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The need for ocean information has never been greater. From climate change to food security and extreme events, we need to understand the role of the ocean and better predict change and impact. This is only possible with the sustained collection of a key set of ocean observations. The Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) coordinates international efforts to collect these Essential Ocean Variables (EOVs), which span physics, bi...
Several legal acts mandate that management agencies regularly assess biological populations. For species with distinct markings, these assessments can be conducted noninvasively via capture‐recapture and photographic identification (photo‐ID), which involves processing considerable quantities of photographic data. To ease this burden, agencies increasingly rely on automated identification (ID) algorithms. Identification algori...
Colour change of greenlip abalone, Haliotis Laevigata Donovan, fed dried macroalgae meals in concurrent laboratory and on‐farm trialsNARA Subscribed
In Australia, cultured greenlip abalone ( Haliotis laevigata ) are fed formulated diets that lack macroalgae. This has resulted in a pale lip colour in contrast to the vivid green lip colour of wild abalone. We evaluated the effects of supplementing 15% dried macroalgae meal, using either commercially available macroalgae meal (MSM) or harvested Gracilaria cliftonii, on colour change in greenlip abalone . Abalone were fed the...
Applying genomics in regulatory toxicology: a report of the ECETOC workshop on omics threshold on non-adversityNARA Subscribed
In a joint effort involving scientists from academia, industry and regulatory agencies, ECETOC’s activities in Omics have led to conceptual proposals for: (1) A framework that assures data quality for reporting and inclusion of Omics data in regulatory assessments; and (2) an approach to robustly quantify these data, prior to interpretation for regulatory use. In continuation of these activities this workshop explored and iden...
Prolonging survival in good health is a fundamental societal goal. However, the leading determinants of disability-free survival in healthy older people have not been well established. Data from ASPREE, a bi-national placebo-controlled trial of aspirin with 4.7 years median follow-up, was analysed. At enrolment, participants were healthy and without prior cardiovascular events, dementia or persistent physical disability. Disab...
The origins and maintenance of global species endemismNARA Subscribed
Aim We test macroecological hypotheses ( H1: long‐term climate stability; H2: climate seasonality; H3: climate distinctiveness or rarity; and, H4: spatial heterogeneity in contemporary climate, topography or habitat ) proposed to explain broad‐scale patterns of total species endemism. Location Continental areas worldwide and zoogeographical realms. Methods Using species distribution maps for mammals and amphibians, we calculat...
Where Newton might have taken ecologyNARA Subscribed
A dilemma in ecology Ecologists aspire to build a discipline to both understand the natural world and to provide society with tools to make responsible decisions about the environment. For both of these purposes, most sciences have, at their core, a set of empirical generalizations that predict the behaviour of important properties of nature (e.g., Newton’s laws of mechanics, Mendeleev’s periodic table, Mendel’s genetics). Eco...
Aim It is commonly asserted that climate presents the primary constraint on species’ geographic distributions, and that species’ distributions should therefore shift to track changing climate. However, the evidence is surprisingly mixed about the causal link between species’ distributions and climate. Correlations between distributions and climate may be indirect, reflecting influences of other spatially structured habitat var...
Protecting biomass carbon stocks to mitigate climate change has direct implications for biodiversity conservation. Yet, evidence that a positive association exists between carbon density and species richness is contrasting. Here, we test how this association varies (1) across spatial extents and (2) as a function of how strongly carbon and species richness depend on environmental variables. We found the correlation weakens whe...
Climate change is not a major driver of shifts in the geographical distributions of North American birdsNARA Subscribed
Aim Many studies postulate that physiological tolerance of climatic variables imposes the primary limit on species geographical distributions, that tolerances are constant through time, that climate has warmed and that geographical distributions shift to maintain species in their thermal niches when climate changes. However, recent studies present evidence that is inconsistent with each of these propositions. Here we ask: how...
Can the richness–climate relationship be explained by systematic variations in how individual species’ ranges relate to climate?NARA Subscribed
Aim At large spatial extents, the species richness of high‐level taxa is generally strongly positively correlated with temperature and precipitation, and consistently so across space and time. Here, we test whether this richness–climate relationship is driven by systematic associations between climate and characteristics of the geographical ranges of individual species. Specifically, we test the hypotheses that spatial variati...
The weakness of evidence supporting tropical niche conservatism as a main driver of current richness–temperature gradientsNARA Subscribed
Aim Geographical variations in species richness are highly correlated with current temperature. The tropical niche conservatism hypothesis proposes that this relationship is driven by the evolutionarily conserved ancestral tolerances of species to the warm environments in which most clades originated. The hypothesis predicts that the slope of the richness–temperature gradient is positively related to the temperature of the per...
An empirical investigation of why species–area relationships overestimate species lossesNARA Subscribed
It is generally assumed that, when natural habitat is converted to human‐dominated land cover, such habitat is lost to its native species. Most literature assumes that species richness should vary as a function of remaining natural area, following the well‐known species–area relationship (i.e., classic SAR). However, classic SARs have consistently overestimated species losses resulting from conversion of natural forested land...
Aim Broad‐scale diversity gradients are strongly correlated with climate. This correlation may reflect direct control of richness by contemporaneous climate. Alternatively, factors that were collinear with contemporaneous climate may have affected richness (e.g. temperature during the L ast G lacial M aximum, LGM ). We tested the hypothesis that contemporaneous climate directly controls broad‐scale patterns of richness. If cli...