Losses of corals worldwide emphasize the need to understand what drives reef decline. Stressors such as overfishing and nutrient pollution may reduce resilience of coral reefs by increasing coral–algal competition and reducing coral recruitment, growth and survivorship. Such effects may themselves develop via several mechanisms, including disruption of coral microbiomes....
Insight into the dependence of benthic communities on biological and physical processes in nearshore pelagic environments, long considered a ``black box,'' has eluded ecologists. In rocky intertidal communities at Oregon coastal sites 80 km apart, differences in abundance of sessile invertebrates, herbivores, carnivores, and macrophytes in the low zone were...
Congestion games offer a perfect environment in which to study the impact of local decisions on global utilities in multiagent systems. What is particularly interesting in such problems is that no individual action is intrinsically “good” or “bad” but that combinations of actions lead to desirable or undesirable outcomes. As...
Whereas capture experiments typically repeat a single task many times, real world cognition is
characterized by frequent switching. Lien, Ruthruff, and Johnston (2010) reported that the
attentional control system can rapidly and fully switch between different search settings (e.g., red
to green), with no carryover and no inter-trial priming. The...
Transgenic down-regulation of the Pt4CL1 gene family encoding 4-coumarate:coenzyme A ligase (4CL) has been reported as a
means for reducing lignin content in cell walls and increasing overall growth rates, thereby improving feedstock quality for
paper and bioethanol production. Using hybrid poplar (Populus tremula 3 Populus alba), we applied this...
Laser-based spectroscopic techniques, such as cavity ring-down spectroscopy (CRDS), provide a new, cost effective and more widely available approach to measure the oxygen isotope ratio in water molecules, H₂¹⁸O/H₂¹⁶O (δ¹⁸O), and are used increasingly to measure δ¹⁸O in the world's oceans. Here, we present results from an interlaboratory comparison designed...
Abstract Endogenous levels and signaling of gibberellin plant hormones such as
gibberellic acid (GA) have been genetically down-regulated to create semi-dwarf
varieties of poplar. The potential benefits of semi-dwarf stature include reduced risk of
wind damage, improved stress tolerance, and improved wood quality. Despite these
benefits, modification of growth traits...
Humans, in conjunction with natural top-down processes and through a sequence of cascading trophic interactions, may have contributed
to the Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions. The arrival of the first humans, as hunters and scavengers, through top-down forcing, could have
triggered a population collapse of large herbivores and their predators. We present...
The impact of herbivores on primary producers in differing oceanographic regimes is a matter of intense ecological interest due to ongoing changes in their abundance, that of their predators, and anthropomorphic alteration of nutrient cycles and climatic patterns. Interactions between productivity and herbivory in marine habitats have been studied on...