Expanding ocean food production under climate change.

As the human population and demand for food grow1, the ocean will be called on to provide increasing amounts of seafood. Although fisheries reforms and advances in offshore aquaculture (hereafter 'mariculture') could increase production2, the true future of seafood depends on human responses to climate change3. Here we investigated whether coordinated reforms in fisheries and mariculture could increase seafood production per capita under climate change. We find that climate-adaptive fisheries reforms will be necessary but insufficient to maintain global seafood production per capita, even with aggressive reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. However, the potential for sustainable mariculture to increase seafood per capita is vast and could increase seafood production per capita under all but the most severe emissions scenario. These increases are contingent on fisheries reforms, continued advances in feed technology and the establishment of effective mariculture governance and best practices. Furthermore, dramatically curbing emissions is essential for reducing inequities, increasing reform efficacy and mitigating risks unaccounted for in our analysis. Although climate change will challenge the ocean's ability to meet growing food demands, the ocean could produce more food than it does currently through swift and ambitious action to reduce emissions, reform capture fisheries and expand sustainable mariculture operations.

Impacts of livestock grazing on the probability of burning in wildfires vary by region and vegetation type in California.

Wildfire activity has recently increased in California, impacting ecosystems and human well-being. California's rangelands are complex social-ecological systems composed of multiple ecosystems and the people who live and work in them. Livestock grazing has been proposed as a tool for reducing wildfire activity. Here, we explore how grazing affects wildfire at large spatial scales, assessing burn probability on rangelands with different grazing levels. We collected grazing data by surveying 140 large private landowners in three social-ecological regions: California's North Bay, Central Coast, and Central Valley and Foothills. Using pre-regression matching and mixed effects regression, we calculate the burn probability from 2001 to 2017 in points sampled from grazed and ungrazed properties in each region in grasslands, shrub/scrublands, and forests. We find that in the Central Coast and North Bay, annual burn probability decreases as stocking levels increase across all vegetation types, with reductions of 0.008-0.036. In the Central Valley and Foothills, the relationship is complex, with burn probability increasing over some grazing levels and variations in the effect of higher stocking densities. Our results indicate that livestock grazing may reduce annual burn probability in some regions and ecosystems in California, providing the first large-scale assessment of this relationship.

Sovereign states in the Caribbean have lower social-ecological vulnerability to coral bleaching than overseas territories.

Coral reef social-ecological systems worldwide face major impacts from climate change, and spatial variation in vulnerability is driven by differential exposure to climatic threats, ecological and socio-economic sensitivity to those threats, ecological recovery potential, and socio-economic adaptive capacity. We assess variation in social-ecological vulnerability to climate change-induced coral bleaching, specifically for reef-based fisheries and tourism, of islands throughout the insular Caribbean, thus providing the first region-wide quantitative analysis of island-scale social-ecological vulnerability to coral bleaching. We show that different components of vulnerability have distinct spatial patterns and that variability in overall vulnerability is driven more by socio-economic than ecological components. Importantly, we find that sovereign islands are less vulnerable on average than overseas territories and that the presence of fisheries management regulations is a significant predictor of adaptive capacity and socio-economic sensitivity, with important implications for island-level governance and policies to reduce climate vulnerability.

Balancing multiple management objectives as climate change transforms ecosystems.

As climate change facilitates significant and persistent ecological transformations, managing ecosystems according to historical baseline conditions may no longer be feasible. The Resist-Accept-Direct (RAD) framework can guide climate-informed management interventions, but in its current implementations RAD has not yet fully accounted for potential tradeoffs between multiple - sometimes incompatible - ecological and societal goals. Key scientific challenges for informing climate-adapted ecosystem management include (i) advancing our predictive understanding of transformations and their socioecological impacts under novel climate conditions, and (ii) incorporating uncertainty around trajectories of ecological change and the potential success of RAD interventions into management decisions. To promote the implementation of RAD, practitioners can account for diverse objectives within just and equitable participatory decision-making processes.

Evaluating the dual target binding capabilities of immobilized aptamers using flow cytometry.

In the current study, the authors quantify the binding activity of particle-immobilized DNA aptamers to their nucleotide and non-nucleotide targets. For the purposes of this work, DNA and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) binding analysis was carried out for VEGF-binding aptamers and compared to that of an ampicillin-binding aptamer as well as a non-aptamer DNA probe. Binding analysis followed incubation of one target type, coincubation of both DNA and VEGF targets, and serial incubations of each target type. Moreover, recovery of aptamer binding activity following displacement of the DNA target from aptamer:DNA duplexes was also explored. Flow cytometry served as the quantitative tool to directly monitor binding events of both the DNA target and protein target to the various aptamer and non-aptamer functionalized particles. The current work demonstrates how processing steps such as annealing and binding history of particle-immobilized aptamers can affect subsequent binding activity. To this end, the authors demonstrate the ability to fully recover DNA target binding activity capabilities and to partially recover protein target binding activity.