Description: While environmental science, and ecology in particular, is working to provide better understanding to base sustainable decisions on, the way scientific understanding is developed can at times be detrimental to this cause. Locked-in debates are often unnecessarily polarised and can compromise any common goals of the opposing camps. The present paper is inspired by a resolved debate from an unrelated field of psychology where Nobel laureate David Kahneman and Garry Klein turned what seemed to be a locked-in debate into a constructive process for their fields. The present paper is also motivated by previous discourses regarding the role of thresholds in natural systems for management and governance, but its scope of analysis targets the scientific process within complex social-ecological systems in general. We identified four features of environmental science that appear to predispose for locked-in debates: (1) The strongly context-dependent behaviour of ecological systems. (2) The dominant role of single hypothesis testing. (3) The high prominence given to theory demonstration compared investigation. (4) The effect of urgent demands to inform and steer policy. This fertile ground is further cultivated by human psychological aspects as well as the structure of funding and publication systems.

Description: The study "Review of voluntary approaches in the European Union" has been conducted in the context of the project "Feasibility study on demonstration of voluntary approaches for industrial environmental management in China" and aims at evaluating the experience with voluntary agreements between industry and public authorities in the European Union. It is part of a comparative study between Europe and China. The study aims at providing a basis for adoption and further development of voluntary agreements in China. Therefore, conceptual information and case studies are presented in order to illustrate the instrument, its chances and risks as well as success factors.

Description: Widespread global declines in shellfish reefs (ecosystem-forming bivalves such as oysters and mussels) have led to growing interest in their restoration and protection. With restoration projects now occurring on four continents and in at least seven countries, global restoration guidelines for these ecosystems have been developed based on experience over the past two decades. The following key elements of the guidelines are outlined: (a) the case for shellfish reef resto- ration and securing financial resources; (b) planning, feasibility, and goal set- ting; (c) biosecurity and permitting; (d) restoration in practice; (e) scaling up from pilot to larger scale restoration, (f) monitoring, (g) restoration beyond oyster reefs (specifically mussels), and (h) successful communication for shell- fish reef restoration projects.

Description: This paper provides a comprehensive description of the newest version of the Dynamic Global Vegetation Model with managed Land, LPJmL4. This model simulates – internally consistently – the growth and productivity of both natural and agricultural vegetation as coherently linked through their water, carbon, and energy fluxes. These features render LPJmL4 suitable for assessing a broad range of feedbacks within and impacts upon the terrestrial biosphere as increasingly shaped by human activities such as climate change and land use change. Here we describe the core model structure, including recently developed modules now unified in LPJmL4. Thereby, we also review LPJmL model developments and evaluations in the field of permafrost, human and ecological water demand, and improved representation of crop types. We summarize and discuss LPJmL model applications dealing with the impacts of historical and future environmental change on the terrestrial biosphere at regional and global scale and provide a comprehensive overview of LPJmL publications since the first model description in 2007. To demonstrate the main features of the LPJmL4 model, we display reference simulation results for key processes such as the current global distribution of natural and managed ecosystems, their productivities, and associated water fluxes. A thorough evaluation of the model is provided in a companion paper. By making the model source code freely available at https://gitlab.pik-potsdam.de/lpjml/LPJmL, we hope to stimulate the application and further development of LPJmL4 across scientific communities in support of major activities such as the IPCC and SDG process.

Description: The dynamic global vegetation model LPJmL4 is a process-based model that simulates climate and land use change impacts on the terrestrial biosphere, agricultural production, and the water and carbon cycle. Different versions of the model have been developed and applied to evaluate the role of natural and managed ecosystems in the Earth system and the potential impacts of global environmental change. A comprehensive model description of the new model version, LPJmL4, is provided in a companion paper (Schaphoff et al., 2018c). Here, we provide a full picture of the model performance, going beyond standard benchmark procedures and give hints on the strengths and shortcomings of the model to identify the need for further model improvement. Specifically, we evaluate LPJmL4 against various datasets from in situ measurement sites, satellite observations, and agricultural yield statistics. We apply a range of metrics to evaluate the quality of the model to simulate stocks and flows of carbon and water in natural and managed ecosystems at different temporal and spatial scales. We show that an advanced phenology scheme improves the simulation of seasonal fluctuations in the atmospheric CO2 concentration, while the permafrost scheme improves estimates of carbon stocks. The full LPJmL4 code including the new developments will be supplied open source through https://gitlab.pik-potsdam.de/lpjml/LPJmL. We hope that this will lead to new model developments and applications that improve the model performance and possibly build up a new understanding of the terrestrial biosphere.

Description: The calving of A-68, the 5,800-km2, 1-trillion-ton iceberg shed from the Larsen C Ice Shelf in July 2017, is one of over 10 significant ice-shelf loss events in the past few decades resulting from rapid warming around the Antarctic Peninsula. The rapid thinning, retreat, and collapse of ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula are harbingers of warming effects around the entire continent. Ice shelves cover more than 1.5 million km2 and fringe 75% of Antarctica's coastline, delineating the primary connections between the Antarctic continent, the continental ice, and the Southern Ocean. Changes in Antarctic ice shelves bring dramatic and large-scale modifications to Southern Ocean ecosystems and continental ice movements, with global-scale implications. The thinning and rate of future ice-shelf demise is notoriously unpredictable, but models suggest increased shelf-melt and calving will become more common. To date, little is known about sub-ice-shelf ecosystems, and our understanding of ecosystem change following collapse and calving is predominantly based on responsive science once collapses have occurred. In this review, we outline what is known about (a) ice-shelf melt, volume loss, retreat, and calving, (b) ice-shelf-associated ecosystems through sub-ice, sediment-core, and pre-collapse and post-collapse studies, and (c) ecological responses in pelagic, sympagic, and benthic ecosystems. We then discuss major knowledge gaps and how science might address these gaps. This article is categorized under: Climate, Ecology, and Conservation 〉 Modeling Species and Community Interactions.

Description: Global climate change affects marine fish through drivers such as ocean warming, acidification and oxygen depletion, causing changes in marine ecosystems and socioeconomic impacts. While experimental and observational results can inform about anticipated effects of different drivers, linking between these results and ecosystem-level changes requires quantitative integration of physiological and ecological processes into models to advance research and inform management. We give an overview of important physiological and ecological processes affected by environmental drivers. We then provide a review of available modelling approaches for marine fish, analysing their capacities for process-based integration of environmental drivers. Building on this, we propose approaches to advance important research questions. Examples of integration of environmental drivers exist for each model class. Recent extensions of modelling frameworks increase the potential for including detailed mechanisms and improving model projections. Experimental results on energy allocation, behaviour and physiological limitations will advance the understanding of organism-level trade-offs and thresholds in response to multiple drivers. More explicit representation of life cycles and biological traits can improve description of population dynamics and adaptation, and data on food web topology and feeding interactions help to detail the conditions for possible regime shifts. Identification of relevant processes will also benefit the coupling of different models to investigate spatial–temporal changes in stock productivity and integrated responses of social–ecological systems. Thus, a more process-informed foundation for models will promote the integration of experimental and observational results and increase the potential for model-based extrapolations into a future under changing environmental conditions.

Description: The current policy and goals aimed to conserve biodiversity and manage biodiversity change are often formulated at the global scale. At smaller scales however, biodiversity change is more nuanced leading to a plethora of trends in different metrics of alpha diversity and temporal turnover. Therefore, large-scale policy targets do not translate easily into local to regional management decisions for biodiversity. Using long-term monitoring data from the Wadden Sea (Southern North Sea), joining structural equation models and general dissimilarity models enabled a better overview of the drivers of biodiversity change. Few commonalities emerged as birds, fish, macroinvertebrates, and phytoplankton differed in their response to certain drivers of change. These differences were additionally dependent upon the biodiversity aspect in question and which environmental data were recorded in each monitoring program. No single biodiversity metric or model sufficed to capture all ongoing change, which requires an explicitly multivariate approaches to biodiversity assessment in local ecosystem management.

Description: The innovative software system "myEcoCost" enables to gather and communicate resource and environmental data for products and services in global value chains. The system has been developed in the consortium of the European research project myEcoCost and forms a basis of a new, highly automated environmental accounting system für companies and consumers. The prototype of the system, linked to financial accounting of companies, was developed and tested in close collaboration with large and small companies. This brochure gives a brief introduction to the vision linked to myEcoCost: a network formed by collaborative environmental accounting nodes collecting environmental data at each step in a product's value chains. It shows why better life cycle data are needed and how myEcoCost addresses and solves this problem. Furthermore, it presents options for a future upscaling of highly automated environmenal accounting for prodcuts and services.

Description: Phytoplankton and bacteria are sensitive indicators of environmental change. The temporal development of these key organisms was monitored from 1988 to the end of 2007 at the time series station Boknis Eck in the western Baltic Sea. This period was characterized by the adaption of the Baltic Sea ecosystem to changes in the environmental conditions caused by the conversion of the political system in the southern and eastern border states, accompanied by the general effects of global climate change. Measured variables were chlorophyll, primary production, bacteria number, -biomass and -production, glucose turnover rate, macro-nutrients, pH, temperature and salinity. Negative trends with time were recorded for chlorophyll, bacteria number, bacterial biomass and bacterial production, nitrate, ammonia, phosphate, silicate, oxygen and salinity while temperature, pH, and the ratio between bacteria numbers and chlorophyll increased. Strongest reductions with time occurred for the annual maximum values, e.g. for chlorophyll during the spring bloom or for nitrate during winter, while the annual minimum values remained more stable. In deep water above sediment the negative trends of oxygen, nitrate, phosphate and bacterial variables as well as the positive trend of temperature were similar to those in the surface while the trends of salinity, ammonia and silicate were opposite to those in the surface. Decreasing oxygen, even in the surface layer, was of particular interest because it suggested enhanced recycling of nutrients from the deep hypoxic zones to the surface by vertical mixing. The long-term seasonal patterns of all variables correlated positively with temperature, except chlorophyll and salinity. Salinity correlated negatively with all bacterial variables (as well as precipitation) and positively with chlorophyll. Surprisingly, bacterial variables did not correlate with chlorophyll, which may be inherent with the time lag between the peaks of phytoplankton and bacteria during spring. Compared to the 20-yr averages of the environmental and microbial variables, the strongest negative deviations of corresponding annual averages were measured about ten years after political change for nitrate and bacterial secondary production (~ −60%), followed by chlorophyll (−50%) and bacterial biomass (−40%). Considering the circulation of surface currents in the Baltic Sea we interpret the observed patterns of the microbial variables at the Boknis Eck time series station as a consequence of the improved management of water resources after 1989 and – to a minor extent – the trends of the climate variables salinity and temperature.