Quantifying global patterns of terrestrial nitrogen (N) cycling is central to predicting future patterns of primary productivity, carbon sequestration, nutrient fluxes to aquatic systems, and climate forcing. With limited direct measures of soil N cycling at the global scale, syntheses of the 15N:14N ratio of soil organic matter across climate gradients provide key insights into understanding global patterns of N cycling. In synthesizing data from over 6000 soil samples, we show strong global relationships among...

Background: Polyandry is a common mating strategy in animals, increasing female fitness through direct (material) and indirect (genetic) benefits. Most theories about the benefits of polyandry come from studies of terrestrial animals, which have relatively complex mating systems and behaviors; less is known about the potential benefits of polyandry in sessile marine animals, for which potential mates may be scarce and females have less control over pre-copulatory mate choice. Here, we used microsatellite markers to...

Many studies have focused on the impacts of climate change on biological assemblages, yet little is known about how climate interacts with other major anthropogenic influences on biodiversity, such as habitat disturbance. Using a unique global database of 1128 local ant assemblages, we examined whether climate mediates the effects of habitat disturbance on assemblage structure at a global scale. Species richness and evenness were associated positively with temperature, and negatively with disturbance. However, the interaction...

The Atlantic blue crab, Callinectes sapidus, is an estuarine keystone species that functions as both predator and prey in food webs and supports a multi-million dollar fishery along the western Atlantic coast from the US mid-Atlantic to southern Brazil. Throughout their range, blue crabs are host to viral, bacterial, fungal, protozoan, and metazoan pathogens. Reoviruses are non-enveloped icosahedral viruses with genomes comprised of 9 to 12 segments of linear double-stranded RNA (dsRNA). They have been...

Multiple spawning runs cause different contingents within the same population to experience varying demographic fates that can stabilize populations through the portfolio effect. Multiple spawning runs are reported here for the first time for striped bass, an economically important coastal species, which is well known for plastic estuarine and shelf migration behaviors. Adult Hudson River Estuary striped bass (n=66) were tagged and tracked with acoustic transmitters from two known spawning reaches separated by 90 km....

1.Community-level models (CLMs) consider multiple, co-occurring species in model fitting and are lesser known alternatives to species distribution models (SDMs) for analyzing and predicting biodiversity patterns. CLMs simultaneously model multiple species, including rare species, while reducing overfitting and implicitly considering drivers of co-occurrence. Many CLMs are direct extensions of well-known SDMs and therefore should be familiar to ecologists. However, CLMs remain underutilized, and there have been few tests of their potential benefits and no systematic...

Gradient Forest (GF) is a machine learning algorithm designed to analyze spatial patterns of biodiversity as a function of environmental gradients. An offset measure between the GF predicted environmental association of adapted alleles and a new environment (GF Offset), is increasingly being used to predict the loss of environmentally adapted alleles under rapid environmental change, but remains mostly untested for this purpose. Here we explore the robustness of GF Offset to assumption violations, and its...

The diffusion of oil vapor after oil spill from tank caused serious consequences. It is studied by combining wind tunnel experiment and numerical simulation. Results show that the higher the fire dike, the more oil vapor accumulates at the inner corner of fire dike; the explosion limit area is the largest when the oil spills in front of single tank on the windward side; concentration of multi-spills will superimpose to induce the presenting of multi-explosion...

Decreased dietary protein intake (DPI) may lead to protein-energy malnutrition and may be associated with increased mortality risk. We hypothesized that longitudinal changes in dietary protein intake have independent associations with survival in peritoneal dialysis (PD) patients. 668 stable PD patients were selected in the study from January 2006 to January 2018 and were followed up until December 2019. Their three-day dietary records were collected at the baseline (the sixth month after PD) and thereafter...

Additional file 1. The detailed primer information of markers used in initial genetic mapping and fine mapping of BhWAX, and primers of qRT-PCR used in the study.

Minutocellus polymorphus MMDL5290, a minute diatom, can efficiently utilize organic nitrogen (N) urea as the sole N source and achieve equivalent growth rate and photosynthesis capacity as it does with nitrate. Interestingly, M. polymorphus MMDL5290 growing on urea-replete (400 µM) medium yields a similar growth rate to that on nitrate-replete (882 µM). So far, very few reports are available on the molecular regulation mechanisms of microalgae with similar growth potential under different N sources. To...

Excess nitrogen (N) is a primary driver of freshwater and coastal eutrophication globally, and urban stormwater is a rapidly growing source of N pollution. Stormwater best management practices (BMPs) are used widely to remove excess N from runoff in urban and suburban areas, and are expected to perform under a wide variety of environmental conditions. Yet the capacity of BMPs to retain excess N varies; and both the variation and the drivers thereof are largely...

Seasonal migrations are key to the production and persistence of marine fish populations but movements within shelf movement corridors or, “flyways”, are poorly known. Atlantic sturgeon and striped bass, two anadromous species of concern, are known for their extensive migrations along the US Middle-Atlantic Bight. Seasonal patterns of habitat selection are well described within spawning rivers, estuaries, and shelf foraging habitats, but information on the location and timing of key coastal migrations is limited. Using...

Significant declines in Atlantic sturgeon (Acipenser oxyrhynchus oxyrhynchus) abundances along the US east coast have spurred major research efforts and management actions over the last 50 years, yet information on spawning stock abundances and habitat use is still lacking for many river systems, including in the Chesapeake Bay, USA. Here, we developed and tested a new quantitative PCR (qPCR) assay to detect Atlantic sturgeon environmental DNA (eDNA) in water samples with the goal of providing...

Scyphozoan jellyfish are conspicuous components of marine ecosystems, which during a bloom, can impact food web structure and economically important fisheries. Jellyfish biomass in the southeastern Bering Sea (SEBS) is primarily comprised of Chrysaora melanaster and has varied widely over the past four decades, yet the underlying causes of these biomass fluctuations remain unclear. The present study investigated the spatial and seasonal dynamics of C. melanaster along the Alaska Peninsula in the SEBS using an...

The release of captive-bred plants and animals has increased worldwide to augment declining species. However, insufficient attention has been given to understanding how neutral and adaptive genetic variation are partitioned within and among proximal natural populations, and the patterns and drivers of gene flow over small spatial scales, which can be important for restoration success. A seascape genomics approach was used to investigate population structure, local adaptation, and the extent to which environmental gradients influence...

To meet the growing food demand while addressing the multiple challenges of exacerbating phosphorus (P) pollution and depleting P rock reserves, P use efficiency (PUE, the ratio of productive P output to P input in a defined system) in crop production needs to be improved. Although many efforts have been devoted to improving nutrient management practices on farms, few studies have examined the historical trajectories of PUE and their socioeconomic and agronomic drivers on a...

Minutocellus polymorphus MMDL5290, a minute diatom, can efficiently utilize organic nitrogen (N) urea as the sole N source and achieve equivalent growth rate and photosynthesis capacity as it does with nitrate. Interestingly, M. polymorphus MMDL5290 growing on urea-replete (400 µM) medium yields a similar growth rate to that on nitrate-replete (882 µM). So far, very few reports are available on the molecular regulation mechanisms of microalgae with similar growth potential under different N sources. To...

“Space-for-time” substitution is widely used in biodiversity modeling to infer past or future trajectories of ecological systems from contemporary spatial patterns. However, the foundational assumption—that drivers of spatial gradients of species composition also drive temporal changes in diversity—rarely is tested. Here, we empirically test the space-for-time assumption by constructing orthogonal datasets of compositional turnover of plant taxa and climatic dissimilarity through time and across space from Late Quaternary pollen records in eastern North America, then...

Migrating birds require en route habitats to rest and refuel. Yet habitat use has never been integrated with passage to understand factors that determine where and when birds stopover during spring and autumn migration. Here, we introduce the stopover-to-passage ratio (SPR), the percentage of passage migrants that stop in an area, and use eight years of data from 12 weather surveillance radars to estimate over 50% SPR during spring and autumn through the Gulf of...

Summer storm events are a significant source of disturbance in the Middle Atlantic Bight (MAB) that cause rapid destratification of the water column. Storm-driven mixing can be considered as a summertime disturbance regime to demersal communities, characterized by the recurrence of large changes in bottom water temperatures. Black sea bass are a model ubiquitous demersal species in the MAB, as their sedentary behavior exposes them to summer storm disturbances and the physiological stresses associated with...

Golden and Blueline Tilefish (Lopholatilus chamaeleonticeps and Caulolatilus microps) are keystone taxa in northwest (NW) Atlantic continental shelf‐edge environments due to their biotic (trophic‐mediated) and abiotic (ecosystem engineering) functional roles combined with high‐value fisheries. Despite this importance, the ecological niche dynamics (i.e., those relating to trophic behavior and food‐web interactions) of these sympatric species are poorly understood, knowledge of which may be consequential for maintaining both ecosystem function and fishery sustainability. We used stable isotope...

Agriculture is fundamental to all three pillars of sustainability, environment, society, and economy. However, the definition of sustainable agriculture and capacities to measure it remain elusive. Independent and transparent measurements of national sustainability are needed to gauge progress, encourage accountability, and inform policy. Here, we developed a Sustainable Agriculture Matrix (SAM) to quantify national performance indicators in agriculture and to investigate the tradeoffs and synergies based on historical data for most countries of the world....

Although long non-coding RNA (LncRNA) LINC00649 is reported to be closely associated with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), prostate cancer and colorectal cancer, its role in regulating other types of cancer, such as gastric cancer (GC), has not been studied. This study analyzed the expression status of LINC00649 in GC tissues and cells by performing Real-Time qPCR analysis, and we found that LINC00649 tended to be enriched in cancerous tissues and cells but not in their...

Decreased dietary protein intake (DPI) may lead to protein-energy malnutrition and may be associated with increased mortality risk. We hypothesized that longitudinal changes in dietary protein intake have independent associations with survival in peritoneal dialysis (PD) patients. 668 stable PD patients were selected in the study from January 2006 to January 2018 and were followed up until December 2019. Their three-day dietary records were collected at the baseline (the sixth month after PD) and thereafter...