Vegetated buffer strips (VBS) are widely used to mitigate agricultural non-point source pollution yet reported retention efficiencies vary considerably across different landscapes. We synthesized 409 observations extracted from 91 peer-reviewed publications to evaluate critical determinants of VBS retention efficiency for agricultural runoff, focusing specifically on total nitrogen (TN), total phosphorus (TP), and total suspended solids (TSS).

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In previous water quality modeling studies in Chesapeake Bay, the severity of summer hypoxia tended to be underestimated in the mid-lower Bay area. The underlying reason has not been well understood. In this study, we test a new hypothesis with respect to the estuary–ocean exchange.

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Parachute science is the problematic and extractive practice of non-local researchers taking data, knowledge and information from communities of which they are not members, failing to engage the local community and local scientists, marginalizing them in most aspects of the research, and using the results to their own benefit.

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Biodiversity can confer temporal stability to ecosystem processes through asynchrony in species' abundances and may promote asynchrony and stability of commercial fishing harvests derived from exploited species. However, the linkages between asynchrony in the population dynamics of commercially harvested species and asynchrony of associated harvests have been difficult to resolve due to ecological, social, and economic dynamics that mediate resource extraction.

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River water quality degradation is a prevailing problem in coastal China with intensifying human-nature interaction. However, the spatial and temporal dynamics of water quality and their drivers remain poorly understood.

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Human society relies on, and interacts with, a diverse assortment of organisms and ecological systems, from the local to the global level. Research and management of these coupled social-ecological systems requires data that speaks to the variety of processes, statuses, and situations defined by them. Effective stewardship is enhanced by interdisciplinary thinking and, critically, access to interoperable data describing human society and governance and ecological and environmental conditions.

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Low dissolved oxygen (DO) conditions pose a persistent threat to aquatic life in coastal ecosystems. In Chesapeake Bay, DO criteria are used to evaluate restoration progress, but traditional assessment methods—such as binary pass/fail outcomes and attainment deficit metrics—can obscure important spatial and temporal variability across tidal segments.

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Marine megaherbivores, particularly green turtles Chelonia mydas, graze on tropical seagrasses worldwide and play a substantial role in determining the structure and function of these ecosystems.

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Many waterbodies undergo nutrient decline, called oligotrophication, globally, but a comprehensive dataset to understand ecosystem responses is lacking. The OLIGOTREND database comprises multi-decadal chlorophyll a and nutrient time series from rivers, lakes, and estuaries with 4.3 million observations from 1894 unique measurement locations. The database provides empirical evidence for oligotrophication responses with a spatial and temporal coverage that exceeds previous efforts.

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How communities of organisms come together has long fascinated scientists, with renewed interest in using functional and evolutionary patterns to infer mechanisms of community assembly. Ecological theory predicts that biotic interactions could lead to either divergence in the event of niche partitioning or convergence through the exclusion of competitively inferior species, but most macroecological studies attribute the latter to environmental influences.

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