Description: A comprehensive understanding of the deep-sea environment and mining’s likely impacts is necessary to assess whether and under what conditions deep-seabed mining operations comply with the International Seabed Authority’s obligations to prevent ‘serious harm’ and ensure the ‘effective protection of the marine environment from harmful effects’ in accordance with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. A synthesis of the peer-reviewed literature and consultations with deep-seabed mining stakeholders revealed that, despite an increase in deep-sea research, there are few categories of publicly available scientific knowledge comprehensive enough to enable evidence-based decision-making regarding environmental management, including whether to proceed with mining in regions where exploration contracts have been granted by the International Seabed Authority. Further information on deep-sea environmental baselines and mining impacts is critical for this emerging industry. Closing the scientific gaps related to deep-seabed mining is a monumental task that is essential to fulfilling the overarching obligation to prevent serious harm and ensure effective protection, and will require clear direction, substantial resources, and robust coordination and collaboration. Based on the information gathered, we propose a potential high-level road map of activities that could stimulate a much-needed discussion on the steps that should be taken to close key scientific gaps before any exploitation is considered. These steps include the definition of environmental goals and objectives, the establishment of an international research agenda to generate new deep-sea environmental, biological, and ecological information, and the synthesis of data that already exist.

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: Thousands of artificial (‘human-made’) structures are present in the marine environment, many at or approaching end-of-life and requiring urgent decisions regarding their decommissioning. No consensus has been reached on which decommissioning option(s) result in optimal environmental and societal outcomes, in part, owing to a paucity of evidence from real-world decommissioning case studies. To address this significant challenge, we asked a worldwide panel of scientists to provide their expert opinion. They were asked to identify and characterise the ecosystem effects of artificial structures in the sea, their causes and consequences, and to identify which, if any, should be retained following decommissioning. Experts considered that most of the pressures driving ecological and societal effects from marine artificial structures (MAS) were of medium severity, occur frequently, and are dependent on spatial scale with local-scale effects of greater magnitude than regional effects. The duration of many effects following decommissioning were considered to be relatively short, in the order of days. Overall, environmental effects of structures were considered marginally undesirable, while societal effects marginally desirable. Experts therefore indicated that any decision to leave MAS in place at end-of-life to be more beneficial to society than the natural environment. However, some individual environmental effects were considered desirable and worthy of retention, especially in certain geographic locations, where structures can support improved trophic linkages, increases in tourism, habitat provision, and population size, and provide stability in population dynamics. The expert analysis consensus that the effects of MAS are both negative and positive for the environment and society, gives no strong support for policy change whether removal or retention is favoured until further empirical evidence is available to justify change to the status quo. The combination of desirable and undesirable effects associated with MAS present a significant challenge for policy- and decision-makers in their justification to implement decommissioning options. Decisions may need to be decided on a case-by-case basis accounting for the trade-off in costs and benefits at a local level.

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 Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP) is characterized by a vast number of frozen and unfrozen freshwater reservoirs, which is why it is also called “the third pole” of the Earth or “Asian Water Tower”. We analyzed testate amoeba (TA) biodiversity and corresponding protozoic biosilicification in lake sediments of the QTP in relation to environmental properties (freshwater conditions, elevation, and climate). As TA are known as excellent bio-indicators, our results allowed us to derive conclusions about the influence of climate warming on TA communities and microbial biogeochemical silicon (Si) cycling. We found a total of 113 TA taxa including some rare and one unknown species in the analyzed lake sediments of the QTP highlighting the potential of this remote region for TA biodiversity. 〉1/3 of the identified TA taxa were relatively small (〈30 μm) reflecting the relatively harsh environmental conditions in the examined lakes. TA communities were strongly affected by physico-chemical properties of the lakes, especially water temperature and pH, but also elevation and climate conditions (temperature, precipitation). Our study reveals climate-related changes in TA biodiversity with consequences for protozoic biosilicification. As the warming trend in the QTP is two to three times faster compared to the global average, our results provide not only deeper insights into the relations between TA biodiversity and environmental properties, but also predictions of future developments in other regions of the world. Moreover, our results provide fundamental data for paleolimnological reconstructions. Thus, examining the QTP is helpful to understand microbial biogeochemical Si cycling in the past, present, and future.

Description: Present day system Earth research utilizes the tool ‘Scientific Drilling’ to access samples and to monitor deep Earth processes that cannot be tackled by other scientific means. Unlike most laboratory experiments or computer modelling, drilling projects are massive field endeavours requiring intense collaboration of researchers with engineers and service providers. In the framework of the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program, ICDP, more than seventy drilling projects have been conducted, from multiyear big research programs to short, smallscale deployments such as lake drilling projects. ICDP has supported these projects not only through grants covering field-related costs, but also through a variety of scientific-technical services and support, as well as active help in data management, outreach and publication. These services are described in this booklet. Due to its instructional character, we call it the ICDP Primer.

Description: This brochure is designed for scientists and engineers of upcoming drilling projects and explains the key steps and important challenges in planning and executing continental scientific drilling.

Description: This brochure is designed for scientists and engineers of upcoming drilling projects and explains the key steps and important challenges in planning and executing continental scientific drilling.

Description: Biological and environmental changes are creating a growing demand for historical and global data sets. Comparing up-to-date ecological and biological findings with historical statements has become a major part of scientific work in the field of ecology. This evaluation and comparison procedure is very time-consuming while the availability of raw data is very low. Comparisons between original findings – if available – require a lot of work from print publication to digitalization or transformation to appropriate data formats. The effective use of working capacity is a general issue and has become important, should the use of information technologies be invoked to minimize time-wasting copy and paste operations. In this paper we aim to present a working repository for terrestrial biological data. The implementation of this type of data repository will provide various services to participating scientists as long as the final aim is the publication of these repositories. Furthermore, the security and long-term availability of environmental data is an issue of increasing importance to the scientific community. Unrepeatable sampling events and any data thus obtained are precious in time series analysis. For this reason, a well-structured storage of data is necessary for easy accessibility, retrieval and comparability. This is an important issue for the community of environmental scientists. The need to construct and implement repositories should prevail against all hitches and we are therefore describing our on-going task with the primary population of this kind of data repository. A biological and ecological information system is a matter of public interest and should also be a key issue for ecologists.