Litter decomposition is an important ecosystem process and global carbon flux that has been shown to be controlled by climate, litter quality, and microbial communities. Process‐based ecosystem models are used to predict responses of litter decomposition to climate change. While these models represent climate and litter quality effects on litter decomposition, they have yet to integrate empirical microbial community data into...

Climate change is expected to affect the morphological, physiological, and life‐history traits of plants and animal pollinators due to more frequent extreme heat and other altered weather patterns. This systematic literature review evaluates the effects of climate change on plant and pollinator traits on a global scale to determine how species responses vary among Earth's ecosystems, climate variables, taxonomic groups, and or...

Soil microbial communities are the key drivers of many terrestrial biogeochemical processes. However, we currently lack a generalizable understanding of how these soil communities will change in response to predicted increases in global temperatures and which microbial lineages will be most impacted. Here, using high‐throughput marker gene sequencing of soils collected from 18 sites throughout North America included in a 100‐d...

The Costa Concordia cruise-ship disaster occurred just off the coast of Italy on January 13th, 2012, and entailed the largest marine salvage operation in history. The salvage employed vessels from different European harbours, providing an unexpected means for transporting alien species into the Mediterranean. In this work we identified mussel species using fragments length polymorphism of a nuclear locus and report the first e...

A reviewed knowledge of the opisthobranch species from Lebanon (eastern Mediterranean Sea), based on literature records (scattered throughout various papers published over a period of more than 150 years) and recently collected material (1999-2002 within the CEDRE framework and other samples), is presented, yielding a total number of 35 taxa recorded from the Lebanese shores identified to species level. Special emphasis has ma...

Specimens of the nudibranch genus Calma were observed under stones at two Croatian localities while feeding on gobiid eggs. Some ambiguous morphological features compared with the original descriptions of the known species of the genus, C. glaucoides and C. gobioophaga, hampered an easy identification. Genetic data (COI and 16S sequences) confirmed the distinction between the two species of the genus Calma, and allowed to unam...

A reviewed knowledge of the opisthobranch species from Lebanon (eastern Mediterranean Sea), based on literature records (scattered throughout various papers published over a period of more than 150 years) and recently collected material (1999-2002 within the CEDRE framework and other samples), is presented, yielding a total number of 35 taxa recorded from the Lebanese shores identified to species level. Special emphasis has ma...

The primary structures of the mtDNA control region, the flanking tRNA Pro and tRNA Phe genes and the partial 12S rRNA gene of the freshwater Etruscan goby Padogobius nigricans (Teleostei, Gobiidae) were determined. A tandem array of variable 17‐bp repeats, named R1–7, was found to be responsible for most of the observed length and sequence variation between individuals.