Illuminating a Blind Spot in Digitalization -- Software Development in Sweden's Private and Public Sector

As Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen famously remarked in 2011, software is eating the world - becoming a pervasive invisible critical infrastructure. Data on the distribution of software use and development in society is scarce, but we compile results from two novel surveys to provide a fuller picture of the role software plays in the public and private sectors in Sweden, respectively. Three out of ten Swedish firms, across industry sectors, develop software in-house. The corresponding figure for Sweden's government agencies is four out of ten, i.e., the public sector should not be underestimated. The digitalization of society will continue, thus the demand for software developers will further increase. Many private firms report that the limited supply of software developers in Sweden is directly affecting their expansion plans. Based on our findings, we outline directions that need additional research to allow evidence-informed policy-making. We argue that such work should ideally be conducted by academic researchers and national statistics agencies in collaboration

Turning on the heat: ecological response to simulated warming in the sea

Significant warming has been observed in every ocean, yet our ability to predict the consequences of oceanic warming on marine biodiversity remains poor. Experiments have been severely limited because, until now, it has not been possible to manipulate seawater temperature in a consistent manner across a range of marine habitats. We constructed a "hot-plate'' system to directly examine ecological responses to elevated seawater temperature in a subtidal marine system. The substratum available for colonisation and overlying seawater boundary layer were warmed for 36 days, which resulted in greater biomass of marine organisms and a doubling of space coverage by a dominant colonial ascidian. The "hot-plate'' system will facilitate complex manipulations of temperature and multiple stressors in the field to provide valuable information on the response of individuals, populations and communities to environmental change in any aquatic habitat

Predicting ecosystem shifts requires new approaches that integrate the effects of climate change across entire systems.

Most studies that forecast the ecological consequences of climate change target a single species and a single life stage. Depending on climatic impacts on other life stages and on interacting species, however, the results from simple experiments may not translate into accurate predictions of future ecological change. Research needs to move beyond simple experimental studies and environmental envelope projections for single species towards identifying where ecosystem change is likely to occur and the drivers for this change. For this to happen, we advocate research directions that (i) identify the critical species within the target ecosystem, and the life stage(s) most susceptible to changing conditions and (ii) the key interactions between these species and components of their broader ecosystem. A combined approach using macroecology, experimentally derived data and modelling that incorporates energy budgets in life cycle models may identify critical abiotic conditions that disproportionately alter important ecological processes under forecasted climates

Regional-scale variability in the response of benthic macroinvertebrate assemblages to a marine heatwave

Extreme climatic events are predicted to increase in severity as a consequence of anthropogenic climate change. In marine ecosystems, the importance of marine heatwaves (MHWs)—discrete periods of anomalously high sea temperatures—is gaining recognition. In 2011, the highest-magnitude MHW ever recorded impacted the west coast of Australia (southeast Indian Ocean). The MHW was associated with widespread mortality of habitat-forming species, including corals and kelps, and structural changes in assemblages of macroalgae and fish. However, the responses of benthic macroinvertebrate assemblages have not yet been fully documented. Here, we resurveyed 2 subtidal habitat types (reef ‘flats’ and ‘slopes’) at 4 locations (spanning >800 km of coastline and >6° of latitude) during the period 1999-2015 to examine the effects of the 2011 MHW on herbivorous macroinvertebrates (i.e. sea urchins, gastropod molluscs). Responses to the MHW varied with latitude; at our warmest study location, abundances were severely depleted, whereas no effects were detected at the coolest location. Across the entire study region, subtle but significant shifts in assemblage structure were observed due to decreased abundances of more southerly-distributed species (i.e. ‘cool’ affinity) and increased abundances of several more northerly-distributed species (i.e. ‘warm’ affinity). The 2011 MHW has had profound effects on the marine biota off the west coast of Australia, across multiple trophic levels and taxonomic groups. Here, as in many other regions, contemporary warming events are superimposed onto gradual warming trends, increasing the likelihood of abrupt changes in ecosystem structure and functioning

Editorial: advances in understanding marine heatwaves and their impacts

© The Author(s), 2020. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Benthuysen, J. A., Oliver, E. C. J., Chen, K., & Wernberg, T. Editorial: advances in understanding marine heatwaves and their impacts. Frontiers in Marine Science, 7, (2020): 147, doi:10.3389/fmars.2020.00147.Editorial on the Research Topic Advances in Understanding Marine Heatwaves and Their Impacts In recent years, prolonged, extremely warm water events, known as marine heatwaves, have featured prominently around the globe with their disruptive consequences for marine ecosystems. Over the past decade, marine heatwaves have occurred from the open ocean to marginal seas and coastal regions, including the unprecedented 2011 Western Australia marine heatwave (Ningaloo Niño) in the eastern Indian Ocean (e.g., Pearce et al., 2011), the 2012 northwest Atlantic marine heatwave (Chen et al., 2014), the 2012 and 2015 Mediterranean Sea marine heatwaves (Darmaraki et al., 2019), the 2013/14 western South Atlantic (Rodrigues et al., 2019) and 2017 southwestern Atlantic marine heatwave (Manta et al., 2018), the persistent 2014–2016 “Blob” in the North Pacific (Bond et al., 2015; Di Lorenzo and Mantua, 2016), the 2015/16 marine heatwave spanning the southeastern tropical Indian Ocean to the Coral Sea (Benthuysen et al., 2018), and the Tasman Sea marine heatwaves in 2015/16 (Oliver et al., 2017) and 2017/18 (Salinger et al., 2019). These events have set new records for marine heatwave intensity, the temperature anomaly exceeding a climatology, and duration, the sustained period of extreme temperatures. We have witnessed the profound consequences of these thermal disturbances from acute changes to marine life to enduring impacts on species, populations, and communities (Smale et al., 2019). These marine heatwaves have spurred a diversity of research spanning the methodology of identifying and quantifying the events (e.g., Hobday et al., 2016) and their historical trends (Oliver et al., 2018), understanding their physical mechanisms and relationships with climate modes (e.g., Holbrook et al., 2019), climate projections (Frölicher et al., 2018), and understanding the biological impacts for organisms and ecosystem function and services (e.g., Smale et al., 2019). By using sea surface temperature percentiles, temperature anomalies can be quantified based on their local variability and account for the broad range of temperature regimes in different marine environments. For temperatures exceeding a 90th-percentile threshold beyond a period of 5-days, marine heatwaves can be classified into categories based on their intensity (Hobday et al., 2018). While these recent advances have provided the framework for understanding key aspects of marine heatwaves, a challenge lies ahead for effective integration of physical and biological knowledge for prediction of marine heatwaves and their ecological impacts. This Research Topic is motivated by the need to understand the mechanisms for how marine heatwaves develop and the biological responses to thermal stress events. This Research Topic is a collection of 18 research articles and three review articles aimed at advancing our knowledge of marine heatwaves within four themes. These themes include methods for detecting marine heatwaves, understanding their physical mechanisms, seasonal forecasting and climate projections, and ecological impacts.We thank the contributing authors, reviewers, and the editorial staff at Frontiers in Marine Science for their support in producing this issue. We thank the Marine Heatwaves Working Group (http://www.marineheatwaves.org/) for inspiration and discussions. This special issue stemmed from the session on Advances in Understanding Marine Heat Waves and Their Impacts at the 2018 Ocean Sciences meeting (Portland, USA)

Forecast ocean variability

The IPCC and policymakers need realistic regional projections of how the seas will respond to climate change in coming decades, write Daniela Schmidt and Philip Boyd

Herbivory drives kelp recruits into ‘hiding’ in a warm ocean climate

Assessing effects of herbivory across broad gradients of varying ocean climate conditions and over small spatial scales is crucial for understand- ing its influence on primary producers. Effects of her- bivory on the distribution and abundance of kelp re- cruits were examined experimentally at two regions under contrasting ocean climate. Specifically, the abundance and survivorship of kelp recruits and the abundance of macro-herbivores were compared be- tween a ‘cool’ and a ‘warm’ region in northern and central Portugal, respectively. In each region, the abundance of kelp recruits and the intensity of grazing were compared between habitats of different topography within reefs (open reef vs. crevices). Com- pared to the ‘warm’ region, the abundance of kelp re- cruits was 3.9 times greater in the ‘cool’ region, where 85% of recruits were found in open reef habitats. In contrast, 87% of recruits in the ‘warm’ region were re- stricted to crevices. The ‘warm’ region had 140 times greater abundances of sea urchins, 45 times more herbivorous fish and 4.1 times more grazing marks on kelp recruits than the ‘cool’ region. Grazing assays showed ca. 50 times higher rates of kelp biomass con- sumption, mainly by fishes, and zero survivorship of kelp recruits in the ‘warm’ relative to the ‘cool’ region. This study suggests both temperature and herbivores affect abundances of kelp recruits across latitudes, and demonstrates how herbivores affect their distri- bution at local scales, driving kelp recruits into ‘hiding’ in crevices under intense herbivory. Conse- quently, where net recruitment success is compro- mised by herbivory, the persistence of kelps will be contingent on availability of topographical refuges

The importance of testing multiple environmental factors in legume–insect research: replication, reviewers, and rebuttal

Investigating the impacts of predicted changes in our atmosphere and climate change on insect–plant interactions is a widely pursued area of research. To date, the majority of experimental studies have tested the impacts of single environmental factors on insect–plant interactions, but meta-analyses have clearly illustrated the importance of investigating multiple factors in tandem (Zvereva and Kozlov, 2006; Robinson et al., 2012). In particular, environmental change factors often interact with each other which can either strengthen or mitigate the effects of environmental factors acting alone (Robinson et al., 2012). For example, the positive effects of elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations (e [CO2]) on plant growth are stronger under high nitrogen (N) conditions compared to low N conditions (+ 32 and+ 19%, respectively; Robinson et al., 2012). Likewise, from the limited number of studies available, Robinson et al.(2012) showed that e [CO2] had different impacts on plant nitrogen, plant biomass, and secondary metabolites under elevated air temperature (eT) conditions. This does not invalidate single factor studies, of which we have published numerous examples, but this is an important consideration for making realistic predictions about how plants and insects will respond to future climates (Facey et al., 2014)

Predominant atmospheric and oceanic patterns during coastal marine heatwaves

As the mean temperatures of the worlds oceans increase, it is predicted that marine heatwaves (MHWs) will occur more frequently and with increased severity. However, it has been shown that variables other than increases in sea water temperature have been responsible for MHWs. To better understand these mechanisms driving MHWs we have utilized atmospheric (ERA-Interim) and oceanic (OISST, AVISO) data to examine the patterns around southern Africa during coastal (<400 m from the low water mark; measured in situ) MHWs. Nonmetric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) was first used to determine that the atmospheric and oceanic states during MHW are different from daily climatological states. Self-organizing maps (SOMs) were then used to cluster the MHW states into one of nine nodes to determine the predominant atmospheric and oceanic patterns present during these events. It was found that warmwater forced onto the coast via anomalous ocean circulation was the predominant oceanic pattern during MHWs. Warm atmospheric temperatures over the subcontinent during onshore or alongshore winds were the most prominent atmospheric patterns. Roughly one third of the MHWs were clustered into a node with no clear patterns, which implied that they were not forced by a recurring atmospheric or oceanic state that could be described by the SOManalysis. Because warm atmospheric and/or oceanic temperature anomalies were not the only pattern associated withMHWs, the current trend of a warming earth does not necessarily mean that MHWs will increase apace; however, aseasonal variability in wind and current patterns was shown to be central to the formation of coastal MHWs, meaning that where climate systems shift from historic records, increases in MHWs will likely occur