Marine pollution is a major threat to human and environmental health. Given the complexity of function of marine and coastal ecosystems, it is unlikely that a balanced view of the nature and extent of risk will easily be achieved if human and environmental risk assessments continue to be conducted in isolation. Here, the integration of assessment protocols is advocated as a holistic means of im...

New Zealand biogeography has been dominated by the knowledge that its geophysical history is continental in nature. The continental crust (Zealandia) from which New Zealand is formed broke from Gondwanaland ca 80 Ma, and there has existed a pervading view that the native biota is primarily a product of this long isolation. However, molecular studies of terrestrial animals and plants in New Zeal...

Laboratory single-species toxicity tests are used to assess the effects of contaminants on aquatic biota. Questions remain as to how accurately these toxicity tests predict site-specific bioavailability and chronic effects of metals, particularly in streams that are effluent-dominated or dependent on effluent discharge for flow. Concurrent 42-d Hyalella azteca exposures were performed with cadm...

1 State Key Laboratory of Soil and Sustainable Agriculture, Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 71 East Beijing Road, Nanjing 210008, China 2 Gladstone Institutes, San Francisco, CA 94158, USA 3 Department of Ecology, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences and Key Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes of the Ministry of Education, Peking University, 5 Yiheyuan Road, Be...

The remains (probably a moult) of a female Chinese mitten crab were found in the freshwater River Clyde. This is the first report of a Chinese mitten crab from the wild in Scotland and is well outside the previously recorded range of the species in Great Britain. The origin of this specimen remains enigmatic but this finding has potentially serious implications for the Clyde catchment, the biot...

The recent discovery of a deep-water sulfur-cycling microbial biota in the ∼ 2.3-Ga Western Australian Turee Creek Group opened a new window to life's early history. We now report a second such subseafloor-inhabiting community from the Western Australian ∼ 1.8-Ga Duck Creek Formation. Permineralized in cherts formed during and soon after the 2.4- to 2.2-Ga "Great Oxidation Event," these two bio...

Methods that integrate population-level sampling from multiple taxa into a single community-level analysis are an essential addition to the comparative phylogeographic toolkit. Detecting how species within communities have demographically tracked each other in space and time is important for understanding the effects of future climate and landscape changes and the resulting acceleration of exti...

Biogeographers study all patterns in the geographic variation of life, from the spatial variation in genetic and physiological characteristics of cells and individuals, to the diversity and dynamics of biological communities among continental biotas or across oceanic archipelagoes. The field of island biogeography, in particular, has provided some genuinely transformative insights for the biolo...

Mining is one of the most important industrial activities worldwide. During its different stages numerous impacts are generated to the environment. The activities in the region have generated a great amount of mining residues, which have caused severe pollution and health effects in both human population and biotic components. The aim of this paper was to assess the impact of mining activities ...

Although palaeontological evidence from exceptional biota demonstrates the existence of diverse marine communities in the Early Cambrian (approx. 540-520 Myr ago), little is known concerning the functioning of the marine ecosystem, especially its trophic structure and the full range of ecological niches colonized by the fauna. The presence of a diverse zooplankton in Early Cambrian oceans is st...