The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill injured mesophotic and deep-sea environments over a vast area. In order to restore mesophotic and deep-sea coral species impacted by the spill, information on fundamental ecosystem processes such as reproduction is needed. During expeditions in 2021 and 2022, fragments of the mesophotic octocoral Swiftia exserta were collected from the northern Gulf of Mexico and transported to aquaria at f...

Recent extremes of flood and drought across Australia have raised questions about the recurrence of such rare events and highlighted the importance of understanding multi-decadal climate variability. However, instrumental records over the past century are too short to adequately characterise climate variability on multi-decadal and longer timescales or robustly determine extreme event frequencies and their duration. Palaeoclim...

Droughts are a natural occurrence in many small Pacific Islands and can have severe impacts on local populations and environments. The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a well-known driver of drought in the South Pacific, but our understanding of extreme ENSO events and their influence on island hydroclimate is limited by the short instrumental record and the infrequency of ENSO extremes. To address this gap, we developed...

Animals can be important in modulating ecosystem‐level nutrient cycling, although their importance varies greatly among species and ecosystems. Nutrient cycling rates of individual animals represent valuable data for testing the predictions of important frameworks such as the Metabolic Theory of Ecology ( MTE ) and ecological stoichiometry ( ES ). They also represent an important set of functional traits that may reflect both...

Freshwater biodiversity is highly endangered and faces increasing threats worldwide. To be complete, regional plans that identify critical areas for conservation must capture representative components of freshwater biodiversity as well as rare and endangered species. We present a spatially hierarchical approach to classify freshwater systems to create a coarse filter to capture representative freshwater biodiversity in regiona...