Cooling down the world oceans and the earth by enhancing the North Atlantic Ocean current

The world is going through intensive changes due to global warming. It is well known that the reduction in ice cover in the Arctic Ocean further contributes to increasing the atmospheric Arctic temperature due to the reduction of the albedo effect and increase in heat absorbed by the ocean’s surface. The Arctic ice cover also works like an insulation sheet, keeping the heat in the ocean from dissipating into the cold Arctic atmosphere. Increasing the salinity of the Arctic Ocean surface would allow the warmer and less salty North Atlantic Ocean current to flow on the surface of the Arctic Ocean considerably increasing the temperature of the Arctic atmosphere and release the ocean heat trapped under the ice. This paper argues that if the North Atlantic Ocean current could maintain the Arctic Ocean ice-free during the winter, the longwave radiation heat loss into space would be larger than the increase in heat absorption due to the albedo effect. This paper presents details of the fundamentals of the Arctic Ocean circulation and presents three possible approaches for increasing the salinity of the surface water of the Arctic Ocean. It then discusses that increasing the salinity of the Arctic Ocean would warm the atmosphere of the Arctic region, but cool down the oceans and possibly the Earth. However, it might take thousands of years for the effects of cooling the oceans to cool the global average atmospheric temperature

Pervasive gaps in Amazonian ecological research

Biodiversity loss is one of the main challenges of our time, and attempts to address it require a clear understanding of how ecological communities respond to environmental change across time and space. While the increasing availability of global databases on ecological communities has advanced our knowledge of biodiversity sensitivity to environmental changes, vast areas of the tropics remain understudied. In the American tropics, Amazonia stands out as the world's most diverse rainforest and the primary source of Neotropical biodiversity, but it remains among the least known forests in America and is often underrepresented in biodiversity databases. To worsen this situation, human-induced modifications may eliminate pieces of the Amazon's biodiversity puzzle before we can use them to understand how ecological communities are responding. To increase generalization and applicability of biodiversity knowledge, it is thus crucial to reduce biases in ecological research, particularly in regions projected to face the most pronounced environmental changes. We integrate ecological community metadata of 7,694 sampling sites for multiple organism groups in a machine learning model framework to map the research probability across the Brazilian Amazonia, while identifying the region's vulnerability to environmental change. 15%–18% of the most neglected areas in ecological research are expected to experience severe climate or land use changes by 2050. This means that unless we take immediate action, we will not be able to establish their current status, much less monitor how it is changing and what is being lost

Land use effects on the co-occurrence patterns of streams ichthyofauna in the eastern Amazon

In this manuscript, we aimed to answer: 1) which environmental and spatial processes are determinant for the patterns of co-occurrence of fish in Amazonian streams, and 2) which variables are responsible for the positive and negative associations between species pairs. For this, we sampled 32 Terra-Firme forest streams in a basin affected by different land uses in the eastern Amazon. In each stream, we measured environmental metrics for its physical characterization; estimated the percentage of land cover of the drainage network; and sampled the ichthyofauna. We also analyzed associations (positive or negative) between pairs of species and whether these associations were determined by physical habitat characteristics and the percentage of vegetation cover, spatial dispersal or biotic interactions, using a classical null model approach complemented by spatial tests and of environmental characteristics of the sites occupied by members of each pair of species. Most of the patterns of ichthyofauna co-occurrence occurred at random, composed mainly of rare species, which may be due to the specificity of these species or because the still forested and highly heterogeneous areas of the region may be acting as a mosaic, together with less aggressive land uses such as agriculture, generating these random pairs. Meanwhile, 32 species (41.03%) formed 613 non-random aggregated or segregated pairs (20.41% of the total pairs), composed mainly of species of intermediate frequency and abundance in the region and with different niches and guilds and determined by biotic interactions, environmental filters’ action and/or by limiting species dispersal