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 ...

In this editorial, we provide a brief introduction and summarize the 10 research articles included in this Special Issue on Applications of stable isotope analysis in mammalian ecology. The first three articles report correction and discrimination factors that can be used to more accurately estimate the diets of extinct and extant mammals using stable isotope analysis. The remaining seven appli...

A great deal of current biological and clinical research is directed at the interpretation of the information contained in the human genome sequence in terms of the structure, function and control of biological systems and processes. Proteomics, the systematic analysis of proteins, is becoming a critical component in this endeavor because proteomic measurements are carried out directly on prote...

1. Background 2. Elements, Nuclides, and Stable Isotopes 3. The Mass Spectrometer and Isotope Ratio Measurement 4. Isotope Fractionation 5. Temperature and Fractionation 6. Stable Isotopes in the Hydrologic Cycle 7. O in Minerals and Rocks 8. C and Carbon Cycling 9. N Cycling in Watersheds 10.S and the Sulfur Cycle 11. Chlorine and Bromine Isotopes 12. Light Lithophile Elements: δLi and δB Glos...

The problem of utilization of high-activity waste by effect of nuclear transmutation in growing associations of microbiological cultures was studied. For the first time we have observed utilization of several kinds of highly active isotopes in the volume of distilled water extracted from the first contour of water-water atomic reactor convert to non-radioactive nuclei. 1. The model and the foun...