Green Roof Substrate Microbes Compose a Core Community of Stress-Tolerant Taxa.

Extensive green roofs provide for many ecosystem services in urban environments. The efficacy of these services is influenced by the vegetation structure. Despite their key role in plant performance and productivity, but also their contribution to nitrogen fixation or carbon sequestration, green roof microbial communities have received little attention so far.

Improving the reliability and ecological validity of pharmaceutical risk assessment: Turquoise killifish (Nothobranchius furzeri) as a model in behavioral ecotoxicology.

Pharmaceuticals are essential for human well-being, but their increasing and continuous use pollutes the environment. Although behavioral ecotoxicology is increasingly advocated to assess the effects of pharmaceutical pollution on wildlife and ecosystems, a consensus on the actual environmental risks is lacking for most compounds. The main limitation is the lack of standardized reproducible tests that are based on sensitive behavioral endpoints and that accommodate a high ecological relevance.

Individual behavioral variation reflects personality divergence in the upcoming model organism .

In the animal kingdom, behavioral variation among individuals has often been reported. However, stable among-individual differences along a behavioral continuum-reflective of personality variation-have only recently become a key target of research. While a vast body of descriptive literature exists on animal personality, hypothesis-driven quantitative studies are largely deficient.