Proposed Relationships Between Climate, Biological Soil Crusts, Human Health, and in Arid Ecosystems.

Biological soil crusts (or biocrust) are diminutive soil communities with ecological functions disproportionate to their size. These communities are composed of lichens, bryophytes, cyanobacteria, fungi, liverworts, and other microorganisms. Creating stabilizing matrices, these microorganisms interact with soil surface minerals thereby enhancing soil quality by redistributing nutrients and reducing erosion by containment of soil particles.

Plasticity in Hydraulic Architecture: Riparian Trees Respond to Increased Temperatures With Genotype-Specific Adjustments to Leaf Traits.

Climate means and variability are shifting rapidly, leading to mismatches between climate and locally adapted plant traits. Phenotypic plasticity, the ability of a plant to respond to environmental conditions within a lifetime, may provide a buffer for plants to persist under increasing temperature and water stress. We used two reciprocal common gardens across a steep temperature gradient to investigate plasticity in six populations of Fremont cottonwood, an important foundation tree species in arid riparian ecosystems.

Distributed Acoustic Sensing for Future Planetary Applications: Initial Results From the San Francisco Volcanic Field, a Lunar Analogue.

Seismic imaging is one of the most powerful tools available for constraining the internal structure and composition of planetary bodies as well as enabling our understanding planetary evolution, geology, and distribution of natural resources. However, traditional seismic instrumentation can be heavy and voluminous, expensive, and/or difficult to rapidly deploy in large numbers. Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) provides a promising new alternative given the ease of deployment, light weight and simplicity of fiber optic cables.

The Cost of Self-Defense: Browsing Effects in the Rare Plant Species .

Coevolution between plants and their animal predators has led to diverse defensive adaptations. Multiple theories of defense propose that there are resource allocation costs associated with producing chemical defenses. One leading hypothesis, optimal defense theory (ODT), suggests that natural selection will result in the allocation of resources to defenses that optimize the cost-to-benefit ratio between defense and other functional processes.

The Role of Geography, Diet, and Host Phylogeny on the Gut Microbiome in the Hawaiian Honeycreeper Radiation.

The animal gut microbiome can have a strong influence on the health, fitness, and behavior of its hosts. The composition of the gut microbial community can be influenced by factors such as diet, environment, and evolutionary history (phylosymbiosis). However, the relative influence of these factors is unknown in most bird species.

New tree height allometries derived from terrestrial laser scanning reveal substantial discrepancies with forest inventory methods in tropical rainforests.

Tree allometric models, essential for monitoring and predicting terrestrial carbon stocks, are traditionally built on global databases with forest inventory measurements of stem diameter (D) and tree height (H). However, these databases often combine H measurements obtained through various measurement methods, each with distinct error patterns, affecting the resulting H:D allometries. In recent decades, terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) has emerged as a widely accepted method for accurate, non-destructive tree structural measurements.

Long-distance swimming by African lions in Uganda.

Earth's most imperiled and iconic wildlife are facing tough decisions under increasing human pressure and limited resources. Swimming across rivers and water bodies filled with high densities of predators may be one such example. In African lions , previous water crossings (recorded in the peer-reviewed and gray literature, on film, and found using Google Search, and YouTube) have recorded distances ranging from <10 to 100 m, with some resulting in mortality by Nile Crocodiles .

Habitat suitability of biocrust communities in a cold desert ecosystem.

Drylands are unique among terrestrial ecosystems in that they have a significant proportion of primary production facilitated by non-vascular plants such as colonial cyanobacteria, moss, and lichens, i.e., biocrusts, which occur on and in the surface soil.

Historical tree phenology data reveal the seasonal rhythms of the Congo Basin rainforest.

Tropical forest phenology directly affects regional carbon cycles, but the relation between species-specific and whole-canopy phenology remains largely uncharacterized. We present a unique analysis of historical tropical tree phenology collected in the central Congo Basin, before large-scale impacts of human-induced climate change. Ground-based long-term (1937-1956) phenological observations of 140 tropical tree species are recovered, species-specific phenological patterns analyzed and related to historical meteorological records, and scaled to characterize stand-level canopy dynamics.

The gut microbiomes of Channel Island foxes and island spotted skunks exhibit fine-scale differentiation across host species and island populations.

California's Channel Islands are home to two endemic mammalian carnivores: island foxes () and island spotted skunks (). Although it is rare for two insular terrestrial carnivores to coexist, these known competitors persist on both Santa Cruz Island and Santa Rosa Island. We hypothesized that examination of their gut microbial communities would provide insight into the factors that enable this coexistence, as microbial symbionts often reflect host evolutionary history and contemporary ecology.

Dietary niche partitioning of three Sky Island lizards as revealed through DNA metabarcoding.

Lizard diets are highly diverse and have contributed to the diversification, biogeographical distributions, and evolution of novel traits across this global radiation. Many parts of a lizard's ecology-including habitat preferences, foraging modes, predation risks, interspecific competition, and thermal constraints, among others-interact to shape diets, and dietary niche partitioning simultaneously contributes to co-occurrence within communities. We used DNA metabarcoding of fecal samples to identify prey items in the diets of three sympatric lizards in the Madrean Sky Islands of Arizona, USA.

Using long-term data from a whole ecosystem warming experiment to identify best spring and autumn phenology models.

Predicting vegetation phenology in response to changing environmental factors is key in understanding feedbacks between the biosphere and the climate system. Experimental approaches extending the temperature range beyond historic climate variability provide a unique opportunity to identify model structures that are best suited to predicting phenological changes under future climate scenarios. Here, we model spring and autumn phenological transition dates obtained from digital repeat photography in a boreal - bog in response to a gradient of whole ecosystem warming manipulations of up to +9°C, using five years of observational data.

A comparison of gene organisations and phylogenetic relationships of all 22 squamate species listed in South Korea using complete mitochondrial DNA.

Studies using complete mitochondrial genome data have the potential to increase our understanding on gene organisations and evolutionary species relationships. In this study, we compared complete mitochondrial genomes between all 22 squamate species listed in South Korea. In addition, we constructed Maximum Parsimony (MP), Maximum Likelihood (ML) and Bayesian Inference (BI) phylogenetic trees using 13 mitochondrial protein-coding genes.

Quantifying Sub-Meter Surface Heterogeneity on Mars Using Off-Axis Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) Data.

Surface heterogeneities below the spatial resolution of thermal infrared (TIR) instruments result in anisothermality and can produce emissivity spectra with negative slopes toward longer wavelengths. Sloped spectra arise from an incorrect assumption of either a uniform surface temperature or a maximum emissivity during the temperature-emissivity separation of radiance data. Surface roughness and lateral mixing of different sub-pixel surface units result in distinct spectral slopes with magnitudes proportional to the degree of temperature mixing.

Climate and the biotic community structure plant resistance across biogeographic groups of yellow monkeyflower.

Characterizing correlates of phytochemical resistance trait variation across a landscape can provide insight into the ecological factors that have shaped the evolution of resistance arsenals. Using field-collected data and a greenhouse common garden experiment, we assessed the relative influences of abiotic and biotic drivers of genetic-based defense trait variation across 41 yellow monkeyflower populations from western and eastern North America and the United Kingdom. Populations experience different climates, herbivore communities, and neighboring vegetative communities, and have distinct phytochemical resistance arsenals.

Climate warming restructures seasonal dynamics of grassland soil microbial communities.

Soil microbial community's responses to climate warming alter the global carbon cycle. In temperate ecosystems, soil microbial communities function along seasonal cycles. However, little is known about how the responses of soil microbial communities to warming vary when the season changes.

Chemical Toxicants in Water: A Perspective in the Context of Climate Change.

The editorial focuses on four major themes contextualized in a virtual workshop that occurred from June 14 to 16, 2021. Topics in that workshop included drinking water and chronic chemical exposure, environmental injustice, public health and drinking water policy, and the fate, transport, and human impact of aqueous contaminants in the context of climate change. The intent of the workshop was to further define the field of .

Evolution and developmental expression of the sodium-iodide symporter (, ) gene family: Implications for perchlorate toxicology.

The vertebrate sodium-iodide symporter (NIS or SLC5A5) transports iodide into the thyroid follicular cells that synthesize thyroid hormone. The SLC5A protein family includes transporters of vitamins, minerals, and nutrients. Disruption of SLC5A5 function by perchlorate, a pervasive environmental contaminant, leads to human pathologies, especially hypothyroidism.

Global application of an unoccupied aerial vehicle photogrammetry protocol for predicting aboveground biomass in non-forest ecosystems.

Non-forest ecosystems, dominated by shrubs, grasses and herbaceous plants, provide ecosystem services including carbon sequestration and forage for grazing, and are highly sensitive to climatic changes. Yet these ecosystems are poorly represented in remotely sensed biomass products and are undersampled by in situ monitoring. Current global change threats emphasize the need for new tools to capture biomass change in non-forest ecosystems at appropriate scales.

Biogeosciences Perspectives on Integrated, Coordinated, Open, Networked (ICON) Science.

This article is composed of three independent commentaries about the state of ntegrated, oordinated, pen, etworked (ICON) principles in the American Geophysical Union Biogeosciences section, and discussion on the opportunities and challenges of adopting them. Each commentary focuses on a different topic: (a) Global collaboration, technology transfer, and application (Section 2), (b) Community engagement, community science, education, and stakeholder involvement (Section 3), and (c) Field, experimental, remote sensing, and real-time data research and application (Section 4). We discuss needs and strategies for implementing ICON and outline short- and long-term goals.

The Terrestrial Biosphere Model Farm.

Model Intercomparison Projects (MIPs) are fundamental to our understanding of how the land surface responds to changes in climate. However, MIPs are challenging to conduct, requiring the organization of multiple, decentralized modeling teams throughout the world running common protocols. We explored centralizing these models on a single supercomputing system.

Investigation of Relationships Between the Geospatial Distribution of Cancer Incidence and Estimated Pesticide Use in the U.S. West.

The objective of the study was to evaluate the potential geospatial relationship between agricultural pesticide use and two cancer metrics (pediatric cancer incidence and total cancer incidence) across each of the 11 contiguous states in the Western United States at state and county resolution. The pesticide usage data were collected from the U.S.