Limnology and Oceanography Bulletin最新文献

The first comprehensive freshwater microplastics monitoring initiative is underway in South America, focusing on lakes, shallow lakes, reservoirs, streams, and rivers from Argentina. The project Monitoring and Analysis of Plastic Pollution in Aquatic Environments (MappA) aims to implement a standardized methodology to comprehensively understand microplastics' presence, characteristics, and distribution within these water bodies. Building upon the successes of prior international collaborations (Nava et al. 2023), Dr. Maria B. Alfonso, based at Kyushu University, Japan, is leading the collaborative effort. Engaging 51 experts in aquatic science from 31 renowned institutes and research centers across Argentina, MappA is currently developing an expansive microplastics study. This ambitious project encompasses 117 diverse study sites spanning 21 lakes, 25 shallow lakes, 7 reservoirs, 44 rivers, and 20 streams, covering most of the main watershed areas of the country (Fig. 1).

The global concern over environmental issues, particularly the increasing threat of plastic pollution, has compelled a focused investigation of its prevalence in aquatic systems. Initial microplastics research primarily focused on their prevalence in marine systems, dating back to the 1970s; the attention towards microplastics in freshwater habitats is a comparatively recent initiative that emerged in the last two decades. Due to their location in the landscape, freshwater systems can act as either pathways or sinks for microplastics that reach the systems by runoff or atmospheric deposition. Most research studies on freshwater environments have focused on the Global North, so Argentina's vast territory, characterized by varying climate and geography, offers a unique opportunity to analyze the challenges posed by the presence, abundance, and distribution of microplastics. In recent years, microplastic studies in the country have expanded, yet they remain limited and applied diverse sampling methodologies (e.g., Alfonso et al. 2020a, b; Kittner et al. 2022; Buteler et al. 2023; Garello et al. 2023). The study sites included within MappA are located across the latitudinal extension of the country (covering an area of 2.8 million km² from 24°S to 54°S), encompassing an extensive gradient of human impact (e.g., from urban areas to remote Patagonia), and a wide variety of ecosystems (e.g., from subtropical to subantarctic; and from rainforest to deserts) with diverse freshwater bodies (Fig. 1).

Our main goal is to establish a coordinated monitoring program for Argentina's freshwater bodies. By employing a standardized methodology across sites, the study aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the prevalence and characteristics of microplastics and the effect of climate and anthropogenic variables (detailed further below) on the presence, abundance, and distribution of mic

The COVID-19 pandemic drastically altered human social systems. To better understand ramifications of the pandemic for aquatic scientists, we assessed perceptions of mentorship within the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography, focusing on impacts felt during the pandemic. We also evaluated current preferences and practices (e.g., valued traits, network composition, communication tools) related to mentoring, as a way of gauging change within the community and informing ongoing or future resilience and recovery efforts. In surveying this group, we found the largest pandemic related professional development gaps to be lost opportunities for mentoring, the absence of in-person meetings, and missed collegial/collaborative interactions. We also assessed which mentorship characteristics were highly valued and found that, “communicative” was the most consistently valued characteristic. Finally, we assessed mentor network composition and code of conduct use. Findings show a limited range of disciplines within most mentees' networks, suggesting lack of access to mentors in outside fields or disciplines, and widespread valuation of codes of conduct but limited implementation. We advocate for mentoring practices that foster personal connections, expand networks, and develop clear plans for mentoring relationships, as a path toward general improvement and resilience within mentoring networks in the face of disruption.

Collaborations between archeologists and aquatic scientists are driving forward a whole new subdiscipline of methods to document and understand environmental change. Climate change, food webs, El Niño La Niña oscillations, and alterations to biotic factors such as salinity and stream flow have all been studied via aquatic archeological material. Much of this research is conducted on shell middens, the archeological materials they contain, and substrates they are deposited in. This article provides a primer on the formation of shell middens, procedures of midden archeological excavation, and the recent advances in aquatic environmental change research from analyzing archeological material collected from middens.

Sharma, S., Lopez, L.S., Basu, A., Blagrave, K., Bazely, D., Bove, G. and Stewart, K. (2023), An introduction to the community lake ice collaboration: A long-term Lake Ice Phenology Community Science Project spanning 1000 lakes and over 30 years. Limnol. Oceanogr. Bull. 32: 74–77. doi:10.1002/lob.10560

The affiliation “Department of Biology, University of The Virgin Islands, Charlotte Amalie, St Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands” for the author Gerald Bove should not have been added earlier and is removed via this Correction article.

Publishing scientific work is as important as conducting research. The rise of online Open Access (OA) publications that are immediately available to readers everywhere free of charge has transformed the publishing landscape in the past decades. I offer a translation of this article into Brazilian Portuguese as my own attempt to improve access to scientific content (Supplementary Information, SI). In this article, I introduce OA publishing in the context of the aquatic sciences. More specifically, I talk about how OA came to be, the different types of OA publications and copyright licenses, the benefits and pitfalls of OA publishing, and how to pay for gold OA publications.