Marine crustacean capture fisheries have been contributing increasingly to global aquatic food production in recent decades, helping secure socioeconomic benefits. During 2000–2022 the total landings of marine crustaceans rose by ~ 6.7% on average while expanding spatially and taxonomically, doubling their contribution to global fisheries landings. Although efforts to improve the data collection that informs stock assessments...

Cephalopods play a key role in marine ecosystems but are difficult to study directly; hence, beaks recovered from predator stomachs are critical to further understand their distribution and ecology. Cephalopod species have traditionally been identified from beak morphology, a time-consuming method limited by degree of beak digestion, lack of specialist expertise, and limited coverage in reference collections. Here, we provide...

Horticultural trade is the primary pathway for the introduction of invasive plant species. Increasingly, trade is conducted online via e-commerce platforms. We used automated web scraping to capture snapshots of the online plant trade in Australia across 11 e-commerce websites between 2020 and 2023, aiming to identify potentially invasive species for sale. We identified 3,822 species for sale, which we categorised based on the...

Victoria Cave, north Yorkshire, England, contains a long sequence of Pleistocene clastic sediments and calcite flowstones. Earlier work, using U–Th dating, established that the flowstone units formed in interglacial stages corresponding to Marine Isotope Stages (MIS) 13, 11, 9, 7 and 5. The intervening laminated sediments were therefore assigned to glacial stages (MIS 12, 10, 6 and 2) and regarded as rhythmites that settled fr...

Aim We investigate the distribution of dispersal modes — endozoochory (via animal ingestion), synzoochory (via animal seed accumulation) and anemochory (via wind)—and seed mass of woody plants across Brazilian ecosystems, testing whether their relative abundance in local plant communities could be predicted by climate, edaphic factors and dispersal agents (e.g., the main vectors moving seeds). We expected climate to be the mai...

Understanding the long-term effects of bottom trawling on sedimentary organic carbon (OC) is crucial for assessing its role in carbon cycling and climate regulation. Most studies analyse effects on surface sediments (≤10 cm), leaving impacts on deeper sediments poorly resolved. This study investigates how bottom trawling influences sediment OC density (SCD) and OC content within 0–50 cm of the Western Irish Sea Mud Belt, repre...

Soldo [...]

Endemic species with narrow ranges are vulnerable to extirpation, and understanding their habitat needs is fundamental to effective management. The Etowah Bridled Darter, Percina freemanorum , is a recently described fish species endemic to the Upper Etowah River in Georgia. Little is known about how its habitat requirements differ from its sister taxon, P. kusha, with which it was previously synonymous . Our objectives were t...

Mycorrhizal fungi are critical plant mutualists that influence nutrient cycling, yet we have an incomplete understanding of factors driving their diversity and function. While it’s presumed that diverse host plant communities support diverse mycorrhizal fungal communities, abiotic factors and non-host plants may also be important. We investigated whether ectomycorrhizal fungal (ECMF) communities in soils and roots varied among...

Ecosystem engineers impact ecosystems by changing the physical environment in which species interact. In Lake Mývatn, Iceland, larvae of the midge Tanytarsus gracilentus function as ecosystem engineers by building tubes in the sediment that solidify the benthic surface and create a 3-dimensional structure on which microalgae can grow. To assess the ecosystem-scale effect of midge engineering, we took advantage of the natural h...

Inorganic nutrients can vary over space and time in lakes due to abiotic and biotic factors. To understand the drivers of spatial variation in nutrients in shallow Lake Mývatn, Iceland, we mapped dissolved inorganic and organic nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) concentrations in benthic (interstitial) and pelagic zones in summer 2021 during a lake-wide pelagic cyanobacterial bloom and in spring 2022 when there was no cyanobacter...