Description: Coastal water quality in urban cities is increasingly impacted by human activities such as agricultural runoff, sewage discharges, and poor sanitation. However, environmental factors controlling bacteria abundance remain poorly understood. The study employed multiple indicators to assess ten beach water qualities in Ghana during minor wet seasons. Environmental parameters (e.g. temperature, electrical conductivity, total dissolved solids) were measured in situ using the Horiba multiple parameter probe. Surface water samples were collected to measure total suspended solids, nutrients, and chlorophyll-a via standard methods and bacteria determination through membrane filtration. Environmental parameters measured showed no significant variation for the sample period. However, bacteria loads differ significantly (p = 0.024) among the beaches and influenced significantly by nitrate (55.3%, p = 0.02) and total dissolved solids (17.1%, p = 0.017). The baseline study detected an increased amount of total coliforms and faecal indicator bacteria (Escherichia coli and Enterococcus spp.) in beach waters along the coast of Ghana, suggesting faecal contamination, which can pose health risks. The mean ± standard deviations of bacteria loads in beach water are total coliforms (4.06 × 103 ± 4.16 × 103 CFU/100 mL), E. coli (7.06 × 102 ± 1.72 × 103 CFU/100 mL), and Enterococcus spp. (6.15 × 102 ± 1.75 × 103 CFU/100 mL). Evidence of pollution calls for public awareness to prevent ecological and health-related risks and policy reforms to control coastal water pollution. Future research should focus on identifying the sources of contamination in the tropical Atlantic region.

Description: 1. A resampling of 38 small farmland ponds in Belgium after 10 years revealed a high temporal species turnover for both phytoplankton and zooplankton communities, associated with substantial changes in abiotic factors, especially a reduction in total phosphorus concentration. 2. Across ponds, phytoplankton biomass decreased while evenness and richness increased between the samplings in 2003 and 2013. By contrast, the zooplankton assemblage was characterised by lower biomass, richness and evenness in 2013. Ponds experiencing larger environmental change showed stronger changes in phytoplankton richness and evenness. 3. Resource use efficiency (RUE) of zooplankton increased with greater environmental change and zooplankton evenness, which points to a switch towards species with higher RUE or greater variety in food sources in higher trophic levels. 4. As ponds are important habitats for freshwater biodiversity and ecosystems services, the strong but predictable species turnover and the opposing effects of environmental change on different trophic levels need to be embedded in conservation and management plans.

Description: 1. Reliable determination of organisms is a prerequisite to explore their spatial and temporal occurrence and to study their evolution, ecology, and dispersal. In Europe, Bavaria (Germany) provides an excellent study system for research on the origin and diversification of freshwater organisms including dinophytes, due to the presence of extensive lake districts and ice age river valleys. Bavarian freshwater environments are ecologically diverse and range from deep nutrient‐poor mountain lakes to shallow nutrient‐rich lakes and ponds. 2. We obtained amplicon sequence data (V4 region of small subunit‐rRNA, c. 410 bp long) from environmental samples collected at 11 sites in Upper Bavaria. We found 186 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) associated with Dinophyceae that were further classified by means of a phylogenetic placement approach. 3. The maximum likelihood tree inferred from a well‐curated reference alignment comprised a systematically representative set of 251 dinophytes, covering the currently known molecular diversity and OTUs linked to type material if possible. Environmental OTUs were scattered across the reference tree, but accumulated mostly in freshwater lineages, with 79% of OTUs placed in either Apocalathium, Ceratium, or Peridinium, the most frequently encountered taxa in Bavaria based on morphology. 4. Twenty‐one Bavarian OTUs showed identical sequences to already known and vouchered accessions, two of which are linked to type material, namely Palatinus apiculatus and Theleodinium calcisporum. Particularly within Peridiniaceae, delimitation of Peridinium species was based on the intraspecific sequence variation. 5. Our approach indicates that high‐throughput sequencing of environmental samples is effective for reliable determination of dinophyte species in Bavarian lakes. We further discuss the importance of well‐curated reference databases that remain to be developed in the future.

Description: Ecological stability is the central framework to understand an ecosystem’s ability to absorb or recover from environmental change. Recent modelling and conceptual work suggests that stability is a multidimensional construct comprising different response aspects. Using two freshwater mesocosm experiments as case studies, we show how the response to single perturbations can be decomposed in different stability aspects (resistance, resilience, recovery, temporal stability) for both ecosystem functions and community composition. We find that extended community recovery is tightly connected to a nearly complete recovery of the function (biomass production), whereas systems with incomplete recovery of the species composition ranged widely in their biomass compared to controls. Moreover, recovery was most complete when either resistance or resilience was high, the latter associated with low temporal stability around the recovery trend. In summary, no single aspect of stability was sufficient to reflect the overall stability of the system.