Publications related to Ecological succession

At what spatial scale does natural selection operate? Using multiscale frameworks to calibrate the effects of environmental factors across landscape continuums

Patterns in nature arise from processes interacting across a continuum of spatial scales, where new relationships emerge at each level of investigation. These patterns are nested features encompassing fine-scale local patterns, such as topography and geolo ...

EPFL2024

Ecosystem engineering by periphyton in Alpine proglacial streams

Tom Ian Battin, Davide Mancini, Marc Aguet, Adrijan Selitaj, Matteo Roncoroni

Stream periphytons are candidate ecosystem engineers in proglacial margins. Here, we quantify the extent to which they are engineers for the case of hillslope-fed tributaries in the terrace zones of proglacial margin alluvial plains. Candidate ecosystem en ...

WILEY2023

Homogeneous Environmental Selection Structures the Bacterial Communities of Benthic Biofilms in Proglacial Floodplain Streams

Tom Ian Battin, Hannes Markus Peter, Susheel Bhanu Busi, Grégoire Marie Octave Edouard Michoud, Leïla Ezzat, Massimo Bourquin, Jade Brandani, Tyler Joe Kohler, Stylianos Fodelianakis

Streams draining proglacial floodplains harbor benthic biofilms comprised of diverse microbial communities. These high-mountain ecosystems are rapidly changing with climate warming, and it is therefore critical to better understand the mechanisms underlyin ...

AMER SOC MICROBIOLOGY2023

Disentangling the effects of climate change and reoligotrophication on primary production in a large lake

Alfred Johny Wüest, Hugo Nicolás Ulloa Sánchez, Shubham Krishna, Emile Barbe

Climate change and reduction in nutrient loads have significant effects on primary production and phytoplankton growth dynamics. Since in the last few decades in many regions, nutrients in lakes were reduced simultaneously as the climate changed. Yet, it r ...

SPRINGER BASEL AG2023

Glacier-Fed Stream Biofilms Harbor Diverse Resistomes and Biosynthetic Gene Clusters

Tom Ian Battin, Hannes Markus Peter, Susheel Bhanu Busi, Grégoire Marie Octave Edouard Michoud, Leïla Ezzat, Massimo Bourquin, Matteo Tolosano, Paraskevi Pramateftaki, Vincent Henri De Staercke, Tyler Joe Kohler, Michail Styllas, Stylianos Fodelianakis

Antimicrobial resistance is an omnipresent phenomenon in the anthropogenically influenced ecosystems. However, its role in shaping microbial community dynamics in pristine environments is relatively unknown. ...

AMER SOC MICROBIOLOGY2023

Atlas Narratives of Anthropogenic Transformations across the Vietnamese Mekong Delta's Urban-Rural Territories: Water Ecosystems as Subject for the Social Ecological Transition

Sylvie Tram Nguyen

Well beyond the impact of climate change, anthropogenic modifications of the Vietnam Mekong Delta's ecosystems have resulted in environmental degradation and subsequent loss in ecosystems. The environmental impacts include but are not limited to accelerate ...

EPFL2023

Mechanical performance and upscaling of bio-improved soils

Ray Harran

Ecological awareness, pressing climate considerations and rising need for soil stabilization push forward the quest for alternative solutions in geotechnical engineering such as Microbially Induced Carbonate Precipitation (MICP). Precipitated crystals serv ...

EPFL2022

Perspectives in machine learning for wildlife conservation

Devis Tuia, Alexander Mathis, Mackenzie Mathis, Benjamin Alexander Kellenberger

Inexpensive and accessible sensors are accelerating data acquisition in animal ecology. These technologies hold great potential for large-scale ecological understanding, but are limited by current processing approaches which inefficiently distill data into ...

Nature Research2022

Wastewater microorganisms impact microbial diversity and important ecological functions of stream periphyton

Kristin Schirmer, Ahmed Tlili

Effluents of wastewater treatment plants can impact microbial communities in the receiving streams. However, little is known about the role of microorganisms in wastewater as opposed to other wastewater constituents, such as nutrients and micropollutants. ...

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2022

From the Heroic Age to today: What diatoms from Shackleton's Nimrod expedition can tell us about the ecological trajectory of Antarctic ponds

Tyler Joe Kohler

Biological invasion and environmental change pose major threats to ecosystems. While long-term ecological change is commonly evaluated through sediment cores in lakes, it is generally not feasible for smaller ponds, and spatial resolution is limited. Here, ...

2021

Bio-Hybrid Systems for Ecosystem Level Effects

Francesco Mondada, Robert Thomas Edmund Mills, Robert Matthew Mills, Rafael Botner Barmak, Matthieu Jean-Michel Philippe Broisin, Martina Szopek, Jean-Louis Deneubourg

In a time marked by ecological decay and by the perspective of a severe backlash of this ecosystem decay and climate devastation onto human society, bold moves that employ novel technology to counteract this decline are required. We present a novel concept ...

MIT Press2021

LeXPLORE: A floating laboratory on Lake Geneva offering unique lake research opportunities

Alfred Johny Wüest, Natacha Tofield-Pasche, Damien Bouffard, Sébastien Lavanchy

Environmental sciences depend heavily on observational data. Successful studies of ecological processes in lakes require in-situ data that cover the relevant temporal scales from milliseconds to entire seasons. Temporal and spatial coverage requirements re ...

2021

On the fractal structure of soil moisture fields

Andrea Rinaldo

We study the spatial structure of soil moisture fields within savanna ecosystems, whose persistence is vital because it is the driver of the entire ecological structure and function. These include changes in the physical and biogeochemical conditions of th ...

ELSEVIER SCI LTD2021

Coarse and Fine Particulate Organic Matter Transport by a Fourth-Order Mountain Stream to Lake Bourget (France)

Guillaume Gilbert René Cunillera

Transport of coarse particulate organic matter (CPOM) derived from forest litterfall has been hardly studied in rivers, unlike fine particulate organic matter (FPOM) or dissolved organic matter (DOM). Yet, many rivers are dammed or run into lakes, and ther ...

MDPI2021

Early-Career Coordinated Distributed Experiments: Empowerment Through Collaboration

Luis Gómez Gener

Coordinated distributed experiments (CDEs) enable the study of large-scale ecological patterns in geographically dispersed areas, while simultaneously providing broad academic and personal benefits for the participants. However, the effective involvement o ...

2020

Key rules of life and the fading cryosphere: impacts in alpine lakes and streams

Tom Ian Battin, Chenxi Wu, Jun Wen, Xiong Xiong

Alpine regions are changing rapidly due to loss of snow and ice in response to ongoing climate change. While studies have documented ecological responses in alpine lakes and streams to these changes, our ability to predict such outcomes is limited. We prop ...

2020

A re-investigation of lake sediment diatoms from the Vestfold Hills, Antarctica, using an updated, fine-grained taxonomy

Tyler Joe Kohler

The non-marine diatom flora of the Antarctic continent is currently being revised as recent work within the Maritime and Sub-Antarctic regions has unveiled a number of new endemic species. The under reporting of endemic species is partially due to the hist ...

2020

Earth and field observations underpin metapopulation dynamics in complex landscapes: Near-term study on carabids

Andrea Rinaldo, Damiano Pasetto, Francisco Javier Perez Saez, Jonathan Giezendanner

Understanding risks to biodiversity requires predictions of the spatial distribution of species adapting to changing ecosystems and, to that end, Earth observations integrating field surveys prove essential as they provide key numbers for assessing landsca ...

2020

Towards simple tools to assess functional effects of contaminants on natural microbial and invertebrate sediment communities

Benoît Jean Dominique Ferrari, Maria del Carmen Casado Martinez, Sophie Campiche

Surface sediments can accumulate contaminants that affect microorganisms and invertebrates and disturb benthic ecological functions. However, effects of contaminants on ecological functions supported by sediment communities are understudied. Here, we teste ...

SPRINGER HEIDELBERG2020

Model-based data analysis of the effect of winter mixing on primary production in a lake under reoligotrophication

Alfred Johny Wüest, Hugo Nicolás Ulloa Sánchez, Camille Roland Marie Minaudo, Shubham Krishna

Nutrient loading, in combination with climate change are important drivers of primary productivity in lakes. Understanding and forecasting future changes in primary production (PP) in response to local and global forcing are major challenges for developing ...

ELSEVIER2020