ecological community

In the face of water shortages affecting not only human society but also the entire ecological community due to the climate crisis, it becomes crucial to adopt comprehensive measures for managing water quality and quantity to avert such pressing challenges.

When plastics enter the ocean, microorganisms attach to and colonise them, forming an ecological community known as the 'Plastisphere'.

Adopting a machine-learning model framework based on metadata of over 7,600 sampling sites from multiple ecological community groups, the study mapped research probability across the Brazilian Amazon using key criteria such as the sites' accessibility and distance to research facilities.

“We’re starting to think about the genome as an ecological community and the transposable elements as species,” Mueller says.

This capability opens the door to a wide range of conservation-assisting endeavors, from characterizing the members of a particular ecological community, to locating rare or endangered species, to tracking the expansion of the range of invasive organisms, to nailing perpetrators of illegal wildlife trade.