The response of marine plankton to climate change is of critical importance to the oceanic food web and fish stocks. We use a 60-year ocean basin-wide data set comprising 4148,000 samples to reveal huge differences in range changes associated with climate change across 35 plankton taxa. While the range of dinoflagellates and copepods tended to closely track the velocity of climate change (the rate of isotherm movement), the range of the diatoms moved much more slowly. Differences in range shifts were up to 900 km in a recent warming period, with average velocities of range movement between 7 km per decade northwards for taxa exhibiting niche plasticity and 99 km per decade for taxa exhibiting niche conservatism. The differing responses of taxa to global warming will cause spatial restructuring of the plankton ecosystem with likely consequences for grazing pressures on phytoplankton and hence for biogeochemical cycling, higher trophic levels and biodiversity.
word count: 228Text-only word count: 3303 Number of tables: 2 Number of figures: 4 2 Abstract Purpose: The aim of this study was to identify contributing factors to the incidence of illness for professional team-sport athletes, utilizing training load (TL), self-reported illness and wellbeing data. Methods: Thirty-two professional rugby league players (26.0 ± 4.8 yr; 99.1 ± 9.6 kg; 1.84 ± 0.06 m) were recruited from the same club. Players participated in prescribed training and responded to a series of questionnaires to determine the presence of self-reported illness and markers of wellbeing. Internal-TL was determined using the session rating of perceived exertion (sRPE) method. These data were collected over 29 weeks, across the preparatory and competition macrocycles. Results: The predictive models developed recognized increases in internal-TL (strain values of >2282 AU, weekly-TL >2786 AU and monotony >0.78 AU) to best predict when athletes are at increased risk of self-reported illness. In addition, a reduction in overall wellbeing (<7.25 AU) in the presence of increased internal-TL as previously stated, was highlighted as a contributor to self-reported illness occurrence. Conclusions: These results indicate that self-report data can be successfully utilized to provide a novel understanding of the interactions between competition-associated stressors experienced by professional team-sport athletes and their susceptibility to illness. This may assist coaching staff to more effectively monitor players during the season and to potentially implement preventative measures to reduce the likelihood of illnesses occurring.
Aim: Phytoplankton form the basis of the marine food web and are responsible for approximately 50% of the world's photosynthesis. Changes to their ecology are, therefore, important: here, we examined seasonal patterns in ocean phytoplankton abundance for 45 taxa over 59 years collected from circa 410,000 km of line-transect sampling at temperate latitudes. Location: The North Sea. Methods: For our analysis we used plankton abundance data from the Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) survey, sea surface temperature measurements from the Hadley Centre, UK Meteorological Office and wind speed data from the International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set, NOAA. Results:We found large differences in changes in the timing of peak abundance between the major phytoplankton groups. Late-summer blooming dinoflagellates (n = 10 taxa) tended to show a large seasonal advancement, the timing of peak abundance for dinoflagellates as group advancing 39 days over these six decades. By contrast diatoms (n = 35) did not show any change as a group in their timing of peak abundance over the time series. Granger causality testing suggested a major driver of these phenological changes has been ocean warming in general but more specifically the rate of spring temperature rise as the most important factor. We also found differences in the timing of peak abundance of harmful algal bloom taxa, with some showing peak abundance earlier while others have moved later. Main conclusions:There has been a fundamental transformation of the classic seasonal progression from blooms of diatoms to dinoflagellates, which lies at the heart of temperate marine food chains, as the classic bimodal diatom and dinoflagellate seasonal peaks are eroded to a more continuous, single, longer-lasting phytoplankton peak. This phenological shuffling within and between major taxonomic groups is likely to have profound implications for the transfer of energy to higher trophic levels. K E Y W O R D S climate change, marine plankton, phytoplankton abundance, phytoplankton phenology, sea surface temperature, spring temperature rise | 537 CHIVERS Et al. B I OS K E TCH E S William Chivers is a quantitative ecologist researching the effects of climate change on ecological communities. Martin Edwards is a marine ecologist looking at environmental change impacts on marine ecosystems including biodiversity, biogeographical and phenological changes. Graeme Hays is a marine ecologist looking at patterns of animal movement and abundance and their responses to climate change. Additional supporting information may be found online in the Supporting Information section. How to cite this article: Chivers WJ, Edwards M, Hays GC. Phenological shuffling of major marine phytoplankton groups over the last six decades. Divers Distrib. 2020;26:536-548.
Reconstruction of past conditions provides important information on how ecosystems have been impacted by climate change, but generally for microhabitats worldwide there are no long-term empirical measurements. In these cases, there has been protracted debate about how various large-scale environmental proxies can best be used to reconstruct local temperatures. Here we help resolve this debate by examining how well environmental proxies hindcast sand temperatures at nest depths for five sea turtle nesting sites across the world. We link instrumental air temperature and sea surface temperature records with empirical sand temperature observations in the Atlantic (Ascension Island and Cape Verde), the Indian Ocean (Chagos Archipelago), the Caribbean (St Eustatius) and the Pacific (French Polynesia). We found strong correlations between sea surface temperatures, air temperatures and sand temperatures at all our study sites. Furthermore, Granger causality testing shows variations in sea surface temperature and air temperature precede variations in sand temperatures.We found that different proxies (air or sea temperature or a combination of both) predicted mean monthly sand temperatures within <0.5°C of empirical observations. Reconstructions of sand temperatures over the last 170 years reveal a slight warming of temperatures (maximum 0.5°C per century). An analysis of 36 published datasets revealed that the gradient of the relationship between sand temperature and air temperature is relatively constant, suggesting long-term changes in sand temperature could be extended around the world to include nesting sites where there are no empirical measurements of sand temperature. Our approaches are likely to have utility for a range of microhabitats where there is an interest in long-term changes in temperature.
There are major concerns about the ecological impact of extreme weather events. In the oceans, marine heatwaves (MHWs) are an increasing threat causing, for example, recent devastation to coral reefs around the world. We show that these impacts extend to adjacent terrestrial systems and could negatively affect the breeding of endangered species. We demonstrate that during an MHW that resulted in major coral bleaching and mortality in a large, remote marine protected area, anomalously warm temperatures also occurred on sea turtle nesting beaches. Granger causality testing showed that variations in sea surface temperature strongly influenced sand temperatures on beaches. We estimate that the warm conditions on both coral reefs and sandy beaches during the MHW were unprecedented in the last 70 years. Model predictions suggest that the most extreme female-biased hatchling sex ratio and the lowest hatchling survival in nests in the last 70 years both occurred during the heatwave. Our work shows that predicted increases in the frequency and intensity of MHWs will likely have growing impacts on sea turtle nesting beaches as well as other terrestrial coastal environments.
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