Global warming is a nonlinear process, and temperature may increase in a stepwise manner. Periods of abrupt warming can trigger persistent changes in the state of ecosystems, also called regime shifts. The responses of organisms to abrupt warming and associated regime shifts can be unlike responses to periods of slow or moderate change. Understanding of nonlinearity in the biological responses to ...

Climate change and other human activities are causing profound effects on marine ecosystem productivity. We show that the breeding success of seabirds is tracking hemispheric differences in ocean warming and human impacts, with the strongest effects on fish-eating, surface-foraging species in the north. Hemispheric asymmetry suggests the need for ocean management at hemispheric scales. For the north, ...

In migratory birds, environmental conditions in both breeding and non-breeding areas may affect adult survival rates and hence be significant drivers of demographic processes. In seabirds, poor knowledge of their true distribution outside the breeding season, however, has severely limited such studies. This study explored how annual adult survival rates of black-legged kittiwakes Rissa tridactyla ...

Predicting the impact of global climate change on the biosphere has become one of the most important efforts in ecology. Ecosystems worldwide are changing rapidly as a consequence of global warming, yet our understanding of the consequences of these changes on populations is limited. The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) has been used as a proxy for “climate” in several ecological studies, but this ...