0000000000041516
AUTHOR
Michael L. Zettler
Ecotoxicity assessment of natural attenuation effects at a historical dumping site in the western Baltic Sea.
During the late 1950s and early 1960s of the past century, industrial waste material highly enriched in various contaminants (heavy metals, PAHs) was dumped in the inner Mecklenburg Bay, western Baltic Sea. Large-scale shifts in the spatial distribution of heavy metals in surface sediments were mapped by geochemical monitoring in the mid-1980s and 12 years later in 1997. A further study in 2001 was designed to investigate the small-scale spatial distribution of contaminants inside, on top of, and around the historical dumping ground and to examine possible effects to benthic organisms (Arctica islandica, microbiological toxicity tests). The site is located within an area characterized by a …
Mn/Ca in shells of Arctica islandica (Baltic Sea) – A potential proxy for ocean hypoxia?
Oxygen depletion threatens an increasing number of shallow water environments, specifically habitats below the seasonal halocline in coastal settings of the Baltic Sea. To understand the natural variations of dissolved oxygen levels on seasonal and inter-annual time-scales prior to the instrumental era, high-resolution archives are urgently required. The present study evaluates the potential use of Mn/Ca values in shells of the bivalve, Arctica islandica to infer concentrations of past dissolved oxygen concentrations. This study is based on laser ablation – inductively coupled plasma – mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) data of six contemporaneous specimens and demonstrates that background varia…
BioTIME: A database of biodiversity time series for the Anthropocene
Abstract Motivation The BioTIME database contains raw data on species identities and abundances in ecological assemblages through time. These data enable users to calculate temporal trends in biodiversity within and amongst assemblages using a broad range of metrics. BioTIME is being developed as a community-led open-source database of biodiversity time series. Our goal is to accelerate and facilitate quantitative analysis of temporal patterns of biodiversity in the Anthropocene. Main types of variables included The database contains 8,777,413 species abundance records, from assemblages consistently sampled for a minimum of 2 years, which need not necessarily be consecutive. In addition, th…