Groundfish morphometric condition indicators, derived from length‐weight relationships, offer insights into fish population health and productivity. This study explores how groundfish conditions vary across the Aleutian Islands, a 1700‐km‐long region that separates the Bering Sea from the North Pacific Ocean, creating distinct ecological zones due to differences in oceanography. We assessed the condition of the six most abunda...

Animals within social groups respond to costs and benefits of sociality by adjusting the proportion of time they spend in close proximity to other individuals in the group (cohesion). Variation in cohesion between individuals, in turn, shapes important group‐level processes such as subgroup formation and fission–fusion dynamics. Although critical to animal sociality, a comprehensive understanding of the factors influencing coh...

The combustion of petroleum-based fossil fuels is associated with a high environmental burden. Several alternative fuels, including synthetic fuels (e.g., gas-to-liquid, GTL) and biofuels (e.g., rapeseed methyl ester, RME) have been studied in the last few years. While the advantages for the environment (sustainability of biofuels) are well known, research on the resulting health effects from combustion aerosols of these alter...

Human impacts such as habitat loss, climate change and biological invasions are radically altering biodiversity, with greater effects projected into the future. Evidence suggests human impacts may differ substantially between terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems, but the reasons for these differences are poorly understood. We propose an integrative approach to explain these differences by linking impacts to four fundamental p...

Species assemblages often have a non‐random nested organization, which in vertebrate scavenger (carrion‐consuming) assemblages is thought to be driven by facilitation in competitive environments. However, not all scavenger species play the same role in maintaining assemblage structure, as some species are obligate scavengers (i.e., vultures) and others are facultative, scavenging opportunistically. We used a database with 177...

The scarcity of model input and calibration data has limited efforts in reconstructing scenarios of past floods in many regions globally. Recently, the number of studies that use distributed post-flood observation data collected throughout flood-affected communities (e.g. face-to-face interviews) are increasing. However, a systematic method that applies such data for hydrodynamic modelling of past floods in locations without h...

We derived the first detailed and accurate estimates of the location, cross‐sectional area, length, and depth of the Aleutian Island passes, which are important bottlenecks for water exchange between the North Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea. Our pass descriptions utilized original bathymetric data from hydrographic smooth sheets, which are of higher resolution than the navigational chart data used for earlier pass size estim...

Global ocean circulation is limited partly by the small passes of Alaska's Aleutian Islands, which restrict North Pacific Ocean water from flowing north into the Bering Sea and eventually to the Arctic, but the size and shape of these Aleutian passes are poorly described. While quantitatively redefining all of the Aleutian passes, we determined that the easternmost pass, with the cryptic name of False Pass, and with an unusual...

For marine fish with ontogenetic shifts in habitat requirements, survival is dependent upon oceanographic transport of pelagic larvae from spawning locations and the arrival of settlement‐stage larvae to nursery habitats. Settlement success for fish with nurseries on the continental shelf, such as many flatfish, relies on routes of transport that facilitate the delivery of larvae from offshore to suitable inshore habitats. To...

The persistence of endangered species may depend on the fate of a very small number of individual animals. In situ conservation alone may sometimes be insufficient. In these instances, the International Union for Conservation of Nature provides guidelines for ex situ conservation and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) indicates how ex situ management can support the CBD's objectives by providing insurance policies fo...

Bottom trawl surveys provide fishery‐independent data on relative abundance and life history parameters for a wide range of marine taxa. Survey data are used to assess species distribution, biological interactions, and ecosystem structure and to manage marine resources. Not all bottom types or oceanographic conditions accommodate this survey method. We applied National Ocean Service hydrographic smooth sheets to evaluate physi...

Remote sensing is revolutionizing the way we study forests, and recent technological advances mean we are now able – for the first time – to identify and measure the crown dimensions of individual trees from airborne imagery. Yet to make full use of these data for quantifying forest carbon stocks and dynamics, a new generation of allometric tools which have tree height and crown size at their centre are needed. Here, we compil...

We synthesize insights from current understanding of drought impacts at stand‐to‐biogeographic scales, including management options, and we identify challenges to be addressed with new research. Large stand‐level shifts underway in western forests already are showing the importance of interactions involving drought, insects, and fire. Diebacks, changes in composition and structure, and shifting range limits are widely observed...

Aim The aim was to test competing hypotheses regarding migration of the Andean timberline within the last 2000 years. Location The upper forest limit in Manu National Park, Peru. Methods A randomized stratified design provided 21 soil profiles from forested sites just below the timberline, 15 from puna grassland sites just above the timberline and 15 from the transitional habitat at the puna–forest boundary. From each profile...