Anticipating ecosystem responses to global change requires identifying the isolated and combined effects of environmental disturbance across both space and time. Examining the coordinated responses of ecosystems has recently emerged as a powerful approach to advance this understanding. We conducted two complementary experiments to identify whether, and if so how, warming temperatures, nutrient enrichment, predator overexploita...

Understanding the response of predators to ecological change at multiple temporal scales can elucidate critical predator–prey dynamics that would otherwise go unrecognized. We performed compound‐specific nitrogen stable isotope analysis of amino acids on 153 harbor seal museum skull specimens to determine how trophic position of this marine predator has responded to ecosystem change over the past century. The relationships bet...

Anthropogenic climate change will impact nutrient cycles, primary production, and ecosystem structure in the world's oceans, although considerable uncertainty exists regarding the magnitude and spatial variability of these changes. Understanding how regional‐scale ocean conditions control nutrient availability and ultimately nutrient assimilation into food webs will inform how marine resources will change in response to climat...

Tropical freshwater ecosystems are some of the world's most biodiverse and productive systems where determining what sustainable exploitation of inland fisheries looks like is particularly challenging. One of the greatest obstacles to sustainable management is collecting and using quality data on fish production and yield. The biodiversity and hydro‐ecology of these systems often under open‐access governance, add to the comple...

The effects of environmental seasonality on food web structure have been notoriously understudied in empirical ecology. Here, we focus on seasonal changes in one key attribute of a food web, consumer trophic position. We ask whether fishes inhabiting tropical river–floodplain ecosystems behave as seasonal omnivores, by shifting their trophic positions in relation to the annual flood pulse, or whether they feed at the same trop...

The deuterium ratio ( 2 H/ 1 H) in tissue is often used to estimate terrestrial subsidies to aquatic consumers because of strongly differentiated values between terrestrial and aquatic primary producers. However, quantitative deuterium‐based analyses of terrestrial resource assimilation are highly dependent on several poorly defined assumptions. We explored the sensitivity of these estimates to assumptions regarding environmen...

We characterized patterns of nighttime ecosystem respiration (ER) in 23 globally‐distributed lakes using free‐water changes in dissolved oxygen (DO). We considered three alternative models of ER to describe overnight changes in DO: constant ER, linearly declining ER, or logistically declining ER. Variation in ER was widespread. Each model of respiration was found to best fit observed overnight DO dynamics with some degree of f...

Runoff from human‐dominated watersheds has greatly altered nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) cycling in lakes. Nutrients from human sources are distinct from those from undisturbed ecosystems in several ways including lower N : P ratios, which can drive ecosystems to N‐limited conditions, and enriched stable N isotope ratios. In this study, we used these distinct characteristics to estimate shifts in N sources to 27 lakes across...

We present a Bayesian statistical model of diel oxygen dynamics in aquatic ecosystems to simultaneously estimate gross primary production, ecosystem respiration, and oxygen exchange with the atmosphere (and their uncertainties) on the basis of changes in dissolved oxygen concentration, water temperature, irradiance, and, if desired, the 18 O to 16 O ratio (δ 18 O‐O 2 ). We test this model using simulated data with realistic me...