Global Change Biology Research Articles

The ongoing need for rates: can physiology and omics come together to co-design the measurements needed to understand complex ocean biogeochemistry?

The necessity to understand the influence of global ocean change on biota has exposed wide-ranging gaps in our knowledge of the fundamental principles that underpin marine life. Concurrently, physiological research has stagnated, in part driven by the advent and rapid evolution of molecular biological techniques, such that they now influence all lines of enquiry in biological oceanography. This dominance has led to an implicit assumption that physiology is outmoded, and advocacy that ecological and biogeochemical models can be directly informed by omics. However, the main modeling currencies are biological rates and biogeochemical fluxes. Here, we ask: how do we translate the wealth of information on physiological potential from omics-based studies to quantifiable physiological rates and, ultimately, to biogeochemical fluxes? Based on the trajectory of the state-of-the-art in biomedical sciences, along with case-studies from ocean sciences, we conclude that it is unlikely that omics can provide such rates in the coming decade. Thus, while physiological rates will continue to be central to providing projections of global change biology, we must revisit the metrics we rely upon. We advocate for the co-design of a new generation of rate measurements that better link the benefits of omics and physiology.

Bibliometric Analysis of Carbon Accounting Research

The issue of the environment continues to receive special attention from researchers. This is related to business operations' importance in paying attention to the profit aspect and environmental impacts to maintain the surrounding environment. Therefore, activities that affect carbon emissions must be reported annually. This is called carbon accounting. This study aims to map carbon accounting articles for 2012 to 2021 on the dimensions.ai database. Using the keyword 'carbon accounting', the collected data was 500 articles. The study results found that the journal most relevant to carbon accounting is ‘The Science of the Total Environment’. Meanwhile, the journals that have the most significant impact are ‘Global Change Biology’, ‘Scientific Reports’, and ‘The Science of the Total Environment’. Meanwhile, the most productive journal is ‘The Science of the Total Environment’, followed by ‘Environmental Science and Pollution Research’. The most relevant and prolific authors were Wang Y, followed by Zhang Y and Zhang X. In addition, Wang Y and Zhang X were the authors who had the greatest impact. The distribution of words in articles with the theme of carbon accounting is dominated by 'carbon' and 'accounting'. This research shows that the theme is undergoing good development. Research data shows that the word 'carbon' is rapidly from 2012 to 2021. This study predicts that articles on carbon accounting will continue to increase in the years to come, especially the themes of 'emissions' and 'study' which have high development although their relevance is quite low. The development of research on carbon accounting is closely related to environmental issues which are currently being studied by many researchers, especially to achieve sustainable development goals.

Nesting in Anolis Lizards: An Understudied Topic in a Well-Studied Clade

Maternal nesting behavior in oviparous species strongly influences the environmental conditions their embryos experience during development. In turn, these early-life conditions have consequences for offspring phenotypes and many fitness components across an individual’s lifespan. Thus, identifying the evolutionary and ecological causes and effects of nesting behavior is a key goal of behavioral ecology. Studies of reptiles have contributed greatly to our understanding of how nesting behavior shapes offspring phenotypes. While some taxonomic groups have been used extensively to provide insights into this important area of biology, many groups remain poorly studied. For example, the squamate genusAnolishas served as a model to study behavior, ecology, and evolution, but research focused onAnolisnesting behavior and developmental plasticity is comparatively scarce. This dearth of empirical research may be attributed to logistical challenges (e.g., difficulty locating nests), biological factors (e.g., their single-egg clutches may hinder some experimental designs), and a historical focus on males inAnolisresearch. Although there is a gap in the literature concerningAnolisnesting behavior, interest in nesting ecology and developmental plasticity in this group has grown in recent years. In this paper, we (1) review existing studies of anole nesting ecology and developmental plasticity; (2) highlight areas of anole nesting ecology that are currently understudied and discuss how research in these areas can contribute to broader topics (e.g., maternal effects and global change biology); and (3) provide guidelines for studying anole nesting in the field. Overall, this review provides a foundation for establishing anoles as models to study nesting ecology and developmental plasticity.

Bridge to the future: Important lessons from 20years of ecosystem observations made by the OzFlux network.

In 2020, the Australian and New Zealand flux research and monitoring network, OzFlux, celebrated its 20th anniversary by reflecting on the lessons learned through two decades of ecosystem studies on global change biology. OzFlux is a network not only for ecosystem researchers, but also for those ‘next users’ of the knowledge, information and data that such networks provide. Here, we focus on eight lessons across topics of climate change and variability, disturbance and resilience, drought and heat stress and synergies with remote sensing and modelling. In distilling the key lessons learned, we also identify where further research is needed to fill knowledge gaps and improve the utility and relevance of the outputs from OzFlux. Extreme climate variability across Australia and New Zealand (droughts and flooding rains) provides a natural laboratory for a global understanding of ecosystems in this time of accelerating climate change. As evidence of worsening global fire risk emerges, the natural ability of these ecosystems to recover from disturbances, such as fire and cyclones, provides lessons on adaptation and resilience to disturbance. Drought and heatwaves are common occurrences across large parts of the region and can tip an ecosystem's carbon budget from a net CO2 sink to a net CO2 source. Despite such responses to stress, ecosystems at OzFlux sites show their resilience to climate variability by rapidly pivoting back to a strong carbon sink upon the return of favourable conditions. Located in under‐represented areas, OzFlux data have the potential for reducing uncertainties in global remote sensing products, and these data provide several opportunities to develop new theories and improve our ecosystem models. The accumulated impacts of these lessons over the last 20 years highlights the value of long‐term flux observations for natural and managed systems. A future vision for OzFlux includes ongoing and newly developed synergies with ecophysiologists, ecologists, geologists, remote sensors and modellers.

What are small-size microplastic distributions telling us?

Writing in this issue of Global Change Biology, Shiye Zhao and co-authors report a microplastic soup extending thousands of meters below the South Atlantic Subtropical Gyre. This discovery contributes two pieces to the missing plastic puzzle- (1) nets have been under-sampling the smallest microplastic size fraction, which is actually not missing when using high-volume filtration, and (2) small microplastics in particular find their way below the surface. But their results also contribute several new questions, because some of what they found is quite surprising. This article is a Research Article on Zhao et al., https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.16089.

Fire ecology for the 21st century: Conserving biodiversity in the age of megafire

Fire ecology for the 21st century: Conserving biodiversity in the age of megafire

Retracted: Toward the saving of global rainforests.

The above article, published online on 29 January 2022 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com), has been retracted by agreement between the authors, the journal's Editor in Chief Steve Long, and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. The retraction has been agreed because of an error the authors of the paper detected in the R code they used in running the rates of change (RoC) analysis. It was discovered after publication that the R code used in the analysis only picked a single pollen site for each rainforest region, despite the authors´ intention to reconstruct RoC for each rainforest region based on multiple pollen sites. Accordingly, the conclusions of this manuscript are based only on the RoC of single pollen records from each rainforest region, and so are insufficient for a robust and accurate analysis of RoC for each rainforest. The article pages have been replaced by the Retraction Statement and the article condensed accordingly. REFERENCE Adeleye, M. A., Connor, S. E., Herbert, A., & Haberle, S. G. (2022). Toward the saving of global rainforests. Global Change Biology, 28, 5006. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.16112.

Daytime and nighttime warming has no opposite effects on vegetation phenology and productivity in the northern hemisphere

Over the past 50 years, global land surface air temperature has been rising at a much higher rate at night than during the day. Understanding plant responses to the asymmetric daytime and nighttime warming in the context of climate change has been a hot topic in global change biology and global ecology. It has been debatable whether the asymmetric warming has opposite effects on vegetation activity (e.g., phenology, productivity). Here we settle the debate by scrutinizing the underpinnings of different statistical methods and revealing how the misuse or improper use of these methods could mischaracterize the effects of asymmetric warming with in situ and satellite observations. The use of the ordinary least square (OLS) methods including both daytime (Tmax) and nighttime (Tmin) temperature in the multiple regression models could overlook the multicollinearity problem and yield the misinterpretations that Tmax and Tmin had opposite effects on spring phenology, autumn phenology, gross primary production (GPP), and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). However, when the OLS methods were applied with Tmax and Tmin included in separate models or alternatively the ridge regression (RR) method with properly selected ridge parameter was used, the effects of Tmax and Tmin on vegetation activity were generally in the same direction. The use of the RR method with improperly selected ridge parameter could also mischaracterize the effects of asymmetric warming. Our findings show that daytime and nighttime warming has no opposite effects on vegetation phenology and productivity in the northern hemisphere, and properly dealing with the multicollinearity problem is critical for understanding the effects of asymmetric warming on vegetation activity.

Response to concerns regarding the role of Antarctic blue carbon habitats in a global context

We address Hunter (2021) concerns regarding our recent contribution to Global Change Biology on the quantification of blue carbon pathways contributing to negative feedback on climate change following glacier retreat in West Antarctic fjords (Zwerschke et al 2021).

Effective forest-based climate change mitigation requires our best science.

California's Cap-and-Trade Program sets a limit on the major sources of greenhouse gas emissions and allows a portion of excess emissions to be offset through purchase of credits for climate benefits accrued elsewhere. Badgley et al. (2021, Global Change Biology, https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.15943) describe how the use of mean forest carbon stocks from ecological supersections can create perverse incentives for project developers, potentially leading to over-crediting and nonadditional offsets. Carbon markets remain a valuable tool in combating climate change, but ensuring projects' additionality is of critical importance to effective carbon mitigation. Badgley's article should serve as a call to action to redouble efforts at integrating the latest carbon science into effective and timely policy solutions.

Low statistical power and overestimated anthropogenic impacts, exacerbated by publication bias, dominate field studies in global change biology.

Field studies are essential to reliably quantify ecological responses to global change because they are exposed to realistic climate manipulations. Yet such studies are limited in replicates, resulting in less power and, therefore, potentially unreliable effect estimates. Furthermore, while manipulative field experiments are assumed to be more powerful than non‐manipulative observations, it has rarely been scrutinized using extensive data. Here, using 3847 field experiments that were designed to estimate the effect of environmental stressors on ecosystems, we systematically quantified their statistical power and magnitude (Type M) and sign (Type S) errors. Our investigations focused upon the reliability of field experiments to assess the effect of stressors on both ecosystem's response magnitude and variability. When controlling for publication bias, single experiments were underpowered to detect response magnitude (median power: 18%–38% depending on effect sizes). Single experiments also had much lower power to detect response variability (6%–12% depending on effect sizes) than response magnitude. Such underpowered studies could exaggerate estimates of response magnitude by 2–3 times (Type M errors) and variability by 4–10 times. Type S errors were comparatively rare. These observations indicate that low power, coupled with publication bias, inflates the estimates of anthropogenic impacts. Importantly, we found that meta‐analyses largely mitigated the issues of low power and exaggerated effect size estimates. Rather surprisingly, manipulative experiments and non‐manipulative observations had very similar results in terms of their power, Type M and S errors. Therefore, the previous assumption about the superiority of manipulative experiments in terms of power is overstated. These results call for highly powered field studies to reliably inform theory building and policymaking, via more collaboration and team science, and large‐scale ecosystem facilities. Future studies also require transparent reporting and open science practices to approach reproducible and reliable empirical work and evidence synthesis.

Invasive wild pigs (Sus scrofa) as a human‐mediated source of soil carbon emissions: Uncertainties and future directions

Invasive wild pigs (Sus scrofa) have been spread by humans outside of their native range and are now established on every continent except Antarctica. Through their uprooting of soil, they affect societal and environmental values. Our recent article explored another threat from their soil disturbance: greenhouse gas emissions (O'Bryan et al., Global Change Biology, 2021). In response to our paper, Don (Global Change Biology, 2021) claims there is no threat to global soil carbon stocks by wild pigs. While we did not investigate soil carbon stocks, we examine uncertainties regarding soil carbon emissions from wild pig uprooting and their implications for management and future research.

Degradation debts accounting: A holistic approach towards land degradation neutrality.

Combatting land degradation and achieving land degradation neutrality are crucial to securing a globally sustainable future. Wuepper et al. (Global Change Biology, 2021) propose an integrated approach to delineate global land degradation based on the concept of natural resources ‘debt’ that combines a diverse range of soil and vegetation indicators. The research is novel both in considering a variety of indicators and in distinguishing between the current state and historical/natural status with (or without) human impact. This novel framework will implement more effective regulatory interventions and land‐use policies, and assist in achieving the long‐term sustainability of terrestrial ecosystems.

John Philip Grime. 30 April 1935—19 April 2021

John Philip ‘Phil’ Grime developed fundamental theory in plant ecology that emerged from a lifetime of fieldwork and experimental studies in the Sheffield region, South Yorkshire, UK. His approach was an unusual combination of observation, experiment and theory: he conducted detailed, intensive observations of natural communities, alongside experimental manipulation of those communities and simulated ‘microcosms’ in the service of formulating general rules (‘strategies’) by which plants evolve with respect to their environment. In this way, Grime was one of several key figures that propelled plant ecology away from descriptive methods focusing on vegetation composition and toward a science more integrated with other fields, including evolutionary biology and Earth science. Grime's investigative approach was an inspiration for the modern field of global change biology, and, by focusing on understanding the contrasting roles species and their traits play in the functioning of ecosystems, marked the beginning of the field of plant functional ecology. For much of his career Grime held the post of full professor (and in retirement, emeritus professor of ecology) at the University of Sheffield, where he also served as the director of the Unit of Comparative Plant Ecology and of the Buxton Climate Change Impacts Laboratory. Awarded an honorary doctorate by Radboud University (Nijmegen, The Netherlands) and a foreign membership of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Grime was the first person awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Award of the International Association for Vegetation Science.

New Avenues for Old Travellers: Phenotypic Evolutionary Trends Meet Morphodynamics, and Both Enter the Global Change Biology Era

Evolutionary trends (ETs) are traditionally defined as substantial changes in the state of traits through time produced by a persistent condition of directional evolution. ETs might also include directional responses to ecological, climatic or biological gradients and represent the primary evolutionary pattern at high taxonomic levels and over long-time scales. The absence of a well-supported operative definition of ETs blurred the definition of conceptual differences between ETs and other key concepts in evolution such as convergence, parallel evolution, and divergence. Also, it prevented the formulation of modern guidelines for studying ETs and evolutionary dynamics related to them. In phenotypic evolution, the theory of morphodynamics states that the interplay between evolutionary factors such as phylogeny, evo-devo constraints, environment, and biological function determines morphological evolution. After introducing a new operative definition, here we provide a morphodynamics-based framework for studying phenotypic ETs, discussing how understanding the impact of these factors on ETs improves the explanation of links between biological patterns and processes underpinning directional evolution. We envisage that adopting a quantitative, pattern-based, and multifactorial approach will pave the way to new potential applications for this field of evolutionary biology. In this framework, by exploiting the catalysing effect of climate change on evolution, research on ETs induced by global change might represent an ideal arena for validating hypotheses about the predictability of evolution.

Physiological Consequences of Oceanic Environmental Variation: Life from a Pelagic Organism's Perspective.

To better understand life in the sea, marine scientists must first quantify how individual organisms experience their environment, and then describe how organismal performance depends on that experience. In this review, we first explore marine environmental variation from the perspective of pelagic organisms, the most abundant life forms in the ocean. Generation time, the ability to move relative to the surrounding water (even slowly), and the presence of environmental gradients at all spatial scales play dominant roles in determining the variation experienced by individuals, but this variation remains difficult to quantify. We then use this insight to critically examine current understanding of the environmental physiology of pelagic marine organisms. Physiologists have begun to grapple with the complexity presented by environmental variation, and promising frameworks exist for predicting and/or interpreting the consequences for physiological performance. However, new technology needs to be developed and much difficult empirical work remains, especially in quantifying response times to environmental variation and the interactions among multiple covarying factors. We call on the field of global-change biology to undertake these important challenges.

Characteristics and Inter-citation Network of 100 Most Influential Studies on Ocean Acidification: A Bibliometric Analysis

ABSTRACT In this study, we aimed to evaluate the trends of the most cited articles on ocean acidification using bibliometric techniques and to provide oceanographers and marine scientists a practical guide in assessing the most influential studies published on this domain. Scopus database is used to extract the literature, and detailed analysis was carried out to identify trends and significant of these studies. The top cited article received 3,183 citations and the least received 201, with a mean of 462 citations. These 100 most-cited papers originated from 34 different countries. The USA ranked top with the highest number of publications followed by Germany and Australia. The top five journals (Science, PNAS, Global Change Biology, Marine Ecology Progress Series, Nature) hold 40% of these influential studies. The thematic cluster analysis showed a composite characteristic of the research domain. The study indicated that a limited of the works focus on impact of ocean acidification on food web that needs to be urgently addressed by the oceanographic community. The study of the carbonate system in coastal, oceanic, and estuaries waters, and its ecological and biogeochemical implications are the emerging areas that required attention for the sustainability and maintaining a healthy balance of the marine ecosystem.

A bibliometric review of ecological research on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau, 1990–2019

Ecological research on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau (QTP) has become a hotspot in recent years, and a great number of related research papers have been published. Here, a bibliometrics method was utilized to analyze 4315 papers from the Web of Science published from 1990 to 2019, and a comprehensive overview based on metrics, including the publication growth, first author’ institutions and countries, research areas, international cooperation, high-impact journals and papers, and research hotspots and topics, is presented. The results revealed the following: (1) The number of published papers has grown exponentially, with China and India being the main research countries. However, China and the USA have the greatest weights in country cooperation. The Chinese Academy of Sciences has a relatively strong influence and plays the leading role in institutional cooperation. Wang Shiping, Zhang Zhenhua, Luo Caiyun, and seven other authors are highly influential. GLOBAL CHANGE BIOLOGY is the scientific journal that has published the greatest number of papers on the subject, and ‘Environmental Sciences & Ecology’ is the key research area; (2) Grazing, Precipitation, Soil moisture, Aboveground biomass, and Temperature are the top five core keywords. The research hotspots were mainly ecosystem services, biodiversity research, forest protection, and ecological adaptation under the background of climate change; and (3) Both new and old research topics appear in the periods 1990–1999, 2000–2009, 2010–2014, and 2015–2019, but all the periods focused on the impacts of rising temperature on natural elements, such as soil, forests, rivers, and lakes. Many recent also focused on the harmonious coexistence of human beings and nature. On the basis of these findings, some research suggestions and agendas are proposed for future research on the QTP. This is the first visualization and analysis of the hotspots and trends in ecological research on the QTP.

Rapid evolution generates synergism between multiple stressors: Linking theory and an evolution experiment.

Global change encompasses many co-occurring anthropogenic stressors. Understanding the interactions between these multiple stressors, whether they be additive, antagonistic or synergistic, is critical for ecosystem managers when prioritizing which stressors to mitigate in the face of global change. While such interactions between stressors appear prevalent, it remains unclear if and how these interactions change over time, as the majority of multiple-stressor studies rarely span multiple generations of study organisms. Although meta-analyses have reported some intriguing temporal trends in stressor interactions, for example that synergism may take time to emerge, the mechanistic basis for such observations is unknown. In this study, by analysing data from an evolution experiment with the rotifer Brachionus calyciflorus (~35 generations and 31,320 observations), we show that adaptation to multiple stressors shifts stressor interactions towards synergism. We show that trade-offs, where populations cannot optimally perform multiple tasks (i.e. adapting to multiple stressors), generate this bias towards synergism. We also show that removal of stressors from evolved populations does not necessarily increase fitness and that there is variation in the evolutionary trajectories of populations that experienced the same stressor regimes. Our results highlight outstanding questions at the interface between evolution and global change biology, and illustrate the importance of considering rapid adaptation when managing or restoring ecosystems subjected to multiple stressors under global change.

Commentary on Osland et al.: Tropicalization of temperate ecosystems in North America: The northward range expansion of tropical organisms in response to warming winter temperatures.

Tropicalization is, "the transformation of temperate ecosystems by poleward-moving tropical organisms in response to warming temperatures" (Osland et al. 2021). In their newly published Research Review article in Global Change Biology, Osland and colleagues provide important context, diverse examples, and discuss critical knowledge gaps on tropicalization for the lower latitudes of North America where species assemblages are changing via range expansions or invasions.