Steepness, a parameter derived from the stock‐recruit relationship, is widely used in fishery stock assessments to scale the productivity of a population. Steepness is a highly influential parameter, but it is often unknown a priori and is typically difficult to estimate. Attempts to statistically estimate steepness, either within stock assessments or through meta‐analyses, can lead to implausible results. We move beyond steep...

Radiocarbon‐dated fossils indicate woolly mammoths were extirpated from mainland Beringia around 13 000 years ago. However, environmental DNA in permafrost suggests small “cryptic“ populations survived into the Holocene. Resolving this discrepancy is crucial to understanding the drivers of mammoth extinction. The Adopt‐a‐Mammoth project, launched in 2022, is increasing the number of radiocarbon‐dated mammoth fossils to locate...

Our understanding of marine ecosystems and ability to manage them sustainably has come from multidisciplinary observations made repeatedly over long periods of time. These long‐term ecosystem observations depend on the capabilities of large research vessels, which play an essential role in the collection of global ocean observations. Research vessels serve as large, stable platforms for collecting high volume samples from the...

Plants play a key role in mediating soil response to global change, and breeding or engineering crops to increase soil organic carbon (SOC) storage is a potential route to land‐based carbon dioxide removal in agricultural systems. However, due to limited observational datasets plus shifting paradigms of SOC stabilization, it is unclear which plant traits are most important for enhancing different types of soil organic matter....

Understanding dissolved concentrations of the essential coenzyme thiamin (vitamin B 1 ) can provide insights into the biological controls on highly productive upwelling systems such as the California Current Ecosystem. To connect thiamin availability with microbial communities in the California Current Ecosystem, we measured concentrations of dissolved thiamin and its biochemically related moieties (thiamin congeners) and 16S...

Aim Long‐term monitoring data at the biogeographic scale are essential for developing baselines of biodiversity patterns and tools to diagnose natural cycles, trends, and anomalous events to assess threats from climate change. However, studies using these data often limit their analyses to relatively few metrics that may not adequately capture the breadth of biodiversity. Here, we calculate a suite of compositional and functio...

Forecasting the recruitment of fish populations with skill has been a challenge in fisheries for over a century. Previous large‐scale meta‐analyses have suggested linkages between environmental or ecosystem drivers and recruitment; however, applying this information in a management setting remains underutilized. Here, we use a well‐studied database of groundfish assessments from the West Coast of the USA to ask whether environ...

2022 marked the third consecutive La Niña and extended the longest consecutive stretch of negative Oceanic Niño Index since 1998-2001. While physical and biological conditions in winter and spring largely adhered to prior La Niña conditions, summer and fall were very different. Similar to past La Niña events, in winter and spring coastal upwelling was either average or above average, temperature average or below average, salin...

Quantifying trophic relationships of marine species is fundamental to the construction and performance of ecosystem models, development of effective ecosystem-based fisheries management strategies, and support of trait-based approaches to ecological risk assessment. Accounting for food web dynamics in taxonomically diverse ecosystems, such as the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem (CCLME), is especially challenging beca...

Protecting global biodiversity is one of the most urgent tasks for the coming decades. Area-based conservation is a pillar for preserving ecosystems and species. Strictly protected areas specifically preserve biodiversity and ecosystem processes. The “EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030” targets strict protection for 10% of land area. Here we performed the first analysis of strictly protected areas (as IUCN type Ia, Ib, and II)...

Through daily vertical movements, mesopelagic fishes contribute to global carbon export and, when eaten, link primary consumers to higher trophic level predators. Although the importance of mesopelagic fishes as prey to individual predator species has been explored, a comprehensive assessment of mesopelagic fishes as prey at the scale of a large marine ecosystem would advance our observing, modeling, and predicting of biodiver...