Many vertebrates and invertebrates in the marine environment create and respond to sound. Due to increasing use of waterways, levels of anthropogenic sound are greater than ever. We examined the responses of larvae of temperate invertebrates to three sound treatments: natural ambient sound (shallow rocky reef), anthropogenic sound (an outboard motor) and no sound (control). Sound recordings wer...

In a changing climate, future inundation of the United States' Atlantic coast will depend on both storm surges during tropical cyclones and the rising relative sea levels on which those surges occur. However, the observational record of tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic basin is too short (A.D. 1851 to present) to accurately assess long-term trends in storm activity. To overcome this limi...

We present a framework for evaluating and communicating effects of human activity on water quality in managed forests. The framework is based on the following processes: atmospheric deposition, weathering, accumulation, recirculation and flux. Impairments to water quality are characterized in terms of their extent, longevity and frequency. Impacts are communicated using a "traffic lights" metap...

Understanding and mitigating the impact of an ever-increasing population and global economic activity on tropical forests is one of the great challenges currently facing biologists, conservationists and policy makers. Tropical forests currently face obvious regional changes, both negative and positive, and uncertain global changes. Although deforestation rates have increased to unprecedented le...

Recent reviews have concluded that efforts to date have yet to detect or attribute an anthropogenic climate change influence on Atlantic tropical cyclone (of at least tropical storm strength) behaviour and concomitant damage. However, the possibility of identifying such influence in the future cannot be ruled out. Using projections of future tropical cyclone activity from a recent prominent stu...

[1] The effects of natural and anthropogenic forcings (solar activity, volcanism, atmospheric CO2 concentration, deforestation) on climate changes are estimated with the Earth system model of intermediate complexity, CLIMBER2, for the past millennium. Simulated surface air temperatures for the Northern Hemisphere from the combined forcing correlate reasonably well with paleoclimatic data (r = 0...

Engineering enzymes to degrade anthropogenic compounds efficiently is challenging. We obtained Rhodococcus rhodochrous haloalkane dehalogenase mutants with up to 32-fold higher activity than wild type toward the toxic, recalcitrant anthropogenic compound 1,2,3-trichloropropane (TCP) using a new strategy. We identified key residues in access tunnels connecting the buried active site with bulk so...