Artificial light at night (ALAN) is one of the most obvious hallmarks of human presence in an ecosystem. The rapidly increasing use of artificial light has fundamentally transformed nightscapes throughout most of the globe, although little is known about how ALAN impacts the biodiversity and food webs of illuminated ecosystems. We developed a large-scale experimental infrastructure to study the...

Surviving viral attack is essential for any species to avoid its irreversible removal from the ecosystem, and microbes must involve the resistance or susceptibility of individual cells. The co-existence between viruses and their hosts has led to the evolution of complex viral attack and host defence strategies. We review the state of the art about our understanding of resistance to viruses in a...

There is debate about whether results from mesocosm studies should be extrapolated to natural ecosystems. Critics argue that the abiotic and biotic characteristics of mesocosms do not represent the in situ conditions of the habitats in which they are designed to mimic. We addressed this idea by deploying mesocosms in two lakes of varying trophic status (mesotrophic and eutrophic). Water chemist...

We apply formal measures of emergence, self-organization, homeostasis, autopoiesis and complexity to an aquatic ecosystem; in particular to the physiochemical component of an Arctic lake. These measures are based on information theory. Variables with an homogeneous distribution have higher values of emergence, while variables with a more heterogeneous distribution have a higher self-organizatio...

most at-risk groups of animals in North America, with nearly 40% of all species either in need of conservation or extinct. Understanding their distribution and role in aquatic ecosystems is key to successful conservation. Researchers at the Illinois Natural History Survey used mussel samples collected across Illinois and a data-mining technique to answer several questions: Where are mussels fou...

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Process-based restoration aims to reestablish normative rates and magnitudes of physical, chemical, and biological processes that sustain river and floodplain ecosystems. Ecosystem conditions at any site are governed by hierarchical regional, watershed, and reach-scale processes controlling hydrologic and sediment regimes; floodplain and aquatic habitat dynamics; and riparian and aquatic biota....

Plant biodiversity affects primary productivity and resource utilization in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, and may also influence other key ecological processes such as predator–prey interactions. We tested the hypotheses that predation intensity is negatively related to plant species richness, and that prey density is positively related to plant species richness. We performed one field an...

National Institute of Aquatic Resources, Danish Technical University-Aqua, Charlottenlund, Denmark, 2 AZTI-Tecnalia, Txatxarramendi Ugartea z/gZ/G, Sukarrieta, Spain, MASTS Marine Population Modelling Group, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK, National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, UK, MARE, Department of Oceanography and Fisheries, University o...

INRA, UMR CARRTEL, 75 avenue de Corzent, 74203 Thonon-les-Bains cx, France; Institute of Oceanography, National Taiwan University, N 1 Sec 4 Roosevelt Road, Taipei 10617, Taiwan; Institute of Marine Sciences, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 3431 Arendell street, Morehead City, NC 28557, USA; Department of Limnology, University of Vienna, Althanstr. 14, A-1091 Vienna, Austria; Depar...