Characterizing and Implementing the Hamamatsu C12880MA Mini-Spectrometer for Near-Surface Reflectance Measurements of Inland Waters.

In recent decades, inland water remote sensing has seen growing interest and very strong development. This includes improved spatial resolution, increased revisiting times, advanced multispectral sensors and recently even hyperspectral sensors. However, inland waters are more challenging than oceanic waters due to their higher complexity of optically active constituents and stronger adjacency effects due to their small size and nearby vegetation and built structures.

Critical role of parasite-mediated energy pathway on community response to nutrient enrichment.

Parasites form an integral part of food webs, however, they are often ignored in classic food web theory or limited to the investigation of trophic transmission pathways. Specifically, direct consumption of parasites by nonhost predators is rarely considered, while it can contribute substantially to energy flow in food webs. In aquatic systems, chytrids constitute a major group of fungal parasites whose free-living infective stages (zoospores) form a highly nutritional food source to zooplankton.

Differing Escape Responses of the Marine Bacterium in the Presence of Planktonic vs. Surface-Associated Protist Grazers.

Protist grazing pressure plays a major role in controlling aquatic bacterial populations, affecting energy flow through the microbial loop and biogeochemical cycles. Predator-escape mechanisms might play a crucial role in energy flow through the microbial loop, but are yet understudied. For example, some bacteria can use planktonic as well as surface-associated habitats, providing a potential escape mechanism to habitat-specific grazers.

Land-use type temporarily affects active pond community structure but not gene expression patterns.

Changes in land use and agricultural intensification threaten biodiversity and ecosystem functioning of small water bodies. We studied 67 kettle holes (KH) in an agricultural landscape in northeastern Germany using landscape-scale metatranscriptomics to understand the responses of active bacterial, archaeal and eukaryotic communities to land-use type. These KH are proxies of the millions of small standing water bodies of glacial origin spread across the northern hemisphere.

Design and implementation of an illumination system to mimic skyglow at ecosystem level in a large-scale lake enclosure facility.

Light pollution is an environmental stressor of global extent that is growing exponentially in area and intensity. Artificial skyglow, a form of light pollution with large range, is hypothesized to have environmental impact at ecosystem level. However, testing the impact of skyglow at large scales and in a controlled fashion under in situ conditions has remained elusive so far.

Climate Change-Driven Regime Shifts in a Planktonic Food Web.

AbstractPredicting how food webs will respond to global environmental change is difficult because of the complex interplay between the abiotic forcing and biotic interactions. Mechanistic models of species interactions in seasonal environments can help understand the effects of global change in different ecosystems. Seasonally ice-covered lakes are warming faster than many other ecosystems and undergoing pronounced food web changes, making the need to forecast those changes especially urgent.

A probabilistic approach to dispersal in spatially explicit meta-populations.

Meta-population and -community models have extended our understanding regarding the influence of habitat distribution, local patch dynamics, and dispersal on species distribution patterns. Currently, theoretical insights on spatial distribution patterns are limited by the dominant use of deterministic approaches for modeling species dispersal. In this work, we introduce a probabilistic, network-based framework to describe species dispersal by considering inter-patch connections as network-determined probabilistic events.

Ontogenetic diet shifts promote predator-mediated coexistence.

It is widely believed that predation moderates interspecific competition and promotes prey diversity. Still, in models of two prey sharing a resource and a predator, predator-mediated coexistence occurs only over narrow ranges of resource productivity. These models have so far ignored the widespread feature of ontogenetic diet shifts in predators.

Simple rules describe bottom-up and top-down control in food webs with alternative energy pathways.

Many human influences on the world's ecosystems have their largest direct impacts at either the top or the bottom of the food web. To predict their ecosystem-wide consequences we must understand how these impacts propagate. A long-standing, but so far elusive, problem in this endeavour is how to reduce food web complexity to a mathematically tractable, but empirically relevant system.