Stable isotope analysis of feces can provide a non-invasive method for tracking the dietary habits of nearly any mammalian species. While fecal samples are often collected for macroscopic and genetic study, stable isotope analysis can also be applied to expand the knowledge of species-specific dietary ecology. It is somewhat unclear how digestion changes the isotope ratios of animals' diets, so...

Carbon cycling pathways in lacustrine systems are complex because there are often multiple sources of organic carbon available to the food webs. Among the techniques used to delineate carbon flows from organic matter to consumers, stable isotope analysis may be the most powerful one because isotope compositions of consumers reflect those of the dietary carbon assimilated and incorporated into t...

Global carbon cycle perturbations throughout Earth history are frequently linked to changing paleogeography, glaciation, ocean oxygenation, and biological innovation. A pronounced carbonate carbon-isotope excursion during the Ediacaran Period (635 to 542 million years ago), accompanied by invariant or decoupled organic carbon-isotope values, has been explained with a model that relies on a larg...

A 1.5‰ to 2‰ carbon isotope shift in surface ocean dissolved inorganic carbon has been reported stratigraphically above the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary in the global stratotype section at El Kef, Tunisia, and in many other marine sections worldwide. Because a change in the dC value of paleoatmospheric CO2 would have accompanied the marine surface carbon isotope shift, the K-T carbon isot...

Conspicuous global stable carbon isotope excursions that are recorded in marine sedimentary rocks of Phanerozoic age and were associated with major extinctions have generally paralleled global stable oxygen isotope excursions. All of these phenomena are therefore likely to share a common origin through global climate change. Exceptional patterns for carbon isotope excursions resulted from massi...

ments from volcanic gases have been carried out to identify their origins and behavior.1 Especially, knowledge of the carbon isotope ratio (13C/12C) is very important for studies performed in volcanic and geothermal areas, because of the existence of several carbon gases, such as CO2, CO, CH4, COS, CS2. Early studies2,3 showed that geothermal CH4 is enriched in 12C relative to CO2. Isotope equi...

The stable carbon isotope composition of isoprene emitted from leaves of red oak (Quercus rubra L.) was measured. Isoprene was depleted in (13)C relative to carbon recently fixed by photosynthesis. The difference in isotope composition between recently fixed carbon and emitted isoprene was independent of the isotopic composition of the source CO(2). beta-Carotene, an isoprenoid plant constituen...

Many environmental factors affect carbon isotope discrimination in plants, yet the predominant factor influencing this process is generally assumed to be the key growth-limiting factor. However, to our knowledge this hypothesis has not been confirmed. We therefore determined the carbon isotope composition (δ(13)C) of plants growing in two cold and humid mountain regions where temperature is con...

Carbonates from approximately 2.3-2.1 billion years ago show markedly positive δ(13)C values commonly reaching and sometimes exceeding +10‰. Traditional interpretation of these positive δ(13)C values favors greatly enhanced organic carbon burial on a global scale, although other researchers have invoked widespread methanogenesis within the sediments. To resolve between these competing models an...

Natural-abundance stable isotope ratios provide a wealth of ecological information relating to food web structure, trophic level, and location. The correct interpretation of stable isotope data requires an understanding of spatial and temporal variation in the isotopic compositions at the base of the food web. In marine pelagic environments, accurate interpretation of stable isotope data is ham...