Many boreal lakes emit the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO₂) to the atmosphere. We incorporated four different gas exchange models into a physico-biochemical lake model and studied their ability to simulate lake air–water CO₂ fluxes. The inclusion of refined gas exchange models in lake models that simulate carbon cycling is important to assess lake carbon budgets. However, higher estimates for inorganic carbon sources in boreal lakes are needed to balance the CO₂ losses to the atmosphere.

Plants emit small amounts of methane and large amounts of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Measurements of plant methane emissions therefore require analysers that can provide accurate measurements of CH₄ concentrations in the presence of changing amounts of VOCs. We therefore quantified to which degree various VOCs bias methane concentration measurements on different analysers. Our results show that some analysers are more sensitive to the presence of VOCs than others.

Plant functional traits have increasingly been studied as determinants of ecosystem properties. While the relationships between biological community structures and ecological functions remain poorly understood at the large scale, we found that there was considerable variation in the profiles of different substrate uses along the NSTEC. The soil silt content and plant functional traits together shaped the biogeographical pattern of the soil microbial substrate use.

We measured rates of biological activity and gas exchange in a Canadian estuary during ice melt. We quantified gas exchange using inert, deliberately released tracers and found that the gas transfer rate at > 90 % ice cover was 6 % of the rate for nearly ice-free conditions. We measured oxygen concentration and isotopic composition and used the data to detect changes in the rates of photosynthesis and respiration (autotrophy and heterotrophy) as the ice melted.

Photosymbiosis (endosymbiosis with algae) is an evolutionary important ecology for many marine organisms but has poorly been identified among planktonic foraminifera. In this study, we identified and characterized photosymbiosis of various species of planktonic foraminifera by focusing on their photosynthesis–related features. We finally proposed a new framework showing a potential strength of photosymbiosis, which will serve as a basis for future ecological studies of planktonic foraminifera.

We present 2 years of eddy covariance carbon dioxide flux data from two Southern Hemisphere peatlands on Tierra del Fuego. One of the investigated sites is a type of bog exclusive to the Southern Hemisphere, which is dominated by vascular, cushion-forming plants and is particularly understudied. One result of this study is that these cushion bogs apparently are highly productive in comparison to Northern and Southern Hemisphere moss-dominated bogs.

To be able to interpret the paleoecological signal contained in N. pachyderma's shells, its habitat depth must be known. Our investigation on 104 density profiles of this species from the Arctic and North Atlantic shows that specimens reside closer to the surface when sea-ice and/or surface chlorophyll concentrations are high. This is in contrast with previous investigations that pointed at the position of the deep chlorophyll maximum as the main driver of N. pachyderma vertical distribution.

This study uses strontium as a trace elemental marker in combination with high-resolution nano-analytical techniques to label the growth fronts of bivalves in controlled aquaculture conditions. The growing shells incorporate the labels and are used as snapshots visualizing the growth processes across different shell architectures. These observations are combined with structural investigations across length scales and altogether allow for a detailed understanding of this shell.

The coarse dead wood component of the tropical forest carbon pool is rarely measured. For the first time, we developed models for predicting coarse dead wood in Amazonian forests by using airborne laser scanning data. Our models produced site-based estimates similar to independent field estimates found in the literature. Our study provides an approach for estimating coarse dead wood pools from remotely sensed data and mapping those pools over large scales in intact and degraded forests.