The oceans are becoming more acidic due to absorption of anthropogenic carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The impact of ocean acidification on marine ecosystems is unclear, but it will likely depend on species adaptability and the rate of change of seawater pH relative to its natural variability. To constrain the natural variability in reef-water pH, we measured boron isotopic compositions in ...

There is increasing evidence that human disturbance can negatively impact plant-pollinator interactions such as outcross pollination. We present a meta-analysis of 22 studies involving 27 plant species showing a significant reduction in the proportion of seeds outcrossed in response to anthropogenic habitat modifications. We discuss the evolutionary consequences of disturbance on plant mating s...

Anthropogenic noise can interfere with environmental information processing and thereby reduce survival and reproduction. Receivers of signals and cues in particular depend on perceptual strategies to adjust to noisy conditions. We found that predators that hunt using prey sounds can reduce the negative impact of noise by making use of prey cues conveyed through additional sensory systems. In t...

Changes in environmental conditions often reverse outcomes of competitive interactions among species. Such context dependency implies that the speed, persistence, and ubiquity of anthropogenic habitat alterations may suddenly put even previously well-adapted native species at a competitive disadvantage with non-native species. That is, anthropogenic disturbance may so drastically alter environm...

The human species has been altering the environment over large geographic areas since the domestication of fire, plants, and animals. The progression from hunter to farmer to technologist has increased the variety and pace more than the geographic extent of human impact on the environment. A number of regions of the earth have experienced significant climatic changes closely related in time to ...

Patterns of biodiversity are changing rapidly. "Legacy studies" use historical data to document changes between past and present communities, revealing long-term trends that can often be linked to particular drivers of ecological change. However, a single pair of historical samples cannot ascertain whether rates of change are consistent or whether the impact and identity of drivers have shifted...

Human activities can create noise pollution and there is increasing international concern about how this may impact wildlife. There is evidence that anthropogenic noise may have detrimental effects on behaviour and physiology in many species but there are few examples of experiments showing how fitness may be directly affected. Here we use a split-brood, counterbalanced, field experiment to inv...

Intensive anchoring of leisure boats in seagrass meadows leads to mechanical damages. This anthropogenic impact creates bare mat patches that are not easily recolonized by the plant. Several tools are used to study human impacts on the structure of seagrass meadows but they are not able to assess the indirect and long term implication of mechanical destruction. We chose to investigate the possi...

Human impact on biodiversity usually is measured by reduction in species abundance or richness. Just as important, but much more difficult to discern, is the anthropogenic elimination of ecological interactions. Here we report on the persistence of a long ecological interaction chain linking diverse food webs and habitats in the near-pristine portions of a remote Pacific atoll. Using biogeochem...

The impact of natural and anthropogenic sources of a ir pollution has gained increasing attention from scientific communities in recent years. Indeed , tropospheric aerosols not only perturb rad iative energy balance by interacting with solar and terrestrial rad iation, but also by changing cloud properties and lifetime. Furthermore, these anthropogenic and natural air pollutants, once generate...