Due to past limitations in experimental technology, canopy function has generally been inferred from leaf properties through scaling and/or indirect measurements. The development of a facility (EcoCELLs) at the Desert Research Institute has now made it possible to directly measure canopy gas exchange. In this experiment, sunflowers (Helianthus annus) were planted in the EcoCELLs and grown under...

Bacterial consumption of dissolved organic matter (DOM) drives much of the movement of carbon through the oceanic food web and the global carbon cycle. Understanding complex interactions between bacteria and marine DOM remains an important challenge. We tested the hypothesis that bacterial growth and community succession would respond differently to DOM additions due to seasonal changes in phyt...

The ocean is a soup of its resident species' genetic material, cast off in the forms of metabolic waste, shed skin cells, or damaged tissue. Sampling this environmental DNA (eDNA) is a potentially powerful means of assessing whole biological communities, a significant advance over the manual methods of environmental sampling that have historically dominated marine ecology and related fields. He...

The efficiency in nitrogen removal from wastewater generated at CSBP Ltd fertiliser and chemical manufacturer by two hybrid constructed wetland mesocosms was compared. The mesocosms were set up in order to help clarify the reasons why the two year old constructed wetland located at the industrial facility, a 1.2 ha free water surface/vertical flow conjugated system, has performed under the 50% ...

A mesocosm experiment was performed in order to observe the behaviour of an aquatic community under stable external conditions. The hypothesis was that the community would show temporal fluctuations that correspond to the principles of deterministic chaos. Water from a brackish (9 psu) location was kept from 31 March 1989 to 11 July 1990 in a 100 l mesocosm under artificial laboratory condition...

Growth hormone (GH) transgenes can significantly accelerate growth rates in fish and cause associated alterations to their physiology and behaviour. Concern exists regarding potential environmental risks of GH transgenic fish, should they enter natural ecosystems. In particular, whether they can reproduce and generate viable offspring under natural conditions is poorly understood. In previous s...

We studied the effect of ocean acidification (OA) on a coastal North Sea plankton community in a long-term mesocosm CO2-enrichment experiment (BIOACID II long-term mesocosm study). From March to July 2013, 10 mesocosms of 19 m length with a volume of 47.5 to 55.9 m3 were deployed in the Gullmar Fjord, Sweden. CO2 concentrations were enriched in five mesocosms to reach average CO2 partial pressu...

Identifying long-term community effects of low toxicant concentrations is one of the major challenges in ecotoxicology at present. Mesocosm investigations, which are one valuable tool to identify such long-term community effects, face the problem that results are obscured by confounding factors and high variability between replicates (Sanderson et al. 2009). This problem is even greater when as...

The general utility of large-scale artificial ecosystems for ecological and ecotoxicological research is evaluated by a case study of the replicability, repeatability and ecological realism of a Baltic Sea hard bottom littoral mesocosm (called BHB-mesocosm). The structure (species abundance and biomass listings) of the macrofauna community associated with bladder-wrack, Fucus vesiculosus L., in...

For many corals, the timing of broadcast spawning correlates strongly with a number of environmental signals (seasonal temperature, lunar, and diel cycles). Robust experimental studies examining the role of these putative cues in triggering spawning have been lacking until recently because it has not been possible to predictably induce spawning in fully closed artificial mesocosms. Here, we pre...