Root puppet masters: Infauna shift trait-productivity relationships in submerged aquatic vegetation communities.

Submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) growth can be limited by light and nutrient availability. Infauna are common inhabitants of SAV meadows. Their activity increases nutrient mobility, and they can positively affect plant growth, but we do not know their role in plant trait-biomass production relationships.

Survival, growth, and functional traits of tropical wet forest tree seedlings across an experimental soil moisture gradient in Puerto Rico.

Droughts are predicted to become more frequent and intense in many tropical regions, which may cause shifts in plant community composition. Especially in diverse tropical communities, understanding how traits mediate demographic responses to drought can help provide insight into the effects of climate change on these ecosystems. To understand tropical tree responses to reduced soil moisture, we grew seedlings of eight species across an experimental soil moisture gradient at the Luquillo Experimental Forest, Puerto Rico.

Water-limited environments affect the association between functional diversity and forest productivity.

The link between biodiversity and ecosystem function can depend on environmental conditions. This contingency can impede our ability to predict how biodiversity-ecosystem function (BEF) relationships will respond to future environmental change, causing a clear need to explore the processes underlying shifts in BEF relationships across large spatial scales and broad environmental gradients. We compiled a dataset on five functional traits (maximum height, wood density, specific leaf area [SLA], seed size, and xylem vulnerability to embolism [P]), covering 78%-90% of the tree species in the National Forest Inventory from Italy, to test (i) how a water limitation gradient shapes the functional composition and diversity of forests, (ii) how functional composition and diversity of trees relate to forest annual increment via mass ratio and complementarity effects, and (iii) how the relationship between functional diversity and annual increment varies between Mediterranean and temperate climate regions.

Clonality, polyploidy and spatial population structure in Baltic Sea .

Genetic characteristics of populations can have substantial impacts on the adaptive potential of a species. Species are heterogeneous, often defined by variability at a range of scales including at the genetic, individual and population level. Using microsatellite genotyping, we characterize patterns underlying the genetic heterogeneity in marine macroalga , with a particular focus on two forms: attached and free-living.

Distance decay 2.0 - A global synthesis of taxonomic and functional turnover in ecological communities.

Aim: Understanding the variation in community composition and species abundances (i.e., β-diversity) is at the heart of community ecology.

Iron-Phosphorus Feedbacks Drive Multidecadal Oscillations in Baltic Sea Hypoxia.

Hypoxia has occurred intermittently in the Baltic Sea since the establishment of brackish-water conditions at ∼8,000 years B.P., principally as recurrent hypoxic events during the Holocene Thermal Maximum (HTM) and the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA).

Beyond the single index: Investigating ecological mechanisms underpinning ecosystem multifunctionality with network analysis.

Ecosystems simultaneously deliver multiple functions that relate to both the activities of resident species and environmental conditions. One of the biggest challenges in multifunctionality assessment is balancing analytical simplicity with ecosystem complexity. As an alternative to index-based approaches, we introduce a multivariate network analysis that uses network theory to assess multifunctionality in terms of the relationships between species' functional traits, environmental characteristics, and functions.

Identifying "vital attributes" for assessing disturbance-recovery potential of seafloor communities.

Despite a long history of disturbance-recovery research, we still lack a generalizable understanding of the attributes that drive community recovery potential in seafloor ecosystems. Marine soft-sediment ecosystems encompass a range of heterogeneity from simple low-diversity habitats with limited biogenic structure, to species-rich systems with complex biogenic habitat structure. These differences in biological heterogeneity are a product of natural conditions and disturbance regimes.

Limited dispersal and an unexpected aggression pattern in a native supercolonial ant.

Understanding how social groups function requires studies on how individuals move across the landscape and interact with each other. Ant supercolonies are extreme cooperative units that may consist of thousands of interconnected nests, and their individuals cooperate over large spatial scales. However, the inner structure of suggested supercolonial (or unicolonial) societies has rarely been extensively studied using both genetic and behavioral analyses.

Male and female preferences for nest characteristics under paternal care.

Nests play a critical role for offspring development across the animal kingdom. Nest quality may contribute to the builder's extended phenotype and serve as an ornament during mate choice. We examined male and female nest choice in the common goby (), a benthic fish with male-only parental care where females deposit eggs in male-built nests.

Future temperature and salinity do not exert selection pressure on cyst germination of a toxic phytoplankton species.

Unlabelled: Environmental conditions regulate the germination of phytoplankton resting stages. While some factors lead to synchronous germination, others stimulate germination of only a small fraction of the resting stages. This suggests that habitat filters may act on the germination level and thus affect selection of blooming strains.

Cryptic temporal changes in stock composition explain the decline of a flounder ( spp.) assemblage.

Unobserved diversity, such as undetected genetic structure or the presence of cryptic species, is of concern for the conservation and management of global biodiversity in the face of threatening anthropogenic processes. For instance, unobserved diversity can lead to overestimation of maximum sustainable yields and therefore to overharvesting of the more vulnerable stock components within unrecognized mixed-stock fisheries. We used DNA from archival (otolith) samples to reconstruct the temporal (1976-2011) genetic makeup of two mixed-stock flounder fisheries in the Åland Sea (AS) and the Gulf of Finland (GoF).

Headwater gas exchange quantified from O mass balances at the reach scale.

Headwater streams are important in the carbon cycle and there is a need to better parametrize and quantify exchange of carbon-relevant gases. Thus, we characterized variability in the gas exchange coefficient ( ) and dissolved oxygen (O) gas transfer velocity () in two lowland headwaters of the River Avon (UK). The traditional one-station open-water method was complemented by in situ quantification of riverine sources and sinks of O (i.