1. In a rapidly changing world, ecology has the potential to move from empirical and conceptual stages to application and management issues. It is now possible to make large-scale predictions up to continental or global scales, ranging from the future distribution of biological diversity to changes in ecosystem functioning and services. With these recent developments, ecology has a historical opportunity to become a major actor in the development of a sustainable human society. With this opportunity, however, also comes an important responsibility in developing appropriate predictive models, correctly interpreting their outcomes and communicating their limitations. There is also a danger that predictions grow faster than our understanding of ecological systems, resulting in a gap between the scientists generating the predictions and stakeholders using them (conservation biologists, environmental managers, journalists, policymakers). 2. Here, we use the context provided by the current surge of ecological predictions on the future of biodiversity to clarify what prediction means, and to pinpoint the challenges that should be addressed in order to improve predictive ecological models and the way they are understood and used.3. Synthesis and applications. Ecologists face several challenges to ensure the healthy development of an operational predictive ecological science: (i) clarity on the distinction between explanatory and anticipatory predictions; (ii) developing new theories at the interface between explanatory and anticipatory predictions; (iii) open data to test and validate predictions; (iv) making predictions operational; and (v) developing a genuine ethics of prediction. Supporting InformationAdditional Supporting Information may be found in the online version of this article.Appendix S1. Characteristics of mechanistic and phenomenological models in ecology.Appendix S2. Non-exhaustive list, of international initiatives of the scientific community aiming for sharing ecological data.

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The French critical zone initiative, called OZCAR (Observatoires de la Zone Critique-Application et Recherche or Critical Zone Observatories-Application and Research) is a National Research Infrastructure (RI). OZCAR-RI is a network of instrumented sites, bringing together 21 pre-existing research observatories monitoring different compartments of the zone situated between "the rock and the sky," the Earth's skin or critical zone (CZ), over the long term. These observatories are regionally based and have specific initial scientific questions, monitoring strategies, databases, and modeling activities. The diversity of OZCAR-RI observatories and sites is well representative of the heterogeneity of the CZ and of the scientific communities studying it. Despite this diversity, all OZCAR-RI sites share a main overarching mandate, which is to monitor, understand, and predict ("earthcast") the fluxes of water and matter of the Earth's near surface and how they will change in response to the "new climatic regime." The vision for OZCAR strategic development aims at designing an open infrastructure, building a national CZ community able to share a systemic representation of the CZ , and educating a new generation of scientists more apt to tackle the wicked problem of the Anthropocene. OZCAR articulates around: (i) a set of common scientific questions and cross-cutting scientific activities using the wealth of OZCAR-RI observatories, (ii) an ambitious instrumental development program, and (iii) a better interaction between data and models to integrate the different time and spatial scales. Internationally, OZCAR-RI aims at strengthening the CZ community by providing a model of organization for pre-existing observatories and by offering CZ instrumented sites. OZCAR is one of two French mirrors of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructure (eLTER-ESFRI) project.

The Black Queen Hypothesis, recently proposed to explain an evolution of dependency based on gene loss, is gaining ground. This paper focuses on how the evolution of dependency transforms interactions and the community. Using agent-based modeling we suggest that species specializing in the consumption of a common good escape competition and therefore favor coexistence. This evolutionary trajectory could open the way for novel long-lasting interactions and a need to revisit the classically accepted assembly rules. Such evolutionary events also reshape the structure and dynamics of communities, depending on the spatial heterogeneity of the common good production. Let Black be the new black!

Many attempts have been made to relate phytoplankton biomass ditributions to their turbulent environments. These studies have not taken the intermittent nature of turbulent processes into account, and hence poorly approximate inhomogeneous patterns. Since these oceanic fields are scaling for a wide range of scales, and scaling processes are believed to generically yield universal multifractal (characterized by three basic exponents), it is natural to analyse temperature and phytoplankton biomass in such a framework. Over the range 0.5s to 11h30', the temperature followed a single scaling regime, whereas the phytoplankton had both a low and high frequency regime (the break occurring at about 100s). We estimated the universal multifractal parameters finding that fluorescence was nearly dynamically passive (i.e. similar to temperature) on smaller scales but biologically active at larger scales.

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Abstract. In this paper, we present evidence that intermittency of Eulerian and Lagrangian turbulence of ocean temperature and plankton fields is multifractal and furthermore can be analysed with the help of universal multifractals. We analyse time series of temperature and in vivo fluorescence taken from a drifter in the mixed coastal waters of the eastern English Channel. Two analysis techniques are used to compute the fundamental universal multifiractal parameters, which describe all the statistics of the turbulent fluctuations: the analysis of the scale invariant structure function exponent ζ(q) and the Double Trace Moment technique. At small scales, we do not detect any significant difference between the universal multifiractal behavior of temperature and fluorescence in an Eulerian framework. This supports the hypothesis that the latter is passively advected with the flow as the former. On the one hand, we show that large scale measurements are Lagrangian and indeed we obtain for temperature fluctuations a ω2 power spectrum corresponding to the theoretical scaling of a Lagrangian passive scalar. Furthermore, we show that Lagrangian temperature fluctuations are multiscaling and intermittent. On the other hand, the flatter slope at large scales of the fluorescence power spectrum points out that the plankton is at these scales a "biologically active" scalar.