Seabirds reveal mercury distribution across the North Atlantic.

Mercury (Hg) is a heterogeneously distributed toxicant affecting wildlife and human health. Yet, the spatial distribution of Hg remains poorly documented, especially in food webs, even though this knowledge is essential to assess large-scale risk of toxicity for the biota and human populations. Here, we used seabirds to assess, at an unprecedented population and geographic magnitude and high resolution, the spatial distribution of Hg in North Atlantic marine food webs. To this end, we combined tracking data of 837 seabirds from seven different species and 27 breeding colonies located across the North Atlantic and Atlantic Arctic together with Hg analyses in feathers representing individual seabird contamination based on their winter distribution. Our results highlight an east-west gradient in Hg concentrations with hot spots around southern Greenland and the east coast of Canada and a cold spot in the Barents and Kara Seas. We hypothesize that those gradients are influenced by eastern (Norwegian Atlantic Current and West Spitsbergen Current) and western (East Greenland Current) oceanic currents and melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet. By tracking spatial Hg contamination in marine ecosystems and through the identification of areas at risk of Hg toxicity, this study provides essential knowledge for international decisions about where the regulation of pollutants should be prioritized.

Meeting Paris agreement objectives will temper seabird winter distribution shifts in the North Atlantic Ocean.

We explored the implications of reaching the Paris Agreement Objective of limiting global warming to <2°C for the future winter distribution of the North Atlantic seabird community. We predicted and quantified current and future winter habitats of five North Atlantic Ocean seabird species (Alle alle, Fratercula arctica, Uria aalge, Uria lomvia and Rissa tridactyla) using tracking data for ~1500 individuals through resource selection functions based on mechanistic modeling of seabird energy requirements, and a dynamic bioclimate envelope model of seabird prey. Future winter distributions were predicted to shift with climate change, especially when global warming exceed 2°C under a "no mitigation" scenario, modifying seabird wintering hotspots in the North Atlantic Ocean. Our findings suggest that meeting Paris agreement objectives will limit changes in seabird selected habitat location and size in the North Atlantic Ocean during the 21st century. We thereby provide key information for the design of adaptive marine-protected areas in a changing ocean.

Laser stabilization to a cryogenic fiber ring resonator.

The frequency stability of lasers is limited by thermal noise in state-of-the-art frequency references. Further improvement requires operation at cryogenic temperature. In this context, we investigate a fiber-based ring resonator. Our system exhibits a first-order temperature-insensitive point around 3.55K, much lower than that of crystalline silicon. The observed low sensitivity with respect to vibrations (<5⋅10-11m-1s2), temperature (-22(1)⋅10-9K-2), and pressure changes (4.2(2)⋅10-11mbar-2) makes our approach promising for future precision experiments.

Dynamical Decoupling of Spin Ensembles with Strong Anisotropic Interactions.

Ensembles of dopants have widespread applications in quantum technology. The miniaturization of corresponding devices is however hampered by dipolar interactions that reduce the coherence at increased dopant density. We theoretically and experimentally investigate this limitation. We find that dynamical decoupling can alleviate, but not fully eliminate, the decoherence in crystals with strong anisotropic spin-spin interactions that originate from an anisotropic g tensor. Our findings can be generalized to many quantum systems used for quantum sensing, microwave-to-optical conversion, and quantum memory.

Light-level geolocator analyses: A user's guide.

Light-level geolocator tags use ambient light recordings to estimate the whereabouts of an individual over the time it carried the device. Over the past decade, these tags have emerged as an important tool and have been used extensively for tracking animal migrations, most commonly small birds. Analysing geolocator data can be daunting to new and experienced scientists alike. Over the past decades, several methods with fundamental differences in the analytical approach have been developed to cope with the various caveats and the often complicated data. Here, we explain the concepts behind the analyses of geolocator data and provide a practical guide for the common steps encompassing most analyses - annotation of twilights, calibration, estimating and refining locations, and extraction of movement patterns - describing good practices and common pitfalls for each step. We discuss criteria for deciding whether or not geolocators can answer proposed research questions, provide guidance in choosing an appropriate analysis method and introduce key features of the newest open-source analysis tools. We provide advice for how to interpret and report results, highlighting parameters that should be reported in publications and included in data archiving. Finally, we introduce a comprehensive supplementary online manual that applies the concepts to several datasets, demonstrates the use of open-source analysis tools with step-by-step instructions and code and details our recommendations for interpreting, reporting and archiving.

Year-round spatiotemporal distribution pattern of a threatened sea duck species breeding on Kolguev Island, south-eastern Barents Sea.

BACKGROUND: The long-tailed duck (Clangula hyemalis) was categorized as ´Vulnerable` by the IUCN after a study revealed a rapid wintering population decline of 65% between 1992-1993 and 2007-2009 in the Baltic Sea. As knowledge about the European long-tailed duck's life cycle and movement ecology is limited, we investigate its year-round spatiotemporal distribution patterns. Specifically, we aimed to identify the wintering grounds, timing of migration and staging of this population via light-level geolocation. RESULTS: Of the 48 female long-tailed ducks tagged on Kolguev Island (western Russian Arctic), 19 were recaptured to obtain data. After breeding and moulting at freshwater lakes, ducks went out to sea around Kolguev Island and to marine waters ranging from the White Sea to Novaya Zemlya Archipelago for 33 ± 10 days. After a rapid autumn migration, 18 of 19 birds spent their winter in the Baltic Sea and one bird in the White Sea, where they stayed for 212 ± 3 days. There, they used areas known to host long-tailed ducks, but areas differed among individuals. After a rapid spring migration in mid-May, the birds spent 23 ± 3 days at sea in coastal areas between the White Sea and Kolguev Island, before returning to their freshwater breeding habitats in June. CONCLUSIONS: The Baltic Sea represents the most important wintering area for female long-tailed ducks from Kolguev Island. Important spring and autumn staging areas include the Barents Sea and the White Sea. Climate change will render these habitats more exposed to human impacts in the form of fisheries, marine traffic and oil exploitation in near future. Threats that now operate in the wintering areas may thus spread to the higher latitude staging areas and further increase the pressure on long-tailed ducks.

Photon Noise Suppression by a Built-in Feedback Loop.

Visionary quantum photonic networks need transform-limited single photons on demand. Resonance fluorescence on a quantum dot provides the access to a solid-state single photon source, where the environment is unfortunately the source of spin and charge noise that leads to fluctuations of the emission frequency and destroys the needed indistinguishability. We demonstrate a built-in stabilization approach for the photon stream, which relies solely on charge carrier dynamics of a two-dimensional hole gas inside a micropillar structure. The hole gas is fed by hole tunneling from field-ionized excitons and influences the energetic position of the excitonic transition by changing the local electric field at the position of the quantum dot. The standard deviation of the photon noise is suppressed by nearly 50% (noise power reduction of 6 dB) and it works in the developed micropillar structure for frequencies up to 1 kHz. This built-in feedback loop represents an easy way for photon noise suppression in large arrays of single photon emitters and promises to reach higher bandwidth by device optimization.

Earlier colony arrival but no trend in hatching timing in two congeneric seabirds (Uria spp.) across the North Atlantic.

A global analysis recently showed that seabird breeding phenology (as the timing of egg-laying and hatching) does not, on average, respond to temperature changes or advance with time (Keogan et al. 2018 Nat. Clim. Change8, 313-318). This group, the most threatened of all birds, is therefore prone to spatio-temporal mismatches with their food resources. Yet, other aspects of the breeding phenology may also have a marked influence on breeding success, such as the arrival date of adults at the breeding site following winter migration. Here, we used a large tracking dataset of two congeneric seabirds breeding in 14 colonies across 18° latitudes, to show that arrival date at the colony was highly variable between colonies and species (ranging 80 days) and advanced 1.4 days/year while timing of egg-laying remained unchanged, resulting in an increasing pre-laying duration between 2009 and 2018. Thus, we demonstrate that potentially not all components of seabird breeding phenology are insensitive to changing environmental conditions.

Choose Your Poison-Space-Use Strategy Influences Pollutant Exposure in Barents Sea Polar Bears.

Variation in space-use is common within mammal populations. In polar bears, Ursus maritimus, some individuals follow the sea ice (offshore bears) whereas others remain nearshore yearlong (coastal bears). We studied pollutant exposure in relation to space-use patterns (offshore vs coastal) in adult female polar bears from the Barents Sea equipped with satellite collars (2000-2014, n = 152). First, we examined the differences in home range (HR) size and position, body condition, and diet proxies (nitrogen and carbon stable isotopes, n = 116) between offshore and coastal space-use. Second, we investigated how HR, space-use, body condition, and diet were related to plasma concentrations of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) ( n = 113), perfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs; n = 92), and hydroxylated-PCBs ( n = 109). Offshore females were in better condition and had a more specialized diet than did coastal females. PCBs, OCPs, and hydroxylated-PCB concentrations were not related to space-use strategy, yet PCB concentrations increased with increasing latitude, and hydroxylated-PCB concentrations were positively related to HR size. PFAS concentrations were 30-35% higher in offshore bears compared to coastal bears and also increased eastward. On the basis of the results we conclude that space-use of Barents Sea female polar bears influences their pollutant exposure, in particular plasma concentrations of PFAS.

Spectral multiplexing of telecom emitters with stable transition frequency.

In a quantum network, coherent emitters can be entangled over large distances using photonic channels. In solid-state devices, the required efficient light-emitter interface can be implemented by confining the light in nanophotonic structures. However, fluctuating charges and magnetic moments at the nearby interface then lead to spectral instability of the emitters. Here, we avoid this limitation when enhancing the photon emission up to 70(12)-fold using a Fabry-Perot resonator with an embedded 19-micrometer-thin crystalline membrane, in which we observe around 100 individual erbium emitters. In long-term measurements, they exhibit an exceptional spectral stability of <0.2 megahertz that is limited by the coupling to surrounding nuclear spins. We further implement spectrally multiplexed coherent control and find an optical coherence time of 0.11(1) milliseconds, approaching the lifetime limit of 0.3 milliseconds for the strongest-coupled emitters. Our results constitute an important step toward frequency-multiplexed quantum-network nodes operating directly at a telecommunication wavelength.

Telemetry data of red king crab (Paralithodes camtschaticus) migrations in a north Norwegian fjord.

Acoustic telemetry allows for high-resolution, long-term tracking of moving animals. Here, we describe data on the movement patterns of 37 adult red king crab (RKC, Paralithodes camtschaticus) obtained by means of acoustic telemetry. Acoustically tagged RKC were released in Gamvikfjorden (Sørøya, northern Norway) the 24th of May 2016 and tracked until the 1st of November 2016. Individual crabs resided in the fjord for 1-162 days and were recorded 16 - 11,501 times (mean number of records per crab: 2,851). In total, the data set consist of 105,484 pairs of accurate spatio-temporal coordinates. The acoustic receivers (n = 38) deployed close to the seabed were integrated with temperature sensors that continuously recorded the ambient seawater temperature, resulting in 174,154 water temperature recordings. These novel tracking data can be used to investigate the species' migratory behaviour, spatio-temporal habitat selection, and the relative role of their environment and their possible food sources. Moreover, the high-resolution seawater temperature dataset may serve independently as input data in physical-oceanographic models of this sub-Arctic sill fjord.

Advanced APCVD-processes for high-temperature grown crystalline silicon thin film solar cells.

Crystalline silicon thin film (cSiTF) solar cells based on the epitaxial wafer-equivalent (EpiWE) concept combine advantages of wafer-based and thin film silicon solar cells. In this paper two processes beyond the standard process sequence for cSiTF cell fabrication are described. The first provides an alternative to wet chemical saw damage removal by chemical vapor etching (CVE) with hydrogen chloride in-situ prior to epitaxial deposition. This application decreases the number of process and handling steps. Solar cells fabricated with different etching processes achieved efficiencies up to 14.7%. 1300 degrees C etching temperature led to better cell results than 1200 degrees C. The second investigated process aims for an improvement of cell efficiency by implementation of a reflecting interlayer between substrate and active solar cell. Some characteristics of epitaxial lateral overgrowth (ELO) of a patterned silicon dioxide film in a lab-type reactor constructed at Fraunhofer ISE are described and first solar cell results are presented.

North Atlantic winter cyclones starve seabirds.

Each winter, the North Atlantic Ocean is the stage for numerous cyclones, the most severe ones leading to seabird mass-mortality events called "winter wrecks."1-3 During these, thousands of emaciated seabird carcasses are washed ashore along European and North American coasts. Winter cyclones can therefore shape seabird population dynamics4,5 by affecting survival rates as well as the body condition of surviving individuals and thus their future reproduction. However, most often the geographic origins of impacted seabirds and the causes of their deaths remain unclear.6 We performed the first ocean-basin scale assessment of cyclone exposure in a seabird community by coupling winter tracking data for ∼1,500 individuals of five key North Atlantic seabird species (Alle alle, Fratercula arctica, Uria aalge, Uria lomvia, and Rissa tridactyla) and cyclone locations. We then explored the energetic consequences of different cyclonic conditions using a mechanistic bioenergetics model7 and tested the hypothesis that cyclones dramatically increase seabird energy requirements. We demonstrated that cyclones of high intensity impacted birds from all studied species and breeding colonies during winter but especially those aggregating in the Labrador Sea, the Davis Strait, the surroundings of Iceland, and the Barents Sea. Our broad-scale analyses suggested that cyclonic conditions do not increase seabird energy requirements, implying that they die because of the unavailability of their prey and/or their inability to feed during cyclones. Our study provides essential information on seabird cyclone exposure in a context of marked cyclone regime changes due to global warming.8.

Seasonal variation of mercury contamination in Arctic seabirds: A pan-Arctic assessment.

Mercury (Hg) is a natural trace element found in high concentrations in top predators, including Arctic seabirds. Most current knowledge about Hg concentrations in Arctic seabirds relates to exposure during the summer breeding period when researchers can easily access seabirds at colonies. However, the few studies focused on winter have shown higher Hg concentrations during the non-breeding period than breeding period in several tissues. Hence, improving knowledge about Hg exposure during the non-breeding period is crucial to understanding the threats and risks encountered by these species year-round. We used feathers of nine migratory alcid species occurring at high latitudes to study bird Hg exposure during both the breeding and non-breeding periods. Overall, Hg concentrations during the non-breeding period were ~3 times higher than during the breeding period. In addition, spatial differences were apparent within and between the Atlantic and Pacific regions. While Hg concentrations during the non-breeding period were ~9 times and ~3 times higher than during the breeding period for the West and East Atlantic respectively, Hg concentrations in the Pacific during the non-breeding period were only ~1.7 times higher than during the breeding period. In addition, individual Hg concentrations during the non-breeding period for most of the seabird colonies were above 5 µg g-1 dry weight (dw), which is considered to be the threshold at which deleterious effects are observed, suggesting that some breeding populations might be vulnerable to non-breeding Hg exposure. Since wintering area locations, and migration routes may influence seasonal Hg concentrations, it is crucial to improve our knowledge about spatial ecotoxicology to fully understand the risks associated with Hg contamination in Arctic seabirds.

A probabilistic algorithm to process geolocation data.

BACKGROUND: The use of light level loggers (geolocators) to understand movements and distributions in terrestrial and marine vertebrates, particularly during the non-breeding period, has increased dramatically in recent years. However, inferring positions from light data is not straightforward, often relies on assumptions that are difficult to test, or includes an element of subjectivity. RESULTS: We present an intuitive framework to compute locations from twilight events collected by geolocators from different manufacturers. The procedure uses an iterative forward step selection, weighting each possible position using a set of parameters that can be specifically selected for each analysis. The approach was tested on data from two wide-ranging seabird species - black-browed albatross Thalassarche melanophris and wandering albatross Diomedea exulans - tracked at Bird Island, South Georgia, during the two most contrasting periods of the year in terms of light regimes (solstice and equinox). Using additional information on travel speed, sea surface temperature and land avoidance, our approach was considerably more accurate than the traditional threshold method (errors reduced to medians of 185 km and 145 km for solstice and equinox periods, respectively). CONCLUSIONS: The algorithm computes stable results with uncertainty estimates, including around the equinoxes, and does not require calibration of solar angles. Accuracy can be increased by assimilating information on travel speed and behaviour, as well as environmental data. This framework is available through the open source R package probGLS, and can be applied in a wide range of biologging studies.

The world's northernmost harbour seal population-how many are there?

This study presents the first abundance estimate for the world's northernmost harbour seal (Phoca vitulina) population, which resides in Svalbard, Norway, based on three digital stereoscopic photographic surveys conducted in 2009 and 2010. The counts from these high resolution 3D images were combined with a novel method for estimating correction factors for animals that were in the water at the time of the surveys, in which extensive behavioural data from radio-tagged harbour seals were used together with age distribution data to estimate the proportion of seals of various age and sex classes hauled out at the times of the surveys. To detect possible seasonal shifts in age distribution between surveys, lengths of hauled out seals were measured from the stereoscopic images. No body-length differences were detected between the surveys; but, this may be due to a high degree of sexual dimorphism exhibited in this population. Applying the modelled correction factors, a total of 1888 (95% CI: 1660-3023), 1742 (1381-3549) and 1812 (1656-4418) harbour seals were estimated for the surveys flown on 01 August 2009, 01 August 2010 and 19 August 2010, respectively. The similarity between the three survey estimates (despite significant differences in the number of animals actually counted on the photos from each survey effort) suggests that the variation in numbers of hauled out seals is reasonably accurately adjusted for by the haul-out probability model. The low population size, the limited spatial distribution of the population and its reduced genetic diversity make this population vulnerable to chance events, such as disease epidemics.