Characterizing the Natural System: Toward Sustained, Integrated Coastal Ocean Acidification Observing Networks to Facilitate Resource Management and Decision Support

Coastal ocean ecosystems have always served human populations they provide food security, livelihoods, coastal protection, and defense. Ocean acidification is a global threat to these ecosystem services, particularly when other local and regional stressors combine with it to jeopardize coastal health. Monitoring efforts call for a coordinated global approach toward sustained, integrated coastal ocean health observing networks to address the region-specific mix of factors while also adhering to global ocean acidification observing network principles to facilitate comparison among regions for increased utility and understanding. Here, we generalize guidelines for scoping and designing regional coastal ocean acidification observing networks and provide examples of existing efforts. While challenging in the early stages of coordinating the design and prioritizing the implementation Of these observing networks, it is essential to actively engage all of the relevant stakeholder groups from the outset, including private industries, public agencies, regulatory bodies, decision makers, and the general public. The long-term sustainability of these critical observing networks will rely on leveraging of resources and the strength of partnerships across the consortium of stakeholders and those implementing coastal ocean health observing networks

Slower recovery in space before collapse of connected populations

Slower recovery from perturbations near a tipping point and its indirect signatures in fluctuation patterns have been suggested to foreshadow catastrophes in a wide variety of systems. Recent studies of populations in the field and in the laboratory have used time-series data to confirm some of the theoretically predicted early warning indicators, such as an increase in recovery time or in the size and timescale of fluctuations. However, the predictive power of temporal warning signals is limited by the demand for long-term observations. Large-scale spatial data are more accessible, but the performance of warning signals in spatially extended systems needs to be examined empirically. Here we use spatially extended yeast populations, an experimental system with a fold bifurcation (tipping point), to evaluate early warning signals based on spatio-temporal fluctuations and to identify a novel spatial warning indicator. We found that two leading indicators based on fluctuations increased before collapse of connected populations; however, the magnitudes of the increases were smaller than those observed in isolated populations, possibly because local variation is reduced by dispersal. Furthermore, we propose a generic indicator based on deterministic spatial patterns, which we call ‘recovery length’. As the spatial counterpart of recovery time, recovery length is the distance necessary for connected populations to recover from spatial perturbations. In our experiments, recovery length increased substantially before population collapse, suggesting that the spatial scale of recovery can provide a superior warning signal before tipping points in spatially extended systems.United States. National Institutes of Health (NIH R00 GM085279-02)United States. National Institutes of Health (NIH DP2)Alfred P. Sloan FoundationNational Science Foundation (U.S.

Ultra-diffuse hydrothermal venting supports Fe-oxidizing bacteria and massive umber deposition at 5000 m off Hawaii

© International Society for Microbial Ecology, 2011. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in The ISME Journal 5 (2011): 1748–1758, doi:10.1038/ismej.2011.48.A novel hydrothermal field has been discovered at the base of Lōihi Seamount, Hawaii, at 5000 mbsl. Geochemical analyses demonstrate that ‘FeMO Deep’, while only 0.2 °C above ambient seawater temperature, derives from a distal, ultra-diffuse hydrothermal source. FeMO Deep is expressed as regional seafloor seepage of gelatinous iron- and silica-rich deposits, pooling between and over basalt pillows, in places over a meter thick. The system is capped by mm to cm thick hydrothermally derived iron-oxyhydroxide- and manganese-oxide-layered crusts. We use molecular analyses (16S rDNA-based) of extant communities combined with fluorescent in situ hybridizations to demonstrate that FeMO Deep deposits contain living iron-oxidizing Zetaproteobacteria related to the recently isolated strain Mariprofundus ferroxydans. Bioenergetic calculations, based on in-situ electrochemical measurements and cell counts, indicate that reactions between iron and oxygen are important in supporting chemosynthesis in the mats, which we infer forms a trophic base of the mat ecosystem. We suggest that the biogenic FeMO Deep hydrothermal deposit represents a modern analog for one class of geological iron deposits known as ‘umbers’ (for example, Troodos ophilolites, Cyprus) because of striking similarities in size, setting and internal structures.Funding has been provided by the NSF Microbial Observatories Program (KJE, DE, BT, HS and CM), by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (KJE), the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences at the University of Southern California (KJE) and by the NASA Astrobiology Institute (KJE, DE)

Recovery of Manganese from Scrap Batteries of Mobile Phones

Present work is focused on the recovery of Mn as a value added product from the leach liquor of scrap lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) of mobile phones by the method of precipitation. The LIBs were crushed and beneficiated by wet scrubbing method to separate cathodic material, plastic and metallic parts. The cathodic material was found to contain 11.3% Mn, 10% Co, 2.4% Cu and 2.4% Li. The cathodic material was processed for leaching under the optimized condition developed by our group at CSIR-NML. Solvent extraction method was used to extract acid using organic extractant Tris(2-ethylhexyl)amine (TEHA) in order to reduce the consumption of alkali required during precipitation studies. The acid free leach liquor was subjected to purification for removal of Fe, Li, Cu and Co as precipitate at different pH. Systematic precipitation studies were carried in batch and continuous mode to recover Mn as Mn(OH)2 at pH *10 which was further roasted at 450 °C for 4 h to get pure Mn3O4