Description: Publication date: Available online 19 January 2018 Source: Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies Author(s): Alfonso Rivera, Lucila Candela Study region Global scale. Study focus This paper highlights the main outputs and outcomes of the Internationally Shared Aquifer Resources Management Initiative (ISARM, 2000–2015) of UNESCO on the global scale. We discuss the lessons learned, what is still relevant in ISARM, and what we consider irrelevant and why. We follow with discussion on the looming scenarios and the next steps following the awareness on transboundary aquifers (TBAs) as identified by ISARM. New insights for the region This analysis emphasizes the need for more scientific data, widespread education and training, and a more clearly defined role for governments to manage groundwater at the international level. It describes the links, approach and relevance of studies on TBAs to the UN Law of Transboundary Aquifers and on how they might fit regional strategies to assess and manage TBAs. The study discusses an important lesson learned on whether groundwater science can solve transboundary issues alone. It has become clear that science should interact with policy makers and social entities to have meaningful impacts on TBAs. Bringing together science, society, law, policy making, and harmonising information, would be important drivers and the best guidance for further assessments. ISARM can still make contributions, but it could be redesigned to support resolving TBAs issues which, in addition to science (hydrogeology), require considering social, political, economic and environmental factors. ISARM can increase its international dimension in the continents that still lag behind the assessment and shared management of TBAs, such as Asia and Africa.

Description: The field of ecoinformatics provides concepts, methods and standards to guide management and analysis of ecological data with particular emphasis on exploration of co-occurrences of organisms and their linkage to environmental conditions and taxon attributes. In this editorial, introducing the Special Feature ‘Ecoinformatics and global change’, we reflect on the development of ecoinformatics and explore its importance for future global change research with special focus on vegetation-plot data. We show how papers in this Special Feature illustrate important directions and approaches in this emerging field. We suggest that ecoinformatics has the potential to make profound contributions to pure and applied sciences, and that the analyses, databases, meta-databases, data exchange formats and analytical tools presented in this Special Feature advance this approach to vegetation science and illustrate and address important open questions. We conclude by describing important future directions for the development of the field including incentives for data sharing, creation of tools for more robust statistical analysis, utilities for integration of data that conform to divergent taxonomic standards, and databases that provide detailed plot-specific data so as to allow users to find and access data appropriate to their research needs.

Description: Questions: What are the most likely environmental drivers for compositional herb layer changes as indicated by trait differences between winner and loser species? Location: Weser-Elbe region (NW Germany). Methods: We resurveyed the herb layer communities of ancient forest patches on base-rich sites of 175 semi-permanent plots. Species traits were tested for their ability to discriminate between winner and loser species using logistic regression analyses and deviance partitioning. Results: Of 115 species tested, 31 were identified as winner species and 30 as loser species. Winner species had higher seed longevity, flowered later in the season and more often had an oceanic distribution compared to loser species. Loser species tended to have a higher specific leaf area, were more susceptible to deer browsing and had a performance optimum at higher soil pH compared to winner species. The loser species also represented several ancient forest and threatened species. Deviance partitioning indicated that local drivers (i.e. disturbance due to forest management) were primarily responsible for the species shifts, while regional drivers (i.e. browsing pressure and acidification from atmospheric deposition) and global drivers (i.e. climate warming) had moderate effects. There was no evidence that canopy closure, drainage or eutrophication contributed to herb layer changes. Conclusions: The relative importance of the different drivers as indicated by the winner and loser species differs from that found in previous long-term studies. Relating species traits to species performance is a valuable tool that provides insight into the environmental drivers that are most likely responsible for herb layer changes.

Description: Publication year: 2011 Source: Journal of Hydrology, Available online 25 November 2011 Shahbaz Khan The sample papers collected in this special volume represent the interdisciplinary studies presented at a major international conference that took place in San Diego, USA, October 11 – 13, 2010 in collaboration with UNESCO’s International Hydrological Program (IHP) Hydrology for the Environment Life and Policy (HELP) network and the Elsevier Journal of Hydrology. This conference targeted the emerging interdisciplinary science themes at the interface between hydrology and other scientific disciplines, including climate change, biology, chemistry and social sciences. These subjects are of particular relevance to current global water crisis, since population increases and a changing climate is bringing new pressures on hydrological systems around the world. The papers presented at the conference focused on the following five interdisciplinary themes:•Hydrology and climate change.•Hydrology, bio-geochemistry and environmental management.•Hydrology, health and improved socio-economic conditions.•Hydrology, history and conflicts.•Hydrology: past, present and future developments.This effort has highlighted the need to further focus hydrological research at the interdisciplinary interfaces between biophysical, social and economic sciences to assist with evidence based legislation and policy making in real catchments while empowering stakeholders in pursuit of real answers.

Description: Tropical forests are biologically diverse ecosystems that play important roles in the carbon cycle and maintenance of global biodiversity. Understanding how tropical forests respond to environmental changes is important, as changes in carbon storage can modulate the rate and magnitude of climate change. Applying an ecoinformatics approach for managing long-term forest inventory plot data, where individual trees are tracked over time, facilitates regional and cross-continental forest research to evaluate changes in taxonomic composition, growth, recruitment and mortality rates, and carbon and biomass stocks. We developed ForestPlots.net as a secure, online inventory data repository and to facilitate data management of long-term tropical forest plots to promote scientific collaborations among independent researchers. The key novel features of the database are: (a) a design that efficiently deals with time-series data; (b) data management tools to assess potential errors; and (c) a query library to generate outputs (e.g. biomass and carbon stock changes over time).

Description: Questions The study of naturally discontinuous forest systems could help further our understanding of the relative roles of abiotic factors and spatial connectivity in influencing species turnover and plant metacommunity structure compared to continuous forest formations where local communities are often arbitrarily defined and where ‘mass effects’ and source-sink dynamics tend to confound the roles of dispersal and environment. Here we study a tropical montane landscape where old-growth evergreen forest occurs as patchy formations in a matrix of natural grasslands, to test the influence of environment and connectivity on species turnover and woody plant metacommunity structure . Location The study area consists of the western and southern regions of the Upper Nilgiri Plateau in the Western Ghats of Southern India, a global biodiversity hotspot . Methods We sampled 85 vegetation plots located across a 600 km2 landscape, assembled environmental data, constructed contrasting spatial connectivity models, including models for the effects of topography on structural connectivity, and used RDA-based variation partitioning to assess the relative influence of environment and space on woody plant metacommunity structure . Results Considering several environmental and multi-scale spatial predictors, we could explain half the variation in plant community structure. Environmental and habitat factors such as precipitation, temperature seasonality, elevation, fragment size and landscape context play a dominant role and explain 42% of variation. Spatial predictors based on Euclidean distance performed better than those that accounted for topographical resistance. Spatial predictors accounted for only 9% of the variation in plant metacommunity structure . Conclusion Our results support the species sorting paradigm of metacommunity structure, as abiotic effects and biotic interactions play dominant roles in influencing community structure and species turnover in these old growth forests with a comparatively small influence of spatial connectivity. Effective management of woody species diversity would therefore require conservation of these forests across the range of environmental conditions under which they occur . This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Description: Publication date: September 2013 Source: Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Volume 66, Issue 2 Author(s): Michael Finus , Christos Kotsogiannis , Steve McCorriston Given the current trend in global emissions, the latest round of climate change negotiations at the Durban meeting of December 2011 (for the adoption of a comprehensive global treaty on climate change mitigation as soon as possible—and no later than 2015—and to come into force in 2020) has hardly shown the results one would have hoped for. Even for the most optimistic, it remains unclear whether one can expect a successful negotiating outcome by 2015. There are inherent difficulties associated with climate change negotiations, ranging from which countries should bear most responsibility for a given emission reduction target to the assessment of a globally efficient time path for pricing harmful greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). These difficulties become even more complex and challenging under the pervasive uncertainty of climate science and the uncertainty about the feedback loop between climate change damages and economic growth. During the past decades, the environmental economics literature has provided important insights regarding the design of environmental fiscal policies and treaties but there is a host of issues that remain relatively unexplored. For instance, we know little about the cooperative solution for carbon and trade policies when climate change affects the productive possibilities of countries. In this context, it is also not obvious whether observed policies could be improved upon in such a way that all countries gain in welfare. It remains also unclear what the carbon extraction path should be in the absence of a comprehensive treaty (such as, for example, if environmental policy is unilaterally chosen subject to an agreed ‘ceiling’ in global temperature). Though carbon pricing instruments like carbon taxes, cap-and-trade and hybrids have been well studied, not much is known about their properties in the presence of ‘offset’ schemes such as the Clean Development Mechanism. More work is also required to understand the strategic implications of the uncertainty surrounding climate change and how this affects, for example, the choice of climate change strategy (‘precautionary’ or ‘wait and see’), how uncertainty impacts the propensity of countries to sign a climate treaty, and the extent to which the possibility of a climate catastrophe fosters or hinders cooperation. Understanding political economy issues is also vital in tackling climate change because efficient climate policies stand little chance of being successfully negotiated and implemented if they do not receive the support of the electorate. The papers in the special issue of the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management are precisely devoted to this broad research agenda.

Description: Questions As biodiversity losses increase due to global change and human-induced habitat destruction, the relationships between plant traits and ecosystem properties can provide a new level of understanding ecosystem complexity. Using a functional response–effect approach, we show that multiple components of the carbon cycle are determined by a few plant traits, which in turn are strongly affected by environmental conditions. Location Salt marshes, northwest Germany. Methods We explored responses of morphological, chemical and biomass-related plant traits to environmental drivers and examined their effects on carbon cycle properties, i.e. above-ground biomass, above-ground net primary productivity and decomposition. The combined analysis between environmental parameters, functional traits and ecosystem properties used structural equation modelling (SEM). Results Important response and effect traits were leaf dry matter content (LDMC) and below-ground dry mass (BDM, responding to groundwater level and salinity) and leaf C:N ratio (responding to inundation frequency). Inundation and salinity led to increased allocation to below-ground biomass and salt stress adaptation in leaves, which translated into increased decomposition rates. Release from these abiotic controls resulted in standing biomass accumulation, which was controlled by LDMC and canopy height as key traits. Conclusions These findings demonstrate the interacting effects of non-consumable environmental factors and soil resources on morphological, chemical and biomass traits, which affected carbon cycle properties. Loss of species from the community has the potential to change the relationships between environment and vegetation-based ecosystem properties and therefore elicit effects on the multifunctionality of the entire and adjacent ecosystems. Studying relationships between plant traits and ecosystem properties can provide new insight into ecosystem complexity. We ask how plant species traits respond to environmental conditions and how key effect traits determine carbon related ecosystem properties in salt marshes of NW-Germany. Our study reveals interacting effects of environmental factors on morphological, chemical and biomass traits and gives recommendations for conservation management.

Description: Agriculture significantly contributes to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and there is a need to develop effective mitigation strategies. The efficacy of methods to reduce GHG fluxes from agricultural soils can be affected by a range of interacting management and environmental factors. Uniquely, we used the Taguchi experimental design methodology to rank the relative importance of six factors known to affect the emission of GHG from soil: nitrate (NO 3 − ) addition, carbon quality (labile and non-labile C), soil temperature, water-filled pore space (WFPS) and extent of soil compaction. Grassland soil was incubated in jars where selected factors, considered at two or three amounts within the experimental range, were combined in an orthogonal array to determine the importance and interactions between factors with a L 16 design, comprising 16 experimental units. Within this L 16 design, 216 combinations of the full factorial experimental design were represented. Headspace nitrous oxide (N 2 O), methane (CH 4 ) and carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) concentrations were measured and used to calculate fluxes. Results found for the relative influence of factors (WFPS and NO 3 − addition were the main factors affecting N 2 O fluxes, whilst glucose, NO 3 − and soil temperature were the main factors affecting CO 2 and CH 4 fluxes) were consistent with those already well documented. Interactions between factors were also studied and results showed that factors with little individual influence became more influential in combination. The proposed methodology offers new possibilities for GHG researchers to study interactions between influential factors and address the optimized sets of conditions to reduce GHG emissions in agro-ecosystems, while reducing the number of experimental units required compared with conventional experimental procedures that adjust one variable at a time.

Description: Publication date: Available online 1 September 2017 Source: The Egyptian Journal of Remote Sensing and Space Science Author(s): H.A. Bharath, M.C. Chandan, S. Vinay, T.V. Ramachandra Metropolitan cities in India are emerging as major economic hubs with an unprecedented land use changes and decline of environmental resources. Globalisation and consequent relaxations of Indian markets to global players has given impetus to rapid urbanisation process. Urbanisation being irreversible and rapid coupled with fast growth of population during the last century, contributed to serious ecological and environmental consequences. This necessitates monitoring and advance visualisation of spatial patterns of landscape dynamics for evolving appropriate management strategies towards sustainable development approaches. This study visualises the growth of Indian mega cities Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Chennai and Coimbatore, through Cellular Automata Markov model considering the influence of agent(s) of urban growth through soft computing techniques. CA Markov model is considered to be one of most effective algorithm to visualise the growth of urban spatial structures. Prediction of growth using agent based modelling considering the spatial patterns of urbanisation during the past four decades has provided insights to the urban dynamics. The industrial, infrastructural, socio-economic factors significantly influence the urban growth compared to the biophysical factors. Visualisation of urban growth suggest agents driven growth in the cities and its surroundings with large land use transformations in urban corridors and upcoming Industrial and ear marked developmental zones. Integrating local agents of urban growth help in identifying specific regions of intense growth, likely challenges and provide opportunities for evolving appropriate management strategies towards sustainable cities during the 21st century.