In the last 2 decades, UK research institutes have led a wide range of developments in marine data assimilation (MDA), covering areas from operational applications in physics and biogeochemistry to fundamental theory. We highlight the emergence of strong collaboration in the UK MDA community over this period and the increasing unification of its tools. We focus on identifying the MDA stakeholder community and current/future ar...

Aim The temporal structure (colour) of environmental variation influences population fluctuations, extinction risk and community stability. However, it is unclear whether environmental covariates linked to population fluctuations are distinguishable from a purely random process (white noise). We aimed to estimate colour coefficients and relative support for three models commonly representing coloured stochastic processes, in e...

Japanese knotweed, Fallopia japonica var. japonica , causes significant disruption to natural and managed habitats, and provides a model for the control of invasive rhizome-forming species. The socioeconomic impacts of the management of, or failure to manage, Japanese knotweed are enormous, annually costing hundreds of millions of pounds sterling (GBP£) in the UK alone. Our study describes the most extensive field-based assess...

Boom‐bust dynamics – the rise of a population to outbreak levels, followed by a dramatic decline – have been associated with biological invasions and offered as a reason not to manage troublesome invaders. However, boom‐bust dynamics rarely have been critically defined, analyzed, or interpreted. Here, we define boom‐bust dynamics and provide specific suggestions for improving the application of the boom‐bust concept. Boom‐bust...

Research on urban insect pollinators is changing views on the biological value and ecological importance of cities. The abundance and diversity of native bee species in urban landscapes that are absent in nearby rural lands evidence the biological value and ecological importance of cities and have implications for biodiversity conservation. Lagging behind this revised image of the city are urban conservation programs that hist...

Human actions challenge nature in many ways. Ecological responses are ineluctably complex, demanding measures that describe them succinctly. Collectively, these measures encapsulate the overall ‘stability’ of the system. Many international bodies, including the Intergovernmental Science‐Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, broadly aspire to maintain or enhance ecological stability. Such bodies frequently use...

Human activities are the main current driver of global change. From hunter‐gatherers through to Neolithic societies–and particularly in contemporary industrialised countries–humans have (voluntarily or involuntarily) provided other animals with food, often with a high spatio‐temporal predictability. Nowadays, as much as 30–40% of all food produced in Earth is wasted. We argue here that predictable anthropogenic food subsidies...

The relationship between community diversity and biomass variability remains a crucial ecological topic, with positive, negative and neutral diversity–stability relationships reported from empirical studies. Theory highlights the relative importance of Species–Species or Species–Environment interactions in driving diversity–stability patterns. Much previous work is based on an assumption of identical (stable) species‐level dyn...

Determining whether the composition of ecological communities (species presence and abundance), can be predicted from species demographic traits, rather than being a result of neutral drift, is a key ecological question. Here we compare the similarity of community composition, from different community assembly models run under identical environmental conditions, where interspecific competition is assumed to be either neutral o...