Habitat loss and fragmentation have caused declines in the abundance and distribution of butterflies, particularly habitat specialists. The Chequered Skipper, Carterocephalus palaemon , has been extinct in England since 1976 after declining from the 1940s predominantly due to changes in woodland management including afforestation and the decline in traditional coppice management. To enable C. palaemon to flourish again, this s...

In recent years, harmful algal blooms (HABs) have increased in their severity and extent in many parts of the world and pose serious threats to local aquaculture, fisheries, and public health. In many cases, the mechanisms triggering and regulating HAB events remain poorly understood. Using underwater microscopy and Residual Neural Network (ResNet‐18) to taxonomically classify imaged organisms, we developed a daily abundance r...

To understand ocean health, it is crucial to monitor photosynthetic marine plankton – the microorganisms that form the base of the marine food web and are responsible for the uptake of atmospheric carbon. With the recent development of in situ microscopes that can acquire vast numbers of images of these organisms, the use of deep learning methods to taxonomically identify them has come to the forefront. Given this, two questio...

Cross‐shore velocities in the coastal ocean typically vary with depth. The direction and magnitude of transport experienced by meroplanktonic larvae will therefore be influenced by their vertical position. To quantify how swimming behavior and vertical position in internal waves influence larval cross‐shore transport in the shallow (~ 20 m), stratified coastal waters off Southern California, we deployed swarms of novel, subsur...

Many aquatic microbes form colonies, yet little is known about their abundance and fitness relative to single‐celled taxa. The formation of diatom chains, in particular, has implications for diatom growth, survival, and carbon transfer. Here, we utilize an autonomous underwater microscope, combined with traditional microscopy, to develop a novel, multiyear record of the abundance of single‐cell and colony‐forming diatoms at Sc...

Coastal physical processes are essential for the cross‐shore transport of meroplanktonic larvae to their benthic adult habitats. To investigate these processes, we released a swarm of novel, trackable, subsurface vehicles, the Mini‐Autonomous Underwater Explorers (M‐AUEs), which we programmed to mimic larval depth‐keeping behavior. The M‐AUE swarm measured a sudden net onshore transport of 30–70 m over 15–20 min, which we inve...

Global climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of weather extremes, including severe droughts in many regions. Drought can impact organisms by inhibiting reproduction, reducing survival and abundance, and forcing range shifts. For birds, considering temporal scale by averaging drought‐related variables over different time lengths (i.e., temporal grains) captures different hydrologic attributes which may unique...

Small‐scale vertical structure in the distribution of phytoplankton could be fundamentally important for zooplankton foraging, trophic coupling, and carbon cycling in planktonic ecosystems. Here, we identify regions of structure in phytoplankton communities that would be undetected by fluorometers by comparing the vertical distribution of chlorophyll fluorescence to the concentration of fluorescent particles over submeter scal...