Dams impound the majority of rivers and provide important societal benefits, especially daily water releases that enable on-peak hydroelectricity generation. Such “hydropeaking” is common worldwide, but its downstream impacts remain unclear. We evaluated the response of aquatic insects, a cornerstone of river food webs, to hydropeaking using a life history–hydrodynamic […]
Aim Vertical root distributions (‘profiles’) influence plant water use and productivity, and the differentiation of root profiles between neighbouring species can indicate the degree of plant interactions and niche partitioning. However, quantifying multiple species’ root distributions in the field can be labour intensive and highly destructive to the soil and […]
Vessel length is an important but understudied dimension of variation in angiosperm vascular anatomy. Among other traits, vessel length mediates an important tradeoff between hydraulic efficiency and safety that could influence how plants respond to extreme weather with climate change. However, the functional significance of vessel length variation within individual […]
The concentration detection threshold (CDT) is the concentration of particles in solution beyond which a (serial dilution) assay detects particle presence. By our account, CDTs typically are not estimated but are fixed at some value. Setting a CDT to zero (d=0d=0) implies perfect detection, a common assumption, and setting d>0d>0 […]
The Arctic continues to warm at a rate that is currently twice as fast as the global average (see essay on Surface Air Temperature). Warming is causing normally frozen ground (permafrost) to thaw, exposing significant quantities of organic soil carbon to decomposition by soil microbes (Romanovsky et al. 2010, Romanovsky […]
Despite the importance of net primary productivity (NPP) and net biome productivity (NBP), estimates of NPP and NBP for China are highly uncertain. To investigate the main sources of uncertainty, we synthesized model estimates of NPP and NBP for China from published literature and the Multi-scale Synthesis and Terrestrial Model […]
Ecosystem responses to the increasing warming in recent decades across North America (NA) are spatially heterogeneous and partly uncertain. Here we examined the spatial and temporal variability of warming across different eco-regions of NA using long-term (1979–2010) climate data (North America Regional Reanalysis (NARR)) with 3-hourly time-step and 0.25° × 0.25° spatial […]
The seasonal-cycle amplitude (SCA) of the atmosphere–ecosystem carbon dioxide (CO2) exchange rate is a useful metric of the responsiveness of the terrestrial biosphere to environmental variations. It is unclear, however, what underlying mechanisms are responsible for the observed increasing trend of SCA in atmospheric CO2 concentration. Using output data from […]
Identification of microorganisms that facilitate the cycling of nutrients in freshwater is paramount to understanding how these ecosystems function. Here, we identify growing aquatic bacteria using quantitative stable isotope probing. During 8 day incubations in 97 atom %, 54% of the taxa grew. The most abundant phyla among growing taxa […]
With increasing air temperatures and changing precipitation patterns forecast for the Arctic over the coming decades, the thawing of ice-rich permafrost is expected to increasingly alter hydrological conditions by creating mosaics of wetter and drier areas. The objective of this study is to investigate how 10 years of lowered water […]