Variation and correlation in the timing of breeding of North Atlantic seabirds across multiple scales.

Timing of breeding, an important driver of fitness in many populations, is widely studied in the context of global change, yet despite considerable efforts to identify environmental drivers of seabird nesting phenology, for most populations we lack evidence of strong drivers. Here we adopt an alternative approach, examining the degree to which different populations positively covary in their annual phenology to infer whether phenological responses to environmental drivers are likely to be (a) shared across species at a range of spatial scales, (b) shared across populations of a species or (c) idiosyncratic to populations. We combined 51 long-term datasets on breeding phenology spanning 50 years from nine seabird species across 29 North Atlantic sites and examined the extent to which different populations share early versus late breeding seasons depending on a hierarchy of spatial scales comprising breeding site, small-scale region, large-scale region and the whole North Atlantic.

Unexpected fish and squid in the central Arctic deep scattering layer.

The retreating ice cover of the Central Arctic Ocean (CAO) fuels speculations on future fisheries. However, very little is known about the existence of harvestable fish stocks in this 3.3 million-square kilometer ecosystem around the North Pole.

Global COVID-19 lockdown highlights humans as both threats and custodians of the environment.

The global lockdown to mitigate COVID-19 pandemic health risks has altered human interactions with nature. Here, we report immediate impacts of changes in human activities on wildlife and environmental threats during the early lockdown months of 2020, based on 877 qualitative reports and 332 quantitative assessments from 89 different studies. Hundreds of reports of unusual species observations from around the world suggest that animals quickly responded to the reductions in human presence.

COVID-19 lockdown reveals tourists as seabird guardians.

The widespread lockdowns put in place to limit the spread of the new coronavirus disease (COVID-19) offers a rare opportunity in understanding how human presence influence ecosystems. Using data from long-term seabird monitoring, we reveal a previously concealed guarding effect by tourist groups on an iconic seabird colony in the Baltic Sea. The absence of tourists in 2020 lead to a sevenfold increase in presence of white-tailed eagles , a sevenfold increase in their disturbance of breeding common murres and causing 26% lower murre productivity than the long-term average.

Recent phenological shifts of migratory birds at a Mediterranean spring stopover site: Species wintering in the Sahel advance passage more than tropical winterers.

Spring migration phenology is shifting towards earlier dates as a response to climate change in many bird species. However, the patterns of change might not be the same for all species, populations, sex and age classes. In particular, patterns of change could differ between species with different ecology.

The undisciplinary journey: early-career perspectives in sustainability science.

The establishment of interdisciplinary Master's and PhD programs in sustainability science is opening up an exciting arena filled with opportunities for early-career scholars to address pressing sustainability challenges. However, embarking upon an interdisciplinary endeavor as an early-career scholar poses a unique set of challenges: to develop an individual scientific identity and a strong and specific methodological skill-set, while at the same time gaining the ability to understand and communicate between different epistemologies. Here, we explore the challenges and opportunities that emerge from a new kind of interdisciplinary journey, which we describe as 'undisciplinary.

An empirical model of the Baltic Sea reveals the importance of social dynamics for ecological regime shifts.

Regime shifts triggered by human activities and environmental changes have led to significant ecological and socioeconomic consequences in marine and terrestrial ecosystems worldwide. Ecological processes and feedbacks associated with regime shifts have received considerable attention, but human individual and collective behavior is rarely treated as an integrated component of such shifts. Here, we used generalized modeling to develop a coupled social-ecological model that integrated rich social and ecological data to investigate the role of social dynamics in the 1980s Baltic Sea cod boom and collapse.

Isotopic analysis of island House Martins indicates marine provenance of nutrients.

The presence of one of the largest colonies of House Martins in Europe on the small island of Stora Karlsö, Sweden, led us to investigate the source of their food by analysis of stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen. Carbon isotopic values of House Martin nestlings were the same as those of Common Guillemot nestlings fed on marine fish, but differed from local Collared Flycatcher nestlings fed on woodland insects. We infer that these House Martins fed their chicks almost exclusively on insects that had used nutrients derived from seabirds, indicating a dependence on the presence of a large seabird colony.

Adapting to regional enforcement: fishing down the governance index.

Background: Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing is a problem for marine resource managers, leading to depletion of fish stocks and negative impacts on marine ecosystems. These problems are particularly evident in regions with weak governance. Countries responsible for sustainable natural resource management in the Southern Ocean have actively worked to reduce IUU fishing in the region over a period of 15 years, leading to a sequence of three distinct peaks of IUU fishing.