All hail the urban jungle

中国井冈山生态系统多样性

Impacts of invasive plants on soil fungi and on above- and belowground plant diversity in temperate forests

Urbanisation is increasing worldwide and regarded a main driver of environmental change. Urban development and associated factors like increased spatial isolation, reduced habitat size and various types of disturbances can alter the dynamics of plant and animal populations in the remaining green areas. Furthermore, changes in abiotic site conditions (e.g. temperature, moisture content) can influence habitat quality and, consequently, the species richness, species composition and functional diversity of plants and animals, which in turn can affect the functioning of ecosystems. Nonetheless, urban areas can harbour a remarkably high species richness and can be of high conservation value by serving as a refugia for many rare and threatened species. It is, therefore, of central importance in conservation biology to disentangle the various drivers of biodiversity in urban landscapes. Within the scope of this thesis, three studies were conducted to examine the consequences of urbanisation on the biodiversity and ecosystem functioning of green areas in the urban region of Basel, Switzerland.
\nThe aim of the first study was to assess the impacts of habitat size and landscape composition of the closer surroundings on the species diversity of three taxonomic groups differing in trophic rank (vascular plants, Orthoptera and Lepidoptera) in meadows and ruderal sites. I also related the response of three traits (body size, dispersal ability and food specialisation) to habitat size in Orthoptera and Lepidoptera. For this purpose, I analysed data of species from the natural heritage inventory of Basel. I found that the response of different groups of species considerably varied depending on the habitat type, taxonomic group and species trait examined. The species richness of Orthoptera and Lepidoptera was positively related to meadow size but not to the size of ruderal sites, while the opposite was true for plants. For Lepidoptera in ruderal sites, the percentage of ruderal sites in the closer surroundings was a better predictor of species richness than habitat size per se.
\nForests belong to the most frequent green areas in urban landscapes and provide a wide range of ecosystem functions and thus play a major role for human well-being in cities. The aim of the second study was to examine the potential effects of degree of urbanisation, forest size and the corresponding interaction on the species diversity and functional diversity of vascular plants, ants and spiders. The two arthropod groups do not show species-specific mutualistic or exploitative relationships with plants in contrast to those in the first study. I conducted vegetation surveys and pitfall trapping to sample soil surface-active ants and spiders. In plants, species richness decreased with the degree of urbanisation. Ants and spiders at higher trophic rank showed more pronounced shifts in species composition with increasing degree of urbanisation, while the percentage of forest specialists in both arthropod groups was positively related to forest size. Local site characteristics were also important determinants for species diversity and functional diversity. 
\nIn forests, the decomposition of leaf litter is an important component of the process of nutrient cycling and the formation of soil. In this way, litter decomposition contributes to the maintenance of several other ecosystem functions and services. The third study aimed to investigate the effects of urbanisation on leaf litter decomposition process in forests. Standardised litter of Fagus sylvatica leaves was used to assess the impact of urbanisation-related factors on the early stage of decomposition and seasonal microbial activity. I found combined effects of degree of urbanisation and forest size on the decomposition rate of leaf litter (klitter) indicating that forests of similar size differed in abiotic and biotic forest characteristics depending on the degree of urbanisation in the closer surroundings. Furthermore, moisture content of litter was the best predictor of microbial activity, followed by forest size.
\nThe findings of this thesis highlight the necessity to consider different taxonomic groups and functional groups in urban planning to maximise conservation value of urban green areas. In addition to degree of urbanisation, also habitat size was important for the diversity of some groups and leaf litter decomposition process in forests. It was also encouraging to find that even small green sites have the potential to make a significant contribution to biodiversity conservation and essential ecosystem functions in urban landscapes. I recommend that urban planners develop more flexible management strategies to satisfy the different requirements of various groups of species in the corresponding habitat type. Locally adapted management practices may provide a way forward to enhance habitat quality in a way to maximise species diversity and thus ensure the functioning of ecosystems; albeit large-scale factors also remain important.
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In the current decade, the main goals for biodiversity conservation and environmental protection at the level of the European Union are set in the EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020: halting biodiversity loss and restoring ecosystem services. A key requirement for the implementation of the Strategy in terms of targeting measures and funds, and monitoring trends is the construction of a biodiversity knowledge base, including spatially explicit information on biodiversity distribution and ecosystem condition. The work presented in this report is based on the analysis of two primary datasets on biodiversity and habitat status. The first one is the Habitats assessment carried out by EU Members States under Art.17 of the Habitats and Birds Directive. Information reported by Member States is analysed to derive the links between pressures and conservation status, showing that agriculture-related habitats have, on average, a worse conservation status when compared to other habitats. Consequently, threats and pressures having most influenced the status of the agricultural-related habitats can be identified. The second one is the global dataset on species threat status elaborated by The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Spatially explicit representations of species distribution, status and richness across the EU 28 are provided, and most importantly the identification of wide geographic variables linked to ecological theory is presented, that explain to a large extent the continental trend in species richness. Finally, an example is presented of how the two exploited datasets can be jointly used by cross-tabulating data on habitats assessments and species threat status in a spatially explicit way at 10 km resolution, aiming at identifying hotspots were policy intervention is needed

Fil: Campos, Claudia Monica. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas. Centro Cientifico Tecnologico Mendoza. Instituto Argentino de Investigaciones de Zonas Aridas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de San Juan. Interacciones Biologicas del Desierto; Argentina

Large-scale terrestrial ecosystem science research becomes an important research field with the promotion of meeting the scientific demand of biodiversity conservation, global climate change mitigation, regional eco-environment governance, and social sustainable development. It is developing rapidly under the guidance of China's ecological civilization construction strategy. Here, we systematically discussed the missions, theoretical foundation and methodology of large-scale terrestrial ecosystem science research and proposed a new theoretical foundation, conceptual system and logical framework for macroecosystem science research on the basis of macrosystem ecology theory. It elaborated the discipline connotation and application of the macroecosystem science to 1) deve-lop the conceptual network of ecosystem science based on the systematic characteristics of ecosystems; 2) develop the theoretical system of ecosystem state change analysis based on the ecosystem integrity and emergence characteristics; 3) develop the theoretical system of integrated research for ecosystem structure-process-function-service cascade relationship based on the attributes and state of ecosystems. We also discussed the methodology and technical system of regional and continental macroecosystem science research, and highlighted the urgency to construct a new generation of continental ecosystem observation and research network, and to develop the network observation-network experiment-numerical simulation-knowledge fusion four-in-one infrastructures.

The coastal ecosystem is essential to life on our planet and supports the livelihood of people living and depending on coastal resources. The abundance of good quality costal is fundamental to all marine biological processes and supports living resources. Moreover it essential for the maintenance of biodiversity and ecosystems, in addition to primary and secondary production functions that support human needs. Valuation studies of coastal resources will considerably increase our knowledge of the value of ecosystems. Their usefulness has often been undermined due to undervaluation, the main reason for coastal resources destruction. Despite a global consensus on the need to implement stakeholder management approaches and on Millenium Development Goals for food security, poverty reduction and preservation of ecosystems, the reality in most counries is a competition between different groups and sectors for access to coastal ecosystem services. The real value of wetlands plays a major role in this predicament. A variety of innovative methods of economics are usually applied in the valuation of cultural and provisioning services in coastal ecosystem under the concept of total value. The basic premise underlying all these economic valuation techniques is the individual's willingness to pay (WTP) or willingness to accept(WTA). The contingent valuation method (CVM) uses a direct stated preference approach to valuing an environment good or service in that it asks people through surveys or experiments what they are WTP for the good or WTA for the loss of the good. A demand curve can be traced using the bid values estimated in a CVM study which is particularly attractive because it can estimate values where market do not exist or where market substitutes cannot be found. Choice experiment (CE) is becoming an increasingly popoluar stated preference technique in valuing coastal resources. CE is considered to be both an evolution of and an alternative to CVM and both methods use stated preference approaches and both are usually based on random utility theory. Two studies in Europe and Asia using CVM and CE approaches for valuing cultural and provisioning ecosystem services are highlighted in this paper. There is an urgent need for research to determine the status of regulating services and how the value can actually be captured and incorporated in decision making process in ecosystem management.

In the development process of the countries, the wetlands play a significant role in people’s well-being by providing the goods and services that are used directly and indirectly. Some examples of these goods include recreational use (as non-consumable values), harvested meat (as direct consumable values), carbon uptake, oxygen generation, water conservation, and soil retention (as indirect consumable values). In addition to consumption values, wetlands have other values too; i.e. the money paid by people to protect the wetlands for future use, for next generations and for their being, no matter if they are used or not used. These non-consumable values are called protection values, too. The present work estimated the value of goods and services of Hamoon wetland ecosystem in the form of biodiversity function in order to economically evaluate the drought damages to Hamoon wetland in 2015. The data needed to estimate the value of these functions were collected by a questionnaire. The biodiversity protection value of Hamoon wetland as the protection value of its forest ecosystem was estimated by contingent valuation method using the data collected from 450 people living in the rural areas surrounding the wetland. The results show that the value of protection of the Hamoon wetland biodiversity is 333.75 billion IRR and the expected WTP to protect its wildlife is 35542.74 IRR per family per year.

The effect of biodiversity loss on ecosystem functioning is a relatively new research topic in ecology. The motivation for this research comes largely from current forecasts of ongoing loss of biodiversity. However, the intellectual link between biodiversity and ecosystem processes was first inferred by Darwin based on his Principle of Divergence. In the notes for his Big Species Book Darwin explicitly states that communities composed of organisms developed under “many and widely differing forms” should have higher rates of productivity and decomposition. Darwin also cites supporting evidence in the form of the Hortus Gramineus Woburnensis: a grass garden at Woburn Abbey in the South of England that contains early experiments on the relationship between organisms and their environment.

Restoring ecosystems to reverse biodiversity loss and to enhance ecosystem services is an important target of the EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020. At global and European level the target is to restore 15% of degraded ecosystems. Identifying sites that should be considered for restoration in order to achieve the target requires spatial information on where degraded ecosystem are, on the kind of mitigation measures that are needed to restore ecosystems to a good condition, and on the costs and benefits of restoration in order to prioritise investments. At all these levels, detailed spatial information is lacking. This report contributes to the ecosystem restoration knowledge base by providing cost estimates of specific restoration measures.

There is a clear crisis in the maintenance of global biodiversity worldwide. Climate change and widespread habitat loss, degradation and fragmentation are exerting strong, landscape-scale pressures on biodiversity. Negative impacts of these stressors are seen at all levels of biological organization, but studies at the level of community and food webs are relatively rare. This is in large part due to the large spatial and temporal scales at which food webs operate. Natural microcosms (food webs operating at small spatial scales) have been used to experimentally approach complex theoretical and applied questions in ecology, and have provided many important insights to date. In particular, moss micro-arthropod communities have been used extensively for the study of the effects of habitat fragmentation. Here, we used this ecosystem in a replicated, manipulative experiment to study the combined effects of warming and habitat fragmentation on community and food web structure. In order to do this, we developed tools to estimate diet of Oribatid mites, which were one of the most abundant and diverse taxa in the food web. Stable isotope techniques and analysis of mouthpart morphology allowed us to describe a food web for a moss-microarthropod ecosystem from south eastern Australia. The food web comprised over 100 taxa organized into a suite of feeding guilds: herbivores, fungivores, detritivores, lichenivores and predators. The speciose nature of the system is a strength, and the challenge of dealing with the taxonomy, data storage and food web analysis was met by development of a publicly available taxonomy database/tool, and a food web analysis package. We described temporal variation in a suite of food web attributes across one summer and winter. We found marked differences in food web structure between sampling occasions, with patterns suggestive of temperature- and humidity-driven changes in resource availability. To test the generality of food web structure in our system as compared to other ecosystems, food web attributes were compared to those of a large compilation of food webs from around the world. Comparison revealed similarities in food web structure to other communities across a range of spatial scales and ecosystems. Dissimilarities were also found and discussed. We concluded that the moss-microarthropod system provides an adequate model for achieving a deeper understanding of processes in community ecology. Our experiments assess the assembly of moss-microarthropod communities after an extreme high-temperature event, against a back-drop of altered climate, and in the context of habitat fragmentation. Data provide initial indications that isolated habitats may be more susceptible to negative impacts of warming than less isolated habitats. Variability of responses among replicate landscapes was considerable, with some being relatively resilient. Future understanding of the underpinnings of this resilience could point to management options for resisting rapid environmental change. Our results highlight the value of dispersal in disturbed landscapes and of disturbance-buffered communities in the face of climate change. Given the importance of synergies between disturbances as drivers of biodiversity loss, and considering the paucity of data assessing the combined impacts of climate change and habitat fragmentation on food webs, further research must be carried out in this area. This could build and draw on the model system we have validated for that purpose, enabled by the suite of new tools generated here.

تنوع زیستی، به همه اشکال زنده حیوانات، گیاهان و میکروارگانیسم‏ها اطلاق می‏شود. تنوع زیستی کشاورزی جزئی از تنوع بوده و بیانگر تنوع زیستی در زمین‏های زراعی می‏باشد. در این پژوهش وضعیت تنوع زیستی کشاورزی کشت‏بوم‏های شهرستان شهر ری واقع در جنوب تهران از طریق محاسبه شاخص غنای گونه‏ای با استفاده از روش رقیق‏سازی مورد ارزیابی قرار گرفت. به منظور انجام این مطالعه هشت روستا (درسون آباد، قیصر-آباد، عظیم آباد، ده خیر، طالب آباد، قمی آباد، ابراهیم آباد و خانلق) در سه بخش (کهریزک، قلعه‏نو و فشافویه)، واقع در شهرستان شهر ری از توابع استان تهران به عنوان نمونه انتخاب شدند. نتایج این پژوهش نشان داد که سه روستای واقع در بخش قلعه نو از توابع شهرستان شهرری، یعنی روستای ده‏خیر، قمی‏آباد و طالب آباد با داشتن شاخص غنای گونه‏ای، به ترتیب برابر با 85/14، 68/14 و 11/13 دارای بیشترین سطح تنوع زیستی در بوم نظام‏های زراعی می‌باشند و عظیم آباد در بخش کهریزک و روستای خانلق در بخش فشافویه از این شهرستان به ترتیب با 06/12 و 25/12 دارای کمترین مقدار شاخص غنای گونه‏ای می‏باشند. با استفاده از برآورد شاخص غنای گونه ای به روش رقیق سازی مشخص شد روستاهای طالب آباد و قمی آباد که به علت کمی مساحت زمین‏های زراعی در نمونه‏های مورد مطالعه، دارای کمترین تعداد گونه در نظام‏های زراعی بودند، از بالاترین مقادیر شاخص غنای گونه‏ای هم‏وزن شده در بین روستاها، برخوردار بودند.

Ecosystem services are the benefits that humans derive from ecosystems, such as food provisioning, water regulating and provisioning, soil productivity, and use of natural areas for recreation. The current challenge is to mainstream ecosystem services into policies and practices in order to ensure the continuous provision of these benefits to humans. The European Union has adopted an EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2020 in which the target of safeguarding ecosystem services is explicitly included. One crucial step to account for ecosystem services is the spatial quantification of the service supply. To this end, the development of robust indicators is needed. In this report we give an overview of spatial information used for mapping and modelling ecosystem services according to the scientific literature and evaluate the potential contribution of the JRC in supporting such initiatives at global, continental, and national level. We found a large diversity of indicators used for mapping different ecosystem services. The most common indicators are based on data related to land use/cover, soils, vegetation, and nutrients. Most of these data are available in and outside the JRC to a large extent and at low resolution. The JRC holds 82% of the data types used to map ecosystem services and could support the Member States and other initiatives involved by directly providing spatial information.

This work aims to justify the potential for biodiversity conservation in moderately exploited lands that are characterized by a low degree of technogenic transformation and occupy an intermediate position between natural and artificial ecosystems due to their ecological features. Ecosystems of such kind can be referred to as quasi-natural. In this study focus is made on the most typical objects in this respect - multipurpose ponds and protective forest belts in Ukraine. Conventional ecological methods were used for accounting for the composition of the communities and assessing their productivity. The general species richness and diversity of groups in communities of quasi-natural ecosystems, as a rule, reach high values, than in their surroundings. In the survey of 30 pond-fish farming areas in the forest-steppe zone of Ukraine, 150 species of vertebrate animals (except fish) were found there, of which more than 90 are listed as protected. Forest shelterbelts of the steppe zone of Ukraine are the habitat of 584 species of beetles, and in forest-steppe protective forest belts there can be found up to 30 protected plant and animal species per hectare of stand. Arable land, pastures and haymaking steppe areas of southern Ukraine support rare bird species, of which 10 are listed in the Red Data Book of Ukraine. Therefore the considered quasi-natural ecosystems undoubtedly play a significant role in the conservation of wildlife and there is a need to provide opportunities for comprehensive implementation and enhancement of their conservation potential.

Introduction Part 1: Ecosystem Services Reconnecting Cities to the Biosphere: Stewardship of Green Infrastructure and Urban Ecosystem Services Erik Andersson, Stephan Barthel, Sara Borgstrom, Johan Colding,Thomas Elmqvist, Carl Folke, and Asa Gren Exploring the Gap between Ecosystem Service Research and Management in Development Planning Nadia Sitas, Heidi E. Prozesky, Karen J. Esler, and Belinda Reyers Spatial Heterogeneity of Urban Soils: The Case of the Beijing Metropolitan Region, China Qizheng Mao, Ganlin Huang, Alexander Buyantuev, Jianguo Wu, Shanghua Luo, and Keming Ma Realizing the ecosystem-service value of native woodland in Ireland Craig Bullock, Jerry Hawe, and Declan Little Global Drivers and Tradeoffs of Three Urban Vegetation Ecosystem Services Cynnamon Dobbs, Craig R. Nitschke, and Dave Kendal Part 2: Green Space Vegetation in Bangalore's Slums: Boosting Livelihoods, Well-Being and Social Capital Divya Gopal and Harini Nagendra Urban Green Spaces and an Integrative Approach to Sustainable Environment Shah Md. Atiqul Haq Part 3: Biodiversity Urbanization Affects Plant Flowering Phenology and Pollinator Community: Effects of Water Availability and Land Cover Kaesha Neil, Jianguo Wu, Christofer Bang, and Stanley Faeth A Landscape Ecology Approach Identifies Important Drivers of Urban Biodiversity Tabea Turrini and Eva Knop Lessons Learned from Chicago Wilderness-Implementing and Sustaining Conservation Management in an Urban Setting Liam Heneghan, Christopher Mulvaney, Kristen Ross, Lauren Umek, Cristy Watkins, Lynne M. Westphal, and David H. Wise Part 4: Planning Tools for Enhancing Urban Ecology Multifunctional Urban Agriculture for Sustainable Land Use Planning in the United States Sarah Taylor Lovell A Conceptual List of Indicators for Urban Planning and Management Based on Earth Observation Nektarios Chrysoulakis, Christian Feigenwinter, Dimitrios Triantakonstantis, Igor Penyevskiy, Abraham Tal, Eberhard Parlow, Guy Fleishman, Sebnem Duzgun, Thomas Esch, and Mattia Marconcini Landscape Architecture and Novel Ecosystems: Ecological Restoration in an Expanded Field Catharina Sack Index