Scientists' warning on extreme wildfire risks to water supply.

2020 is the year of wildfire records. California experienced its three largest fires early in its fire season. The Pantanal, the largest wetland on the planet, burned over 20% of its surface.

"Micropersonality" traits and their implications for behavioral and movement ecology research.

Many animal personality traits have implicit movement-based definitions and can directly or indirectly influence ecological and evolutionary processes. It has therefore been proposed that animal movement studies could benefit from acknowledging and studying consistent interindividual differences (personality), and, conversely, animal personality studies could adopt a more quantitative representation of movement patterns.Using high-resolution tracking data of three-spined stickleback fish () we examined the repeatability of four movement parameters commonly used in the analysis of discrete time series movement data (time stationary, step length, turning angle, burst frequency) and four behavioral parameters commonly used in animal personality studies (distance travelled, space use, time in free water, and time near objects).

A new direction for differentiating animal activity based on measuring angular velocity about the yaw axis.

The use of animal-attached data loggers to quantify animal movement has increased in popularity and application in recent years. High-resolution tri-axial acceleration and magnetometry measurements have been fundamental in elucidating fine-scale animal movements, providing information on posture, traveling speed, energy expenditure, and associated behavioral patterns. Heading is a key variable obtained from the tandem use of magnetometers and accelerometers, although few field investigations have explored fine-scale changes in heading to elucidate differences in animal activity (beyond the notable exceptions of dead-reckoning).

An "orientation sphere" visualization for examining animal head movements.

Animal behavior is elicited, in part, in response to external conditions, but understanding how animals perceive the environment and make the decisions that bring about these behavioral responses is challenging.Animal heads often move during specific behaviors and, additionally, typically have sensory systems (notably vision, smell, and hearing) sampling in defined arcs (normally to the front of their heads). As such, head-mounted electronic sensors consisting of accelerometers and magnetometers, which can be used to determine the movement and directionality of animal heads (where head "movement" is defined here as changes in heading [azimuth] and/or pitch [elevation angle]), can potentially provide information both on behaviors in general and also clarify which parts of the environment the animals might be prioritizing ("environmental framing").

The functional convergence of antibiotic resistance in β-lactamases is not conferred by a simple convergent substitution of amino acid.

Bacterial resistance to antibiotics is a serious medical and public health concern worldwide. Such resistance is conferred by a variety of mechanisms, but the extensive variability in levels of resistance across bacteria is a common finding. Understanding the underlying evolutionary processes governing this functional variation in antibiotic resistance is important as it may allow the development of appropriate strategies to improve treatment options for bacterial infections.

Transcriptomic response to aquaculture intensification in Nile tilapia.

To meet future global demand for fish protein, more fish will need to be farmed using fewer resources, and this will require the selection of nonaggressive individuals that perform well at high densities. Yet, the genetic changes underlying loss of aggression and adaptation to crowding during aquaculture intensification are largely unknown. We examined the transcriptomic response to aggression and crowding in Nile tilapia, one of the oldest and most widespread farmed fish, whose social structure shifts from social hierarchies to shoaling with increasing density.

Diving behavior in a free-living, semi-aquatic herbivore, the Eurasian beaver .

Semi-aquatic mammals have secondarily returned to the aquatic environment, although they spend a major part of their life operating in air. Moving both on land, as well as in, and under water is challenging because such species are considered to be imperfectly adapted to both environments. We deployed accelerometers combined with a depth sensor to study the diving behavior of 12 free-living Eurasian beavers in southeast Norway between 2009 and 2011 to examine the extent to which beavers conformed with mass-dependent dive capacities, expecting them to be poorer than wholly aquatic species.

Dynamics of glacier calving at the ungrounded margin of Helheim Glacier, southeast Greenland.

During summer 2013 we installed a network of 19 GPS nodes at the ungrounded margin of Helheim Glacier in southeast Greenland together with three cameras to study iceberg calving mechanisms. The network collected data at rates up to every 7 s and was designed to be robust to loss of nodes as the glacier calved. Data collection covered 55 days, and many nodes survived in locations right at the glacier front to the time of iceberg calving.