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Water Transactions for Streamflow Restoration, Water Supply Reliability, and Rural Economic Vitality in the Western United States

Across the western United States, environmental water transaction programs (EWTPs) restore environmental flows by acquiring water rights and incentivizing changes in water management. These programs have evolved over several decades, expanding from relatively simple two-party transactions to multiobjective deals that simultaneously benefit the environment and multiple water-using sectors.

Computing Environments for Reproducibility: Capturing the Whole Tale

The act of sharing scientific knowledge is rapidly evolving away from traditional articles and presentations to the delivery of executable objects that integrate the data and computational details (e.g., scripts and workflows) upon which the findings rely. This envisioned coupling of data and process is essential to advancing science but faces technical and institutional barriers.

Eradication of Invading Insect Populations: From Concepts to Applications

Eradication is the deliberate elimination of a species from an area. Given that international quarantine measures can never be 100% effective, surveillance for newly arrived populations of nonnative species coupled with their eradication represents an important strategy for excluding potentially damaging insect species. Historically, eradication efforts have not always been successful and have sometimes been met with public opposition.

The sensitivity of ecosystem service models to choices of input data and spatial resolution

Although ecosystem service (ES) modeling has progressed rapidly in the last 10–15 years, comparative studies on data and model selection effects have become more common only recently. Such studies have drawn mixed conclusions about whether different data and model choices yield divergent results. In this study, we compared the results of different models to address these questions at national, provincial, and subwatershed scales in Rwanda.

Biocultural approaches to indicator development in the Solomon Islands

Despite recent advances in the development of sustainability indicators, it is still difficult to produce indicator sets that are locally derived and culturally appropriate. In particular, indicator frameworks that capture both ecological and socio-cultural sustainability remain elusive, as do mechanisms to monitor feedbacks between system components. In Melanesia, which encompasses a complex mosaic of land- and seascapes and different worldviews, finding locally-appropriate sustainability indicators poses particular challenges.

Ecological Drought: Accounting for the Non-Human Impacts of Water Shortage in the Upper Missouri Headwaters Basin, Montana, USA

Water laws and drought plans are used to prioritize and allocate scarce water resources. Both have historically been human-centric, failing to account for non-human water needs. In this paper, we examine the development of instream flow legislation and the evolution of drought planning to highlight the growing concern for the non-human impacts of water scarcity. Utilizing a new framework for ecological drought, we analyzed five watershed-scale drought plans in southwestern Montana, USA to understand if, and how, the ecological impacts of drought are currently being assessed.

Old-growth fishes become scarce under fishing

Researchers have long recognized the importance of ecological differences at the species level in structuring natural communities yet until recently have often overlooked the influence of intraspecific trait variation, which can profoundly alter community dynamics [1]. Human extraction of living resources can reduce intraspecific trait variation by, for example, causing truncation of age and size structure of populations, where numbers of older individuals decline far more with exploitation than younger individuals.

Changes in the size structure of marine fish communities

Marine ecosystems have been heavily impacted by fishing pressure, which can cause major changes in the structure of communities. Fishing directly removes biomass and causes secondary effects such as changing predatory and competitive interactions and altering energy pathways, all of which affect the functional groups and size distributions of marine ecosystems. We conducted a meta-analysis of eighteen trawl surveys from around the world to identify if there have been consistent changes in size-structure and life history groups across ecosystems.

Does unreported catch lead to overfishing?

Catches are commonly misreported in many fisheries worldwide, resulting in inaccurate data that hinder our ability to assess population status and manage fisheries sustainably. Under-reported catch is generally perceived to lead to overfishing, and hence, catch reconstructions are increasingly used to account for sectors that may be unreliably reported, including illegal harvest, recreational and subsistence fisheries, and discards.

Unique parasite aDNA in moa coprolites from New Zealand suggests mass parasite extinctions followed human-induced megafauna extinctions