In 2006, a marked increase in harbor porpoise Phocoena phocoena strandings were reported in the Pacific Northwest of the USA, resulting in the declaration of an unusual mortality event (UME) for Washington and Oregon to facilitate investigation into potential causes. The UME was in place during all of 2006 and...
Time-series observations are critical to understand the structure, function, and dynamics of marine ecosystems. The Hawaii Ocean Time-series program has maintained near-monthly sampling at Station ALOHA (22°45′N, 158°00′W) in the oligotrophic North Pacific Subtropical Gyre (NPSG) since 1988 and has identified ecosystem variability over seasonal to interannual timescales. To further...
Long-term research on freshwater ecosystems provides insights that can be difficult to obtain from other approaches. Widespread monitoring of ecologically relevant water-quality parameters spanning decades can facilitate important tests of ecological principles. Unique long-term data sets and analytical tools are increasingly available, allowing for powerful and synthetic analyses across sites....
Increasing public awareness that the Cascadia subduction zone in the Pacific Northwest is capable of great earthquakes (magnitude 9 and greater) motivates the Cascadia Initiative, an ambitious onshore/offshore seismic and geodetic experiment that takes advantage of an amphibious array to study questions ranging from megathrust earthquakes, to volcanic arc structure,...
Wildfire risk in temperate forests has become a nearly intractable problem that can be characterized as a socioecological “pathology”: that is, a set of complex and problematic interactions among social and ecological systems across multiple spatial and temporal scales. Assessments of wildfire risk could benefit from recognizing and accounting for...
This work advances a unified approach to process-based hydrologic modeling, which we term the ‘‘Structure for Unifying Multiple Modeling Alternatives (SUMMA).’’ The modeling framework, introduced in the companion paper, uses a general set of conservation equations with flexibility in the choice of process parameterizations (closure relationships) and spatial architecture. This...
Pursuit of the triple bottom line of economic, community and ecological sustainability has increased the complexity of fishery management; fisheries assessments require new types of data and analysis to guide science-based policy in addition to traditional biological information and modeling. We introduce the Fishery Performance Indicators (FPIs), a broadly applicable...
Ocean acidification is a global, long-term problem whose ultimate solution requires carbon dioxide reduction at a scope and scale that will take decades to accomplish successfully. Until that is achieved, feasible and locally relevant adaptation and mitigation measures are needed. To help to prioritize societal responses to ocean acidification, we...
The carbon system of the western Arctic Ocean is undergoing a rapid transition as sea ice extent and thickness decline. These processes are dynamically forcing the region, with unknown consequences for CO2 fluxes and carbonate mineral saturation states, particularly in the coastal regions where sensitive ecosystems are already under threat...
Endogenous small RNAs (endo-siRNAs) interact with Argonaute (AGO) proteins to mediate
sequence-specific regulation of diverse biological processes. Here, we combine deep-sequencing and
genetic approaches to explore the biogenesis and function of endo-siRNAs in C. elegans. We describe
conditional alleles of the dicer-related helicase, drh-3, that abrogate both RNA interference and...