Aim The sweeping transformation of the biosphere by humans over the last millennia leaves only limited windows into its natural state. Much of the forests that dominated temperate and southern boreal regions have been lost and those that remain typically bear a strong imprint of forestry activities and past land‐use change, which have changed forest age structure and composition. Here, we ask how would the dynamics, structure...

With a growing urban population and increasing climate uncertainty, it is necessary to quantitatively understand the flux of resources through cities, specifically energy and water resources. Many methods exist to analyze the urban energy–water nexus based on either physical characteristics of the system or using available data. While data‐driven approaches can be valuable, they are often challenging to duplicate on a large sc...

In the fifty years since Abel Wolman first published an estimate of U.S. urban metabolism, the field of urban metabolism has begun to thrive, with cities outside the United States being much of the focus. As cities attempt to meet local and international sustainability goals, it is time to revisit the metabolism of cities within the United States. Using existing empirical databases for material flows (the Freight Analysis Fram...

Numerous species have been pushed into extinction as an increasing portion of Earth's land surface has been appropriated for human enterprise. In the future, global biodiversity will be affected by both climate change and land‐use change, the latter of which is currently the primary driver of species extinctions. How societies address climate change will critically affect biodiversity because climate‐change mitigation policies...

The exceptionally fast growth that fish experience after periods of fasting has been called ‘compensatory growth’ or ‘catch‐up’ growth. This phenomenon, reported in a wide range of fish species, has been studied in intensive aquaculture as a means of enhancing feed conversion efficiency, but the mechanisms implicated are complex and not yet fully understood. In the present study, the authors describe the cloning and sequencing...