Peer-review and subject-matter editing is the backbone of scientific publishing. However, early-career researchers (ECRs) are given few opportunities to participate in the editorial process beyond reviewing articles. Thus, a disconnect exists: science needs high-quality editorial talent to conduct, oversee and improve the publishing process, yet we dedicate few resources to building editorial talent nor giving ECRs formal opportunities to influence publishing from within.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe effect of nutrients on phytoplankton biomass in lakes continues to be a subject of debate by aquatic scientists. However, determining whether or not chlorophyll a (CHL) is limited by phosphorus (P) and/or nitrogen (N) is rarely considered using a probabilistic method in studies of hundreds of lakes across broad spatial extents. Several studies have applied a unified CHL-nutrient relationship to determine nutrient limitation, but pose a risk of ecological fallacy because they neglect spatial heterogeneity in ecological contexts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAgricultural land use is typically associated with high stream nutrient concentrations and increased nutrient loading to lakes. For lakes, evidence for these associations mostly comes from studies on individual lakes or watersheds that relate concentrations of nitrogen (N) or phosphorus (P) to aggregate measures of agricultural land use, such as the proportion of land used for agriculture in a lake's watershed. However, at macroscales (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough ecosystems respond to global change at regional to continental scales (i.e., macroscales), model predictions of ecosystem responses often rely on data from targeted monitoring of a small proportion of sampled ecosystems within a particular geographic area.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFaced with limitations in data availability, funding, and time constraints, ecologists are often tasked with making predictions beyond the range of their data. In ecological studies, it is not always obvious when and where extrapolation occurs because of the multivariate nature of the data. Previous work on identifying extrapolation has focused on univariate response data, but these methods are not directly applicable to multivariate response data, which are common in ecological investigations.
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