Scientists often debate on the evolving state of their fields and future research directions, but empirical studies on research trends are rare and this limits our capacity to disentangle perceptions from facts within the mass of available data. We used ecological and paleolimnological approaches to assess how the “community” of words most commonly used in limnological studies presented at the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO) meetings and published in Web of Science have evolved over the last decades. We found that the field of limnology has become increasingly focused on global abiotic research themes, especially in rivers, while there was a decrease in the proportion of organismal studies. We hypothesize that this results from both major influential publications highlighting the importance of framing limnology in a global context and the methodological limitations of organismal studies that prevent data from scaling up as quickly as their abiotic counterparts.
Large rivers are critical conduits from continents to oceans as they receive, produce and process huge amounts of dissolved organic matter (DOM). Yet, the relative influence of intrinsic DOM properties and extrinsic environmental properties on these processes at the ecosystem‐level is rarely studied. We assessed DOM optical properties as well as bioreactivity and photoreactivity at 40 sites along a >200 km transect of the freshwater portion of the St. Lawrence River through a series of standardized microbial incubations and exposure to simulated sunlight, and then estimated in situ areal rates of processing. We found that biological and photochemical processes preferentially targeted contrasting pools of DOM, but that DOM composition had an undiscernible effect on in situ degradation rates compared to other environmental factors. Total daily processing across the whole water column ranged from 36.7 to 892.1 mg C m−2. In situ photochemical degradation was largely driven by intrinsic DOM photoreactivity rather than environmental drivers in the water. In contrast, we found a relatively constant baseline pool of biolabile DOM that appeared to be independent from changes in concentration and environmental conditions. In situ DOM processing was mostly driven by biological degradation (on average 95%), and disproportionately high biodegradation rates (2.5–4x the average) were found in a few shallower sites near effluents or islands, potentially driven by local increases in nutrient concentration and in the proportion of protein‐like DOM. These results illustrate how DOM composition and degradability interact with ambient environmental and morphological properties to dictate an ecosystem‐level reactivity of DOM.
To integrate high amounts of renewable energy resources, electrical power grids must be able to cope with high amplitude, fast timescale variations in power generation. Frequency regulation through demand response has the potential to coordinate temporally flexible loads, such as air conditioners, to counteract these variations. Existing approaches for discrete control with dynamic constraints struggle to provide satisfactory performance for fast timescale action selection with hundreds of agents. We propose a decentralized agent trained with multi-agent proximal policy optimization with localized communication. We explore two communication frameworks: hand-engineered, or learned through targeted multi-agent communication. The resulting policies perform well and robustly for frequency regulation, and scale seamlessly to arbitrary numbers of houses for constant processing times.
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