The combination of taxa and size classes of phytoplankton that coexist at any location affects the structure of the marine food web and the magnitude of carbon fluxes to the deep ocean. But what controls the patterns of this community structure across environmental gradients remains unclear. Here, we focus on the North East Pacific Transition Zone, a ~ 10° region of latitude straddling warm, nutrient‐poor subtropical and cold,...

The elemental composition of marine microorganisms (their C:N:P ratio, or stoichiometry) is central to understanding the biotic and biogeochemical processes underlying key marine ecosystem functions. Phytoplankton C:N:P is species specific and flexible to changing environmental conditions. However, bulk or fixed phytoplankton stoichiometry is usually assumed in biogeochemical and ecological models because more realistic, envir...

Monod’s model describes the growth of microorganisms using a hyperbolic function of extracellular resource concentration. Under fluctuating or limited resource concentrations this model performs poorly against experimental data, motivating the more complex Droop model with a time-varying internal storage pool. We extend the Monod model to incorporate memory of past conditions, adding a single parameter motivated by a fractiona...

Aim Topographic complexity is widely accepted as a key driver of biodiversity, but at the patch‐scale, complexity–biodiversity relationships may vary spatially and temporally according to the environmental stressors complexity mitigates, and the species richness and identity of potential colonists. Using a manipulative experiment, we assessed spatial variation in patch‐scale effects of complexity on intertidal biodiversity. Lo...

In three-dimensional (3-D) implicit geological modeling, the bounding surfaces between geological units are automatically constructed from lithological contact data (position and orientation) and the location and orientation of potential faults. This approach was applied to conceptualize a karst aquifer in the Middle Triassic Muschelkalk Formation in southwest Germany, using digital elevation data, geological maps, borehole lo...

The consistent management of research data is crucial for the success of long-term and large-scale collaborative research. Research data management is the basis for efficiency, continuity, and quality of the research, as well as for maximum impact and outreach, including the long-term publication of data and their accessibility. Both funding agencies and publishers increasingly require this long term and open access to researc...

We use the Global Historical Climatology Network – daily database to calculate a nonparametric statistic that describes the rate at which all‐time daily high‐ and low‐temperature records have been set in nine geographic regions (continents or major portions of continents) during periods mostly from the mid‐20th century to the present. This statistic was defined in our earlier work on temperature records in the 48 contiguous Un...

The rise in global mean temperature is an incomplete description of warming. For many purposes, including agriculture and human life, temperature extremes may be more important than temperature means and changes in local extremes may be more important than mean global changes. We define a non‐parametric statistic to describe extreme temperature behaviour by quantifying the frequency of local daily all‐time highs and lows, norm...

The mean North American and world climates have warmed since the 19th century following the anthropogenic emission of large quantities of greenhouse gases. It has been suggested that this warming may increase the frequency or severity of droughts. We define a quantitative and objective aridity index that describes the precipitation forcing function of drought. Using the extensive historical database of precipitation records, w...

Perhaps the most pressing issue in predicting biotic responses to present and future global change is understanding how environmental factors shape the relationship between ecological traits and extinction risk. The fossil record provides millions of years of insight into how extinction selectivity (i.e., differential extinction risk) is shaped by interactions between ecological traits and environmental conditions. Numerous pa...

We combine phytoplankton occurrence data for 119 species from the continuous plankton recorder with climatological environmental variables in the North Atlantic to obtain ecological response functions of each species using the MaxEnt statistical method. These response functions describe how the probability of occurrence of each species changes as a function of environmental conditions and can be reduced to a simple description...

We present a new regional calibration of the 10 Be production rate from two well‐dated surfaces in southern Norway: a rock avalanche with 14 C‐dated wood and a precisely dated Younger Dryas moraine. Calculated 10 Be production rates are 4.26 ± 0.13 and 4.65 ± 0.14 at g −1 a −1 for the Lal/Stone and Lifton scaling models, respectively. Our regional production rate for southern Norway is 5% lower than the canonical global 10 Be...

Summary The above‐ground surfaces of terrestrial plants, the phyllosphere, comprise the main interface between the terrestrial biosphere and solar radiation. It is estimated to host up to 10 26 microbial cells that may intercept part of the photon flux impinging on the leaves. Based on 454‐pyrosequencing‐generated metagenome data, we report on the existence of diverse microbial rhodopsins in five distinct phyllospheres from ta...

We quantified and compared the photophysiological characteristics of Emiliania huxleyi with two marine diatoms Thalassiosira pseudonana and Coscinodiscus sp. under nitrogen‐ and phosphorus‐replete and ‐depleted conditions. Under nitrogen‐depleted conditions, E. huxleyi maintained significant photosystem II (PSII) function over at least 38 d, whereas for both diatoms, PSII function declined to marginal levels within 8‐10 d of n...

Here we combine 10 Be depth profile techniques applied to late glacial ice‐contact marine and lacustrine deltas, as well as boulder exposure dating of associated features in the Scoresby Sound region, east Greenland, to determine both the surface age and the magnitude of cosmogenic nuclide inheritance. Boulder ages from an ice‐contact delta in northern Scoresby Sund show scatter typical of polar regions and yield an average ag...