Reducing the hydrologic effects and pollutant loadings from urban drainage systems and restoring aquatic habitats to improve the health of our aquatic ecosystems presents many unique challenges. These challenges can be categorized as technical, institutional, financial, and cultural. This paper will examine each of the challenges and the tools that have and are being developed to overcome them....

However, hydrologists and ecologists are still woefully incapable of answering the question, “How much hydrologic alteration is too much for an aquatic or riparian ecosystem?” This is not to say that we haven’t learned a great deal about the influence of hydrologic variation and extreme events on species and natural communities or key ecosystem processes such as nutrient transport and cycling. ...

Aim The network structure of food webs plays an important role in the maintenance of diversity and ecosystem functioning in ecological communities. Previous research has found that ecosystem size, resource availability, assembly history and biotic interactions can potentially drive food web structure. However, the relative influence of climatic variables that drive broad-scale biogeographic pat...

Biomonitoring of waterbodies is vital as the number of anthropogenic stressors on aquatic ecosystems keeps growing. However, the continuous decrease in funding makes it impossible to meet monitoring goals or sustain traditional manual sample processing. In this paper, we review what kind of statistical tools can be used to enhance the cost efficiency of biomonitoring: We explore automated ident...

Thomas H. Chrzanowski and James P. Grover Department of Biology, The University of Texas at Arlington, PO Box 19498, Arlington, TX 76019, U.S.A. E-mail: [email protected] Abstract The light-to-nutrient hypothesis explores how the balance between energy (as light energy) and nutrients (as total phosphorus) shapes aquatic ecosystem structure and process. The balance of energy and nutrients is thought ...

The formation of oriented thermokarst lakes on the Arctic Coastal Plain of northern Alaska has been the subject of debate for more than half a century. The striking elongation of the lakes perpendicular to the prevailing wind direction has led to the development of a preferred wind-generated gyre hypothesis, while other hypotheses include a combination of sun angle, topographic aspect, and/or a...

Huge complex ecosystem models with several hundred parameters and large input data sets escape standard attempts at integral assessment. We introduce the concept of group-collecting sensitivity analysis in which related model parameters or forcing coefficients are combined into subsets. Since means and standard deviations of subsets are varied instead of individual coefficients, the method is n...

An ecosystem made of nutrients, plants, detritus and dissolved oxygen is presented. Its equilibria are established. Sufficient conditions for the existence of the coexistence equilibrium are derived and its feasibility is discussed in every detail.

The imaging spectroscopy mission EnMAP aims to assess the state and evolution of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, examine the multifaceted impacts of human activities, and support a sustainable use of natural resources. Once in operation (scheduled to launch in 2019), EnMAP will provide high-quality observations in the visible to near-infrared and shortwave-infrared spectral range. The scien...

An experiment was conducted to investigate the response of periphyton biomass to addition of phosphorus (P) in an aquatic ecosystem dominated by submersed plants. Aquatic ecosystems dominated by Hydrilla verticillata (L.f.) Royle and Vallisneria natans (Lour.) Hara were constructed in mesocosm aquaria. Mesocosms were dosed weekly with different P loads (0 μg/L/Week and 100 μg/L/Week) for 17 wee...