S.A. Atkinson results 47
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Aim The urgency for remote, reliable and scalable biodiversity monitoring amidst mounting human pressures on ecosystems has sparked worldwide interest in Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM), which can track life underwater and on land. However, we lack a unified methodology to report this sampling effort and a comprehensive overview of PAM coverage to gauge its potential as a global research and monitoring tool. To address this...
Shorebirds Are Shrinking and Shape‐Shifting: Declining Body Size and Lengthening Bills in the Past Half‐CenturyNARA Subscribed
Animals are predicted to shrink and shape‐shift as the climate warms, declining in size, while their appendages lengthen. Determining which types of species are undergoing these morphological changes, and why, is critical to understanding species responses to global change, including potential adaptation to climate warming. We examine body size and bill length changes in 25 shorebird species using extensive field data (> 200,0...
Understanding and managing the response of marine ecosystems to human pressures including climate change requires reliable large-scale and multi-decadal information on the state of key populations. These populations include the pelagic animals that support ecosystem services including carbon export and fisheries. The use of research vessels to collect information using scientific nets and acoustics is being replaced with techn...
Relative sea‐level changes in southeastern Australia during the 19 th and 20 th centuriesNARA Subscribed
Rates of global and regional sea‐level rise between ~1850 and 1950 were high compared to those in preceding centuries. The cause of this sea‐level acceleration remains uncertain, but it appears to be pronounced in a small set of relative sea‐level proxy records from the Southern Hemisphere. Here we generate three new proxy‐based relative sea‐level reconstructions for southeastern Australia to investigate spatial patterns and c...
Lethal and Sub-lethal Implications of Sodium Chloride Exposure for Adult Unionid Mussel Species: Eurynia dilatata and Lasmigona costataNARA Subscribed
The elevated use of salt as a de-icing agent on roads in Canada is causing an increase in the chloride concentration of freshwater ecosystems. Freshwater Unionid mussels are a group of organisms that are sensitive to increases in chloride levels. Unionids have greater diversity in North America than anywhere else on Earth, but they are also one of the most imperiled groups of organisms. This underscores the importance of under...
Global efforts to deliver internationally agreed goals to reduce carbon emissions, halt biodiversity loss, and retain essential ecosystem services have been poorly integrated. These goals rely in part on preserving natural (e.g., native, largely unmodified) and seminatural (e.g., low intensity or sustainable human use) forests, woodlands, and grasslands. To show how to unify these goals, we empirically derived spatially explic...
Marine protected areas (MPAs), particularly large MPAs, are increasing in number and size around the globe in part to facilitate the conservation of marine megafauna under the assumption that large-scale MPAs better align with vagile life histories; however, this alignment is not well established. Using a global tracking dataset from 36 species across five taxa, chosen to reflect the span of home range size in highly mobile ma...
Stepping stones towards Antarctica: Switch to southern spawning grounds explains an abrupt range shift in krillNARA Subscribed
Poleward range shifts are a global‐scale response to warming, but these vary greatly among taxa and are hard to predict for individual species, localized regions or over shorter (years to decadal) timescales. Moving poleward might be easier in the Arctic than in the Southern Ocean, where evidence for range shifts is sparse and contradictory. Here, we compiled a database of larval Antarctic krill, Euphausia superba and, togethe...
Substantial long‐term loss of alpha and gamma diversity of lake invertebrates in a landscape exposed to a drying climateNARA Subscribed
Many regions across the globe are shifting to more arid climates. For shallow lakes, decreasing rainfall volume and timing, changing regional wind patterns and increased evaporation rates alter water regimes so that dry periods occur more frequently and for longer. Drier conditions may affect fauna directly and indirectly through altered physicochemical conditions in lakes. Although many studies have predicted negative effects...
Increasing nutrient stress reduces the efficiency of energy transfer through planktonic size spectraNARA Subscribed
Size‐spectral approaches quantify the efficiency of energy transfer through food webs, but theory and field studies disagree over how changes in temperature, nutrients, and extreme weather impact on this efficiency. We address this at two scales: via 6 years of weekly sampling of the plankton size spectrum at the Plymouth L4 shelf sea site, and via a new, global‐scale, meta‐analysis of aquatic size spectra. The time series sho...
Increasing picocyanobacteria success in shelf waters contributes to long‐term food web degradationNARA Subscribed
Continental margins are disproportionally important for global primary production, fisheries and CO 2 uptake. However, across the Northeast Atlantic shelves, there has been an ongoing summertime decline of key biota—large diatoms, dinoflagellates and copepods—that traditionally fuel higher tropic levels such as fish, sea birds and marine mammals. Here, we combine multiple time series with in situ process studies to link these...
Ontogenetic body‐mass scaling of nitrogen excretion relates to body surface area in diverse pelagic invertebratesNARA Subscribed
Many physiological and ecological processes depend on body size and the supply of limiting nutrients. Hence, it is important to derive quantitative predictions based on a mechanistic understanding of the influence of body size on metabolic rate and on the ratios of consumed to excreted elements. Among diverse pelagic invertebrates that change shape during ontogeny, recent analysis has demonstrated a significant positive correl...
Crop rotational diversity enhances belowground communities and functions in an agroecosystemNARA Subscribed
Biodiversity loss, an important consequence of agricultural intensification, can lead to reductions in agroecosystem functions and services. Increasing crop diversity through rotation may alleviate these negative consequences by restoring positive aboveground–belowground interactions. Positive impacts of aboveground biodiversity on belowground communities and processes have primarily been observed in natural systems. Here, we...