Locally extreme environments are a powerful tool for the study of slow ecological and evolutionary processes, largely because they enable long-term insight into adaptation of the natural communities and their ecological networks. These systems allow the conceptual compression of both time and space, allowing the investigation of important questions at manageable spatio-temporal scales. Here a case study of mofettes as natural sites with constant geogenic CO2 exhalations and soil hypoxia acting on the biological communities is presented, with a review of a wide range of studies from potential analogues for climate change, model ecosystems for environmental impact assessments for carbon capture and storage (CCS), to plant ecophysiological, and ecological studies of distinct groups of organisms from micro to macro scale. The paper also shows where the greatest advances in using discrete extreme environments with long-term and constant selective pressures in the context of global change ecology is likely to appear in the future.
Diversification and fragmentation of scientific exploration brings an increasing need for integration, for example through interdisciplinary research. The field of nanoscience for example appears to exhibit strong interdisciplinary characteristics. Our objective was to test the methodology and explore the structure of the interdisciplinary field and ascertain how different research areas within this field reflect interdisciplinarity through citation patterns. The complex relations between the citing and cited articles were examined through schematic visualization. Examination of WOS categories assigned to journals shows the scatter of studies across a wide range of research topics. We identified four distinctive groups of categories each showing some detectable shared characteristics. However, one of the groups indicated that certain categories of both citing as well as cited articles aggregate mostly in the framework of physics, chemistry, and materials. Similar studies could be performed in different fields that have an interdisciplinary character e.g. climate change. One of such fields is also the use of extreme environments like mofettes in the wider life and environmental sciences. The used methodology in this paper thus has a much wider range of applications to other fields.
COBISS.SI-ID: 3686223