Sea Turtles: A Case of Animal Magnetism
Michael Lavine, J. Roger Brothers, Kenneth J. Lohmann, and Isaac Lavine The scientific exploration of whether and how migratory animals return to their birth areas goes back at least to John James Audubon, who tied silver threads to the legs of young songbirds and observed their return in the following year. Different species use different […]
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Modeling Species Ranges
Sydne Record and Noah Charney According to two separate analyses by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the 10 warmest years globally since 1880 occurred within the last 15 years. These reports are part of a body of mounting evidence that the Earth’s climate is changing. […]
Checkerboards and Missing Species Combinations: Are Ecological Communities Assembled by Chance?
Nicholas J. Gotelli The Search for Community Assembly Rules How are communities of plants and animals organized in nature? This is a challenging question, because there are too many species in most communities to study this problem experimentally. For example, even with only three species (A, B, and C), eight different “communities” or distinct species […]
Detecting Ecological Patterns Along Environmental Gradients: Alpine Treeline Ecotones
Hannah L. Buckley, Bradley S. Case, Ronny Vallejos, J. Julio Camarero, Emilia Gutiérrez, Eryuan Liang, Yafeng Wang, and Aaron M. Ellison Everyone is familiar with that age-old adage “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Among ecologists, the word “picture” easily could be replaced with the word “pattern,” although the significance remains the same: The […]
Deepwater Horizon: Locating Submerged Oil in Ocean Water Using the k-means Clustering Technique
Tanujit Dey, Walter Hickey, Bimal Parakkal, and Wojbor A. Woyczynski In April of 2010, a dramatic explosion on the Deepwater Horizon (“Macondo”) oil well drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico caused the largest marine oil spill in U.S. history. A casual Internet search of the term “Deepwater Horizon spill” yields more than 845,000 results, […]
Models for Ecological Models: Ocean Primary Productivity
Christopher K. Wikle, William B. Leeds, and Mevin B. Hooten The ocean accounts for more than 70% of planet Earth’s surface, and its processes are critically important to marine and terrestrial life. Ocean ecosystems are strongly dependent on the physical state of the ocean (e.g., transports, mixing, upwelling, runoff, and ice dynamics). As an example, […]