Towards a relational understanding of youth lifestyles and wellbeing in climate resilient urban development insights from a seven-city study of young people
- Authors: Prendergast, Kate , Hayward, Bronwyn , Aoyagi, Midori , Burningham, Kate , Hasan, M Mehedi , Jackson, Tim , Jha, Vimlendu , Loukianov, Anastasia , Mattar, Helio , Schudel, Ingrid J , Yoshida, Aya
- Date: 2025
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/482593 , vital:78669 , https://doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2025.2454985
- Description: Supporting youth wellbeing in low carbon ways is a crucial challenge in cities. Seventy percent of youth will live in urban areas by 2050 and urban sites account for 67–72% of the global share of carbon emissions. Young people’s consumption behaviour including energy use is increasingly identified as a key driver of urban emissions. This paper expands beyond dominant individualised approaches to examining urban youth wellbeing and consumption to interrogate the relational contexts in which young people live, their wellbeing aspirations, and the conditions that enable or lock-in lifestyle emissions. Applying a relational lens and thematic analysis to focus group data collected from 332 youth aged 12–24 years in seven cities of the global South and North, the paper examines experiences shaping youth wellbeing in the context of urban consumption activities. Findings emphasised the complexities of “linked lives”, foregrounding family, peer and community relationships as critical in shaping youth wellbeing and consumption.
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Black Twitter and Digital Counterpublics in South Africa
- Authors: Aiseng, Kealeboga
- Date: 2024
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/455188 , vital:75411 , https://doi.org/10.11114/smc.v12i2.6540
- Description: The growth of technology has made the Internet an essential tool in so-ciety. Scholars have argued that the Internet supports a more delibera-tive democracy. However, scholars have also raised concerns about the role of the Internet in political matters. While scholars agree that the Internet has facilitated broader public discussion, in many regards, its ‘virtual public sphere’still mirrors existing social structures. Twitter has become a common social media platform for many South Africans. This has led to a virtual community of Twitter users engaged in real-time dis-courses primarily related to Black South Africans. Black Twitter in South Africa is used for social, political, and economic motivations. This study argues for the practice of Black Twitter as a digital counterpublic in South Africa. The aim is to spotlight how black people in South Africa have used Black Twitter as a digital counterpublic for the marginalized groups within South Africa. The research will investigate the potential challenges and opportunities associated with Black Twitter functioning as a digital counterpublic. Utilizing digital ethnography, the study gath-ered a dataset of tweets from Black Twitter in 2022, focusing on those addressing social, political, and economic issues. More than 700,000 tweets were identified under these specific thematic hashtags.
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Gendered labour market outcomes among South African technical and vocational education and training (TVET) completers
- Authors: Friderichs, Tamaryn J , Rogan, Michael , Needham, Seamus
- Date: 2024
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/470853 , vital:77401 , https://doi.org/10.14426/jovacet.v7i2.417
- Description: South Africa's post-school education and training (PSET) system plays an important role in addressing historical inequalities and preparing youth for the labour market. Technical and vocational education and training (TVET) colleges have seen rising female enrolment, including in traditionally male-dominated fields like Engineering. This study examines whether women's increased participation in TVET programmes translates into equal labour market opportunities. Using administrative enrolment data and a tracer study of TVET completers, findings show that female completers face significantly higher unemployment rates than men, unrelated to the over-representation in Business Studies or services programmes. Additionally, women earn 22% less than men, even after accounting for study choices and qualification levels. While challenges remain in ensuring gender parity, the increasing presence of women in male-dominated fields signals progress. Efforts must focus on translating these gains into equitable employment outcomes.
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Challenges and Opportunities of Preserving African Indigenous Knowledge Using Digital Technologies: The Case of Bogwera
- Authors: Aiseng, Kealeboga
- Date: 2023
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/455424 , vital:75429 , ISBN 9781668470244 , DOI: 10.4018/978-1-6684-7024-4.ch007
- Description: Most indigenous knowledge systems, practices, and values disappear due to the influence of technology, human migrations, climate change, globalization, death, memory loss, and civilization. Therefore, indigenous knowledge systems will disappear if they are no longer used. This is because many traditional practices and activities within indigenous knowledge systems that have been used are essential coping and living strategies and are now in danger of disappearing. The chapter investigates how social web technologies, social media platforms, and online video tools can digitize, share, and preserve indigenous knowledge for the current generations that need to be more knowledgeable about these systems and future generations. With the example of bogwera, the chapter studies the role that digital technologies can play in protecting and preserving indigenous knowledge systems in the Taung community in North West, South Africa.
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Learning in the context of partnership: Trainee and intern psychologists’ reflections on community-based service learning
- Authors: Akhurst, Jacqueline E , Msomi, Nqobile , Maritz, Anneliese
- Date: 2023
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/481447 , vital:78552 , https://doi.org/10.21504/ajhece.v1i1.2480
- Description: For a number of years, community-based service learning (CBSL) has been a key element of the Community Psychology module in the Master’s programme for training psychologists at Rhodes University. In 2022, CBSL was consolidated to become central to the whole programme, with a focus on providing services in a partnership with the Assumption Development Centre (ADC). After introducing a model showing how students gradually move from sensitisation to social justice issues at undergraduate levels towards conscientisation as postgraduates, this paper will reflect on the interface between the professional training programmes and the community-based partnership with the ADC. Following a brief background about the partnership’s development, we describe the structure of the CBSL and its integration into the curricula. We provide evidence of its impact on both the firstyear master’s students, and the second year Counselling Psychology Interns. These data draw from the trainee psychologists’ reflections, as reported in the Rhodes Psychology Clinic 2022 Annual Report; and the Intern Psychologists’ reflections, integrated into the 2022 ADC Counselling Hub Annual Report. A thematic analysis of the reflections illustrates the commonalities in the accounts of learning, as well as the deepened insights and shifts evident in the accounts. The reported reflective learning is then considered both practically and theoretically, with recommendations for further development.
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Literary Byways in Duncan Brown’s Finding My Way: A Review Essay
- Authors: Klopper, Dirk
- Date: 2023
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458573 , vital:75753 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/ejc-iseaeng_v50_n2_a5
- Description: The poetics of Duncan Brown’s Finding My Way: Reflections on South African Literature (2020) is intimated in the title of the book, where the infinitude of ‘finding’ and the provisionality of ‘reflections’ anticipate what, in the introductory chapter “Finding My Way”, is described as an avoidance of the “monumentalising study” in favour of a more “mobile, tentative, suggestive scholarship” that is comfortable with “paradox and open-endedness” (12). The chapters that follow explore ways in which the notion of South African literature and the notion of the literary may be reimagined, and explicate a mode of reading ‘with’ the text, showing how this may be applied to ways of reading belief. They also examine the notion of creative non-fiction, revisit orality in South African literature, describe an autobiographical history with a book, and end with a reflection on postapartheid South African literature as “a place of radical newness and obsessive return” (175). What the book omits in its coverage, but which is nevertheless present in its ways of thinking, is Brown’s environmental concern with ‘wildness’ and ‘rewilding’, described in his book Wilder Lives: Humans and Our Environments (2019), published a year earlier. As is the case with the essays in the earlier book, the essays in Finding My Way speak to one another, disclosing of a way of thinking, of finding one’s way, that is recursive in style and attentive to the thing under scrutiny.
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Service learning in teacher education programmes: A literature review on the rationale, benefits, and challenges
- Authors: Mutambara, Tsitsi E
- Date: 2023
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/477842 , vital:78129 , https://doi.org/10.24052/IJHEM/V09N02/ART-5
- Description: Service-learning is a teaching approach that gives students opportunities to participate in a service that meets community needs as well as being relevant to the curriculum content and to reflect on the service-learning activity/activities and experience. While the discipline specific content is determined by the National Approved Curriculum for the respective Degree, Diploma or Certificate programme, activities which contribute towards concretising concepts and thus, marry theory with real-life challenges are jointly designed and agreed upon by the subject lecturer and the specific community partner. As pre-service teachers engage in servicelearning activities, they experience personal and professional growth through:(i) taking leadership roles in service-learning activities;(ii) exposure to-and awareness of the real-life environment in which the 21st Century teaching profession has to operate;(iii) engaging in and participating in authentic real-life centred teaching practices;(iv) acquisition of new dispositions necessary for a 21st Century teacher; and (v) exposure to-and the relevance of service-learning as a teaching/learning pedagogy. Therefore, this study is a literature review of a range of some of the existing work on service-learning and it collates and brings together key components of service-learning, its benefits, and challenges. The implications of servicelearning in Teacher education programmes are that curriculum content should be questioned regarding its relevance in modern day society, how well it prepares pre-service teachers for teaching skills and needs of a rapidly changing economy and society, and that education should take place in an authentic learning environment where community service activities are integrated with the academic curriculum.
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Water, Transport, Oil and Food: A Political–Economy–Ecology Lens on Changing Conceptions of Work, Learning and Skills Development in Africa
- Authors: Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Date: 2023
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/434894 , vital:73114 , ISBN 978-1529224634 , https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/transitioning-vocational-education-and-training-in-africa
- Description: Not enough has been said about the kinds of skills develop-ment that are needed if we are to stem the rising tides and impacts of political economies that have been driving what some call ‘fossil capital’(Malm, 2016). In this book, we are producing an emerging argument that it is necessary to also rethink and reframe vocational education and training (VET) logics and approaches if we are to fully consider the implica-tions of a warming future. This chapter provides the context of why this is such an urgent challenge and some thinking tools for understanding where we have come from and where we need to go. The prognosis is that it is now almost impossible to stop global warming below 2oC. The 2021 In-tergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is-sued a ‘red alert’for humanity, noting climate change to be one of the most severe challenges facing human societies for decades and potentially centuries to come. Scientists are warning that we have entered a new ‘geological epoch’, named the ‘Anthropocene’, in which human activity, especial-ly the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through fossil-based pollution, is transforming the stability of the earth system and creating knock on effects such as ice melt and methane release, which exacerbate the impacts of pollutants on the stability of the earth system.
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A Decolonial perspective on online media discourses in the context of violence against people with disabilities in South Africa
- Authors: Dalvit, Lorenzo
- Date: 2022
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/468140 , vital:77022 , DOI: 10.17231/comsoc.41(2022).3722
- Description: As one of the most violent and unequal societies globally, South Africa is still profoundly shaped by a legacy of segregation and oppression. While race, gender and socio-economic status receive much attention, (dis)ability is an important yet often neglected dimension of inequality. In this article, I adopt a decolonial perspective in discussing online media articles about violence against people with disabilities. By focusing on stories related to issues that received extensive media coverage (e.g. mental health, police brutality and gender-based violence), I problematise the Eurocentric human-rights discourse informing public and scholarly discussions. I also explore the link between current understandings of (dis)ability and the legacy of a violent colonial and apartheid past. As a result of the intersectional nature of (dis)ability, many of the stories involve multiple layers of inequality and different forms of oppression. An explicit focus on extreme forms of institutional and physical violence, while restricting the scope of enquiry, brings the brutality of western modernity and its effects on the people affected into sharp focus. Legal recurse appears to lead to incomplete reparation at best while its failures perpetuate a cycle of marginalisation and oppression. Rather than problematising these structural failures as a result of western modernity and neoliberalism, the media inadvertently obfuscates such links by performing its normative, that is, by identifying and exposing individual culprits or by blaming contextual factors.
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Differently included: A decolonial perspective on disability and digital media in South Africa
- Authors: Dalvit, Lorenzo
- Date: 2022
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/468173 , vital:77026 , ISBN 978-3-030-94121-5 , https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94122-2_16
- Description: South Africa is a diverse country with a legacy of inequalities which extend to the digital domain. Alongside race, gender, socio-economic status and others, (dis)ability is an important dimension of inclusion/exclusion. In this chapter, the digital inclusion of people with disabilities in South Africa is explored through a decolonial lens. In particular, the focus is on unmasking digital inclusion as constructive absence, in problematising it as a right and in exploring its liberatory (as opposed to emancipatory) potential. By analysing publicly available online texts, it is argued that digital inclusion should be regarded as a complex and nuanced phenomenon, with the potential to address as well as reproduce inequalities and the marginalisation of (some) people with disabilities.
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The emergence of isiZulu in Skeem Saam (2011) sociolinguistics: factors and the politics of the ‘loss of ethnolinguistic pluralism’at the SABC 1
- Authors: Aiseng, Kealeboga
- Date: 2022
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/455285 , vital:75418 , https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2022.2063115
- Description: This study aims to investigate how an ecological understanding of pol-yglossia is used in the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s (SABC) television channel, SABC 1 to maintain and create ethnolinguis-tic dominance. Key arguments this study will make are: (1) polyglossia is a language ideology masquerading as ethnolinguistic pluralism, (2) there is a loss of ethnolinguistic pluralism in SABC 1 because of the polyglot culture and its transmissions, (3) isiZulu is emerging as a lan-guage and cultural flare of the channel. This paper concluded that isi-Zulu’s presence is rising in a soap initially meant to be a Sepedi show. And this has negative consequences for language equality in the SABC.
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No size fits all: Design considerations for networked professional development in higher education
- Authors: Pallitt, Nicola , Gachago, Daniela , Bali, Maha
- Date: 2021
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/453520 , vital:75260 , ISBN 978-3-030-85241-2 , https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85241-2_4
- Description: This chapter develops a framework for design considerations that can be used to analyze, contrast, and design networked professional development (NPD) in higher education (HE) contexts. The framework was developed after reflecting on three professional development (PD) courses, each with facilitators who are academic developers across the African continent. Using a Collaborative Autoethnographic methodology, the three authors reflect on design considerations for different forms of blended and online PD courses, based on their experiences of designing and/or facilitating these interventions and with PD more broadly. We argue that course designs can be positioned along a range of dimensions, namely open/closed, structured/unstructured, facilitated/unfacilitated, certified/uncertified, with/without date commitments, homogenous versus autonomous learning path, content vs. process centric, serious vs. playful, and individual vs. collaborative. We discuss relationships between dimensions and learning theories (the more open dimensions speak to connectivist, while more structured courses follow social constructivist approaches). We also identify various tensions that arise in the design of NPD, such as between academic developers’ pedagogical advocacy vs. usefulness, need to maintain volunteerism without exploitation of affective labour, and struggle to create spaces for agency within institutional constraints.
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Social Cohesion Through Sonic Intervention
- Authors: McConnachie, Boudina E
- Date: 2021
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/480257 , vital:78411 , ISBN 9781800795846
- Description: Abstract that must end in a full stop.
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"When in Doubt, Leave Out”: The Country Editor Who Declined to Publish a Long Letter from Olive Schreiner
- Authors: Walters, Paul S , Fogg, Jeremy
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458322 , vital:75732 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/ejc-iseaeng-v47-n2-a3
- Description: The authors deal with six unpublished communications from Olive Schreiner to James Butler, Editor of the Cradock newspaper The Midland News and Karroo farmer between March 1893 and October 1905, as well as a reply from Butler to Schreiner. These documents are housed in the Cory Library for Historical Research at Rhodes University. Transcriptions by J. Fogg are appended. The heart of the article deals with Butler’s refusal to publish Schreiner’s “letter to the Women of Somerset East” which she had sent as a contribution to the protest meeting held in Somerset East on 12 October 1900 to mark the first anniversary of the declaration of the South African War.
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Academic development: Autonomy pathways towards gaining legitimacy
- Authors: Vorster, Jo-Anne E
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/445759 , vital:74427 , ISBN 9781003028215 , https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003028215-16/academic-development-jo-anne-vorster
- Description: Despite playing a critical role in universities grappling with change, practitioners working in the field of academic staff development often struggle with legitimacy. Being a relatively young field in higher education, the challenges faced by these actors are largely un-theorized and under-researched. This chapter explores how academic staff development practitioners at eight universities seek (and gain) legitimacy amongst disciplinary academic peers. Drawing on LCT concepts of ‘autonomy codes’, it analyses practices in terms of the fields from which they come and the purpose to which they are directed. Data include publications by academic developers and interviews with academic developers, academics and senior managers of the eight institutions. The chapter demonstrates how academic developers often struggle to gain legitimacy as they occupy a liminal position between academic or administrative positions in relation to the disciplinary experts they work with. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the most successful academic development work occurs when disciplinary staff view academic development as enabling them to become better teachers. The chapter reveals how legitimacy may be more successfully enabled in the field of academic staff development.
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Decolonizing the science curriculum: When good intentions are not enough
- Authors: Adendorff, Hanelie , Blackie, Margaret A L
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/445796 , vital:74433 , ISBN 9781003028215 , https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003028215-14/decolonizing-science-curriculum-hanelie-adendorff-margaret-blackie
- Description: Universities across the world are facing the need to transform as access is opened up and student cohorts diversify. In the case of South Africa, these calls for transformation are specifically related to ‘decolonization’. Since 2015, South African universities have experienced growing student protests as students mobilize against institutional racism and demand that higher education curricula are decolonized. This chapter uses the LCT specialization plane, which explores the basis of legitimacy in relation to knowledge and knowers, to analyse the content of these calls for decolonization, particularly with respect to science education. The analysis provides a way into real dialogue. Having established what is at stake in the conversation we turn to the ‘autonomy code’ to explore what decolonization might look like in practice and shows why current decolonization attempts might be perceived as perpetuating past injustices. Although focused on the South African context, this chapter offers generalizable principles applicable to any educational institutions undergoing transformation.
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Eco-schools as education for sustainable development in rural South Africa
- Authors: Rosenberg, Eureta
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/436854 , vital:73310 , ISBN 978-3-030-46820-0 , https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46820-0_16
- Description: This chapter takes the reader into the context of rural South Africa with a sketch of developmental and educational chal-lenges from the point of view of a young person born here. It goes on to ask whether Eco-Schools has a role in this chal-lenging context, as a vehicle for or form of Education for Sus-tainable Development (ESD). Past Eco-Schools evaluations are reviewed against current educational needs and livelihood opportunities. The findings suggest that Eco-Schools gives teachers greater environmental awareness and motivates pedagogical practices such as active learning in relation to lo-cally relevant issues. Learners develop environmental com-mitment and a sense of agency, and may become more com-mitted to academic learning – all of which is necessary to pre-pare them for thriving in and also improving their socio-ecological contexts. Eco-Schools further supports schools sys-temically through meaningful partnerships with external agen-cies. The conclusion is that attempts should be made to scale up and scale out this impact. In the process, key features of the programme should be preserved. These include a focus on sustainable solutions.
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Factors influencing food consumption diversity among farming households in selected states in southwestern Nigeria
- Authors: Egbetokun, Olugbenga A , Fraser, Gavin C G
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/471346 , vital:77444 , https://www.ajol.info/index.php/ajfand/article/view/206465
- Description: The dietary practices of households have significant repercussions on the quality of life of its members. Dietary practice generally shows the types and variety of food intake and is extremely reliant on the socio-demographic characteristics. Dietary diversity has been positively associated with the four pillars of food security and all dietary guidelines propose consuming a large variety of foods, across and within major food groups. This paper focuses on the influence of socioeconomic factors on household-level food consumption diversity (FCD) in Nigeria. Since the majority of Nigerians (70 per cent) live in rural areas, an analysis of the food and nutrition security status of rural dwellers will provide a clear picture of what needs to be done to assure food security. A multistage sampling technique was employed for the selection of respondents from a random sample of households proportionate to the size of three states in the south-western agricultural zone of Nigeria, and primary data were collected using an interview guide. The analytical tools used were descriptive statistics, inferential statistics, mean food consumption diversity index and multinomial logit regression model.
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Invasive alien aquatic plants in South African freshwater ecosystems:
- Authors: Hill, Martin P , Coetzee, Julie A , Martin, Grant D , Smith, Rosali , Strange, Emily F
- Date: 2020
- Language: English
- Type: text , book
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/176271 , vital:42680 , ISBN 978-3-030-32394-3 , 10.1007/978-3-030-32394-3
- Description: South Africa has a long history of managing the establishment and spread of invasive fioating macrophytes. The past thirty years of research and the implementation of nation-wide biological and integrated control programmes has led to widespread control of these species in many degraded freshwater ecosystems. Such initiatives are aimed at restoring access to potable freshwater and maintaining native biodiversity.
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Nutrient patchiness, phytoplankton surge-uptake, and turbulent history: a theoretical approach and its experimental validation
- Authors: Schapira, Mathilde , Seuront, Laurent
- Date: 2020
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/149774 , vital:38883 , https://doi.org/10.3390/fluids5020080
- Description: Despite ample evidence of micro- and small-scale (i.e., millimeter- to meter-scale) phytoplankton and zooplankton patchiness in the ocean, direct observations of nutrient distributions and the ecological importance of this phenomenon are still relatively scarce. In this context, we first describe a simple procedure to continuously sample nutrients in surface waters, and subsequently provide evidence of the existence of microscale distribution of ammonium in the ocean. We further show that ammonium is never homogeneously distributed, even under very high conditions of turbulence. Instead, turbulence intensity appears to control nutrient patchiness, with a more homogeneous or a more heterogeneous distribution observed under high and low turbulence intensities, respectively, under the same concentration in nutrient. Based on a modelling procedure taking into account the stochastic properties of intermittent nutrient distributions and observations carried out on natural phytoplankton communities, we introduce and verify the hypothesis that under nutrient limitation, the “turbulent history” of phytoplankton cells, i.e., the turbulent conditions they experienced in their natural environments, conditions their efficiency to uptake ephemeral inorganic nitrogen patches of different concentrations.
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