The connectivity between epigean and cave habitats is crucial for maintaining invertebrate communities once it can facilitate faunal movement, organic resource supply, and environmental stability. The study aimed to investigate how some spatial and temporal variations in environmental factors within caves and epigean habitats influence invertebrate species richness and composition. We found a notable difference in invertebrate species richness and composition between cave and epigean environments and between cave lithologies. Moisture and temperature significantly influenced species composition across lithologies and epigean and hypogean environments. Cave microclimatic emerged as a critical factor influencing cave fauna. The dissimilarities between epigean and cave environments underscore the selective pressures imposed by caves, challenging species to overcome such environmental filters. Despite epigean environments offering more significant variability in conditions and resources, the findings highlight the importance of local ecological context and specific situations in shaping invertebrate communities. Furthermore, spatial variability within caves emphasises the necessity for a nuanced approach to conservation, considering the heterogeneity of habitats within each cave system. The study contributes to understanding the relationship between caves and their surrounding areas, emphasising the need for tailored conservation strategies that account for regional and cave-specific factors in the context of global environmental changes.

This article explores how the models of medical risk from radiation established in the aftermath of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are insufficient for understanding the risks faced by people in contaminated environments like Fukushima. These models focus exclusively on levels of external radiation, while the risk faced by people in areas affected by radioactive fallout comes from internalizing fallout particles. These models have helped to obscure the health impacts over the last 76 years of those exposed to fallout, from the people who experienced the Black Rain in Hiroshima, to the global hibakusha exposed through nuclear testing, production and accidents, and now to those living where the plumes deposited radiation in Fukushima.

Open data promises various benefits, including stimulating innovation, improving transparency and public decision-making, and enhancing the reproducibility of scientific research. Nevertheless, numerous studies have highlighted myriad challenges related to preparing, disseminating, processing, and reusing open data, with newer studies revealing similar issues to those identified a decade prior. Several researchers have proposed the open data ecosystem (ODE) as a lens for studying and devising interventions to address these issues. Since actors in the ecosystem are individually and collectively impacted by the sustainability of the ecosystem, all have a role in tackling the challenges in the ODE. This paper asks what the contributions of open data intermediaries may be in addressing these challenges. Open data intermediaries are third-party actors providing specialized resources and capabilities to (i) enhance the supply, flow, and/or use of open data and/or (ii) strengthen the relationships among various open data stakeholders. They are critical in ensuring the flow of resources within the ODE. Through semi-structured interviews and a validation exercise in the European Union context, this study explores the potential contribution of open data intermediaries and the specific ODE challenges they may address. This study identified 20 potential contributions, addressing 27 challenges. The findings of this study pave the way for further inquiry into the internal incentives (viable business models) and external incentives (policies and regulations) to direct the contributions of open data intermediaries toward addressing challenges in the ODE.

Systems change can help to address sustainability challenges and interventions at deep leverage points of a system can be applied to do so. By studying 9 sustainable entrepreneurial businesses, this paper looked at how entrepreneurial firms used their business to intervene at deep leverage points to facilitate systems change. We then proposed how deep leverage points can be operationalized by developing an approach for sustainable business model innovation and how entrepreneurs can consciously target leverage points when designing their business models to influence sustainable systems change.

To inform water quality monitoring techniques and modeling at coastal research sites, this study investigated seasonality and trends in coastal lagoons on the eastern shore of Virginia, USA. Seasonality was quantified with harmonic analysis of low-frequency time-series, approximately 30 years of quarterly sampled data at thirteen mainland, lagoon, and ocean inlet sites, along with 4–6 years of high-frequency, 15-min resolution sonde data at two mainland sites. Temperature, dissolved oxygen, and apparent oxygen utilization (AOU) seasonality were dominated by annual harmonics, while salinity and chlorophyll-a exhibited mixed annual and semi-annual harmonics. Mainland sites had larger seasonal amplitudes and higher peak summer values for temperature, chlorophyll-a and AOU, likely from longer water residence times, shallower waters, and proximity to marshes and uplands. Based on the statistical subsampling of high-frequency data, one to several decades of low-frequency data (at quarterly sampling) were needed to quantify the climatological seasonal cycle within specified confidence intervals. Statistically significant decadal warming and increasing chlorophyll-a concentrations were found at a sub-set of mainland sites, with no distinct geographic patterns for other water quality trends. The analysis highlighted challenges in detecting long-term trends in coastal water quality at sites sampled at low frequency with large seasonal and interannual variability.

Aquatic ecosystems - lakes, ponds and streams - are hotspots of biodiversity in the cold and arid environment of Continental Antarctica. Environmental change is expected to increasingly alter Antarctic aquatic ecosystems and modify the physical characteristics and interactions within the habitats that they support. Here, we describe physical and biological features of the peripheral ‘moat’ of a closed-basin Antarctic lake. These moats mediate connectivity amongst streams, lake and soils. We highlight the cyclical moat transition from a frozen winter state to an active open-water summer system, through refreeze as winter returns. Summer melting begins at the lakebed, initially creating an ice-constrained lens of liquid water in November, which swiftly progresses upwards, creating open water in December. Conversely, freezing progresses slowly from the water surface downwards, with water at 1 m bottom depth remaining liquid until May. Moats support productive, diverse benthic communities that are taxonomically distinct from those under the adjacent permanent lake ice. We show how ion ratios suggest that summer exchange occurs amongst moats, streams, soils and sub-ice lake water, perhaps facilitated by within-moat density-driven convection. Moats occupy a small but dynamic area of lake habitat, are disproportionately affected by recent lake-level rises and may thus be particularly vulnerable to hydrological change.

The chemistry of Al transformation has been well documented, though little is known about the mechanisms of structural perturbation of Al precipitates by carbonates at a molecular level. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the structural perturbation of Al precipitates formed under the influence of carbonates. Initial carbonate/Al molar ratios (MRs) used were 0, 0.1, and 0.5 after aging for 32 days, then the samples were analyzed by X-ray absorption near edge structure spectroscopy (XANES), X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier-transform infrared absorption spectroscopy (FTIR), and chemical analysis. The XRD data were in accord with the FTIR results, which revealed that as the carbonate/Al MR was increased from 0 to 0.1, carbonate preferentially retarded the formation of gibbsite and had relatively little effect on the formation of bayerite. As the carbonate/Al MR was increased to 0.5, however, the crystallization of both gibbsite and bayerite was completely inhibited. The impact of carbonate on the nature of Al precipitates was also evident in the increase of adsorbed water and inorganic C contents with increasing carbonate/Al MR. The Al K- and L- edge XANES data provide the first evidence illustrating the change in the coordination number of Al from 6-fold to mixed 6- and 4-fold coordination in the structural network of short-range ordered (SRO) Al precipitates formed under the increasing perturbation of carbonate. The fluorescence yield spectra of the O K-edge show that the intensity of the peak at 534.5 eV assigned to σ* transitions of Al-O and O-H bonding decreased with increasing carbonate/Al MR. The XANES data, along with the evidence from XRD, FTIR, and chemical analysis showed clearly that carbonate caused the alteration of the coordination nature of the Al-O bonding through perturbation of the atomic bonding and structural configuration of Al hydroxides by complexation with Al in the SRO network of Al precipitates. The surface reactivity of an Al-O bond is related to its covalency and coordination geometry. The present findings were, therefore, of fundamental significance in understanding the low-temperature geochemistry of Al and its impacts on the transformation, transport, and fate of nutrients and pollutants in the ecosystem.

To harness the promises of digital transformation, different players take different paths. Departing from corporate-driven (e.g., the United States) and state-led (e.g., China) approaches, in various documents, the European Union states its goal to establish a citizen-centric data ecosystem. However, it remains contentious the extent to which the envisioned digital single market can enable the creation of public value and empower citizens. As an alternative, in this article, we argue in favor of a fair data ecosystem, defined as an approach capable of representing and keep in balance the data interests of all actors, while maintain a collective outlook. We build such ecosystem around data commons—as a third path to market and state approaches to the managing of resources—coupled with open data (OD) frameworks and spatial data infrastructures (SDIs). Indeed, based on literature, we claim that these three regimes complement each other, with OD and SDIs supplying infrastructures and institutionalization to data commons’ limited replicability and scalability. This creates the preconditions for designing the main roles, rules, and mechanisms of a data republic, as a possible enactment of a fair data ecosystem. While outlining here its main traits, the testing of the data republic model is open for further research.

Since the 1980s, the existence of one or more extinction events in the late Ediacaran has been the subject of debate. Discussion surrounding these events has intensified in the last decade, in concert with efforts to understand drivers of global change over the Ediacaran–Cambrian transition and the appearance of the more modern-looking Phanerozoic biosphere. In this paper we review the history of thought and work surrounding late Ediacaran extinctions, with a particular focus on the last 5 years of paleontological, geochemical, and geochronological research. We consider the extent to which key questions have been answered, and pose new questions which will help to characterize drivers of environmental and biotic change. A key challenge for future work will be the calculation of extinction intensities that account for limited sampling, the duration of Ediacaran ‘assemblage’ zones, and the preponderance of taxa restricted to a single ‘assemblage’; without these data, the extent to which Ediacaran bioevents represent genuine mass extinctions comparable to the ‘Big 5’ extinctions of the Phanerozoic remains to be rigorously tested. Lastly, we propose a revised model for drivers of late Ediacaran extinction pulses that builds off recent data and growing consensus within the field. This model is speculative, but does frame testable hypotheses that can be targeted in the next decade of work.

The rise of digital capitalism was marked by significant changes in the processes of value generation and capture in the economy. However, its impact on competition has only been recently explored. Taking a Law and Political Economy perspective we analyse four central developments challenging the traditional competition law framework and raising important questions regarding the broader institutional environment for the protection of competition: the transition towards financialisation and the logic of futurity, in particular in the digital economy, which gives rise to new competitive strategies of undertakings, structured around the ‘shareholder value’ principle; the extraction of economic value through new types of labour, which fall outside traditional employment relationships and hence affect the scope of competition law in the digital economy; the emergence of digital value chains that rely on multi-sided platforms and the formation of digital ecosystems, which challenge the usual focus of competition law on markets; the generation and extraction of value in the digital economy through new types of commodities and natural and artificial scarcities, that shape new social relations of production in accordance with the logic of futurity and lead to the emergence of competitive bottlenecks. Based on this analysis, we emphasize the need for a comprehensive theory-building for competition law and regulation that engages with these new processes of value generation and capture. We highlight how the underlying theories of ‘value’ and the institutional set-up have led to inequality and reduced competition. Existing institutions could not respond to these changes, which led to the initiation of significant institutional reforms. The prevailing conception of competition law had to evolve in congruence with different regulatory alternatives (a ‘toolkit’ approach). The article concludes by analysing how the emerging competition and regulatory compass for the digital economy in the European Union (EU) contributes to this dialectic between value generation/capture and institutional choice.