Most of the global mesopelagic zone lies beyond the jurisdiction of any single government or entity, making equitable access and sustainable management for ecosystem services (ES) difficult. Here, a foresighting approach was used to examine the plausible consequences of four speculative scenarios of human activity on the mesopelagic zone and its associated ES. Large‐scale Harvest represented the provisioning ES, with concerns...

In 2023, more than half of olive harvests ( Olea europaea ) across Spain, Greece, and Türkiye were lost to drought. The same year late freeze destroyed 90% of the peach crop ( Prunus persica ) on the Georgia Piedmont and the apple crop ( Malus domestica ) in central New York, Vermont, and southern Quebec. Climate extremes now rank with the costliest threats to agriculture, but their role in forest recovery from diebacks that a...

This review paper discusses the potential and limitations of polymer composites for smart nitrogen (N) supply to meet the needs of agricultural crops. Unlike most conventional fertilizers, nano-clay polymer composites (NCPCs) offer a slow-release mechanism that enhances nitrogen use efficiency and reduces its loss to the environment. NCPCs are normally synthesized using solution blending, melt blending and in situ polymerizati...

The marine system plays a critical role in the global climate cycle, as a major control of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO 2 ). Marine primary production (photosynthesis) and remineralisation of organic carbon (respiration, degradation) determine the amount of CO 2 sequestered in marine sediments and deep‐water environments on century to millennial timescales. The stocks and fluxes of the marine carbon cycle are susceptible to...

To understand how behaviors arise in animals, it is necessary to investigate both the neural circuits and the biomechanics of the periphery. A tractable model system for studying multifunctional control is the feeding apparatus of the marine mollusk Aplysia californica . Previous in silico and in roboto models have investigated how the nervous and muscular systems interact in this system. However, these models are still limite...

Emerging infectious diseases are increasingly recognized as a significant threat to global biodiversity conservation. Elucidating the relationship between pathogens and the host microbiome could lead to novel approaches for mitigating disease impacts. Pathogens can alter the host microbiome by inducing dysbiosis, an ecological state characterized by a reduction in bacterial alpha diversity, an increase in pathobionts, or a shi...

Predicting invasion risk to novel environments is essential for risk management and conservation decision making but the evolutionary lineage at which to make these predictions is often unclear. Here we predict the current suitability across the United Kingdom (UK) for the alpine newt Ichthyosaura alpestris , a species with a complex evolutionary history, a broad native range, a growing number of introduced populations and ane...

Global climate is regulated by the ocean, which stores, releases, and transports large amounts of mass, heat, carbon, and oxygen. Understanding, monitoring, and predicting the exchanges of these quantities across the ocean’s surface, their interactions with the atmosphere, and their horizontal and vertical pathways through the global oceans, are key for advancing fundamental knowledge and improving forecasts and longer-term pr...

The passive sinking flux of particles, termed the biological gravitational pump (BGP), is an important component of the ocean’s biological carbon pump. In addition, carbon-rich particles are actively injected to depth through the diel vertical migration (DVM) of micronekton and mesozooplankton from the surface to the oceans’ twilight zone (200 m – 1000 m depth). This is known as the mesopelagic-migrant pump (MMP). We investiga...

Fishes inhabiting the mesopelagic zone of the world's oceans are estimated to account for the majority of the world's fish biomass. They have recently attracted new attention because they are part of the biological carbon pump and have been reconsidered as a contribution to food security. Hence, there is an urgent need to understand how environmental conditions and species interactions shape their assemblages, and how they con...