously distributed environmental conditions. Ecosystem dynamics in the Northeast Pacific have been suggested to be predominately bottom-up regulated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe accelerating loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services worldwide has accentuated a long-standing debate on the role of diversity in stabilizing ecological communities and has given rise to a field of research on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (BEF). Although broad consensus has been reached regarding the positive BEF relationship, a number of important challenges remain unanswered. These primarily concern the underlying mechanisms by which diversity increases resilience and community stability, particularly the relative importance of statistical averaging and functional complementarity.
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