Marine dissolved organic matter (DOM) contains more carbon than the combined stocks of Earth’s biota. Organisms in the ocean continuously release a myriad of molecules that become food for microheterotrophs, but, for unknown reasons, a residual …
In a warming climate, rising seawater temperatures and declining primary and secondary production will drastically affect growth and fitness of marine invertebrates in the northern Atlantic Ocean. To study the ecological performance of juvenile …
Ecological restoration is emerging as an important strategy to improve the recovery of degraded lands and to combat habitat and biodiversity loss worldwide. One central unresolved question revolves around the optimal spatial design for outplanted …
We study the economic management of a renewable resource, the stock of which is spatially distributed and moves over a discrete or continuous spatial domain. In contrast to standard harvesting models where the agent can control the take-out from the …
We analyse data on marine unicellular phytoplankton, exhibiting an astounding diversity of cell sizes and shapes. We quantify the variation in size and shape and explore their effects on taxonomic diversity. We find that cells of intermediate volume exhibit the greatest shape variation, with shapes ranging from oblate to extremely elongated forms, while very small and large cells are mostly compact. We show that cell shape has a strong effect on phytoplankton diversity, comparable in magnitude to the effect of cell volume, with both traits explaining up to 92% of the variance in phytoplankton diversity. Species richness decays exponentially with cell elongation and displays a log-normal dependence on cell volume, peaking for compact cells of intermediate volume.
The rise of the World Airline Network over the past century has led to sharp changes in our notions of “distance” and “closeness”—in terms of both trade and travel, but also (less desirably) with respect to the spread of disease. When novel pathogens …
Dissolved organic carbon (DOC) forms one of the largest active organic carbon reservoirs on Earth and reaches average radiocarbon ages of several thousand years. Many previous large scale DOC models assume different lability classes (labile to …
Dispersal and foodweb dynamics have long been studied in separate models. However, over the past decades, it has become abundantly clear that there are intricate interactions between local dynamics and spatial patterns. Trophic meta-communities, i.e. …