Stable isotopes are a powerful tool for ecologists, often used to assess contributions of different sources to a mixture (e.g. prey to a consumer). Mixing models use stable isotope data to estimate the contribution of sources to a mixture. Uncertainty associated with mixing models is often substantial, but has not yet been fully incorporated in models. We developed a Bayesian-mixing model that ...

Quantitative description of food webs provides fundamental information for the understanding of population, community, and ecosystem dynamics. Recently, stable isotope mixing models have been widely used to quantify dietary proportions of different food resources to a focal consumer. Here we propose a novel mixing model (IsoWeb) that estimates diet proportions of all consumers in a food web bas...

Understanding the transport and behavior of bacteria in the environment has broad implications in diverse areas, ranging from agriculture to groundwater quality, risk assessment, and bioremediation. The ability to reliably track and enumerate specific bacterial populations in the context of native communities and environments is key to developing this understanding. We report a novel bacterial ...

Divergent selection and adaptive divergence can increase phenotypic diversification amongst populations and lineages. Yet adaptive divergence between different environments, habitats or niches does not occur in all lineages. For example, the colonization of freshwater environments by ancestral marine species has triggered adaptive radiation and phenotypic diversification in some taxa but not in...

Biodiversity is well studied in ecology and the concept has been developed to include traits of species, rather than solely taxonomy, to better reflect the functional diversity of a system. The deep sea provides a natural environmental gradient within which to study changes in different diversity metrics, but traits of deep-sea fish are not widely known, hampering the application of functional ...

Abstract The chemical composition of the wood reflects soil over which corresponding tree has developed. Multi-elemental and isotopic signatures, are characteristic underlying rock substrates, potentially powerful tools for determining provenance. These tracers special interest charred archaeological because they circumvent some limitations dendrochronological provenancing linked to tree-ring l...

Iron absorption can be measured by the incorporation of stable iron isotopes into erythrocytes, 14 days after isotope administration. The disadvantage of this method is the high dose of isotopes needed to obtain a sufficient enrichment. Therefore, in this study cell fractions rich in young erythroid cells were prepared by using a density separation method. From 10 women blood was taken 4, 5, an...

Fifty-eight dental calculus samples from medieval and post-medieval skeletons from Vitoria, Spain, and a single sample from an Alaskan Inuit were tested for stable carbon and nitrogen isotope compositions. There was sufficient carbon and nitrogen concentrations to obtain d13C and d15N values, and the samples from Spain produced results that were replicable and comparable to European isotope val...