Aggregate dwellings are a common construction configuration in urban environments in the Americas, where space constraints favour terraced construction. However, seismic interaction between adjacent dwellings can significantly alter their structural response, especially when there are differences in height or in the stiffness of horizontal diaphragms. Despite advances in the seismic analysis of masonry buildings, most previous...

Kelp forests are among the most extensive and productive coastal ecosystems, yet they remain underrepresented in global conservation policy despite widespread declines driven by interacting global- (i.e., ocean warming, marine heatwaves) to local-scale stressors. At the same time, kelp conservation and restoration efforts are expanding rapidly across regions, but measures of success and syntheses tend to primarily focus on eco...

Kazakhstan, located predominantly in an arid climatic zone, relies heavily on irrigation to sustain paddy farming and ensure food security. However, prolonged irrigation practices have substantially altered the groundwater regime, affecting groundwater levels, recharge-discharge patterns and the water-salt balance of soils. These transformations, often difficult to reverse, impact both irrigated lands and adjacent areas, compr...

In 2024, an expedition was conducted off northwestern Baja California, México, to find and identify the beaked whale species that produced the BW43 echolocation pulse previously recorded in this area and elsewhere in the North Pacific. There were five Mesoplodon sightings and 21 BW43 acoustic detections on both a towed array and drifting pole buoy recorders over the course of the survey. Three of the sightings had concurrent a...

Hermaphroditic fish species show low resilience to fishing exploitation, as alterations in sex ratio or size at sexual transition have direct implications for population fitness. The Patagonian blenny is a protandric hermaphrodite of economic importance in Chile, where basic knowledge of its life‐history traits remains scarce. Using individuals collected from the artisanal fishery, we estimated the proportion of females at len...

Eolian environments provide valuable information about arid climate intervals, yet the preservation of fossil bone microstructure, which can provide evidence of past environmental conditions in these settings, remains poorly understood. During the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), eolian systems were more widespread than today across both hemispheres. In order to identify patterns associated with this type of environment, a series o...

Rancho La Brea (RLB) in Los Angeles, USA, is an iconic fossil locality, owing to the high number and diversity of Quaternary vertebrate remains and their excellent preservation. More than a century of study, focused predominantly on large mammals, has provided valuable information along different lines of research, including taxonomy, taphonomy, isotopic ecology, functional morphology, and paleopathology. In order to develop a...