Recent  

Ecosystems are, in many ways, changing more rapidly than they have in the past. Rapid past ecological changes can provide critical insight into how to best understand ecosystem function to improve ecological restoration, but a historic focus on community composition in the paleoecological literature can obscure the causes of these changes, making mechanisms unclear. The authors demonstrate a path forward using pollen and diatom records from a lake in the Italian Alps to construct a narrative of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystem changes that combines well-established vegetation changes with rapid changes to water management changes to explore how rapidly the ecosystem responds to perturbations, and how aquatic function has been restored after pollution events. Doing so provides new insight into how to use the paleoecological record to understand restoration success and the time scales upon which ecosystem changes occur.

This paper describes an extensive Critical Zone Observatory in a unique Patagonian Coastal Rainforest. The authors make a compelling argument for studying the ecological, biogeological, and hydrological value of this Rainforest type and present a comprehensive measurement approach for quantifying water and trace gas fluxes and the environmental drivers to which they respond including disturbance regimes as measured in part by seismology.