Faculty Opinions recommendation of Biodiversity tracks temperature over time.

Developing spatial prioritisation strategies to maximise conservation impact

Climantica is an environmental education project that approaches all environmental problems in relation to climate change. It represents one of the four pillars on which the Galician Action Plan against Climate Change (Plano Galego de Accion contra o Cambio Climatico) is based (see figure 1). The remaining three pillars are mitigation, research and adaptation. It started with the publication of eight books structured as teaching units, the first of which deals generally with the issue of climate change. The other seven books cover energy, waste, the water cycle, biodiversity, the territory, the rural environment and the urban environment. These general teaching units fuel the entire project, and their contents are the bases for comic strips, magazines, documentaries, and multimedia resources for autonomous learning through the website, www.climantica.org. This project is aimed at the general public through the website, where besides having access to all educational contents, visitors also have the opportunity to ask questions, give their opinions and participate in discussions through a blog. However, the starting point is secondary education, since the authors teach at this level and consider it a key stage to begin a thorough scientific study of such a global, complex and interdisciplinary issue. For the time being, the approach in primary education is to appeal to children’s imagination through comic strips, animated short films and educational video games. University education is another area, which will be targeted in the coming academic year.

Faculty Opinions recommendation of Time to change how we describe biodiversity.

The reindeer's rumen microbiota plays an important role in the digestion of feed with enzymes produced by rumen microsymbiotes. In this regard, the study of reindeer adaptations, the possibility of effective use plant feed resources of the Arctic are of wide interest. This study presents for the first time the results of the assessment of the population structure of the microbial communities of the Rangifer tarandus rumen in the winter period according to high-throughput sequencing data. A special feature of the reindeer ration in the winter-spring period is the high proportion of lichens in the diet (up to 70%) as compared with the summer-autumn (no more than 10-15%). Samples of the rumen content were collected in the winter-spring period in 2018 in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District from calves (6-8 months, n = 3), young (1-2 years, n = 3) and adults (3-6 years, n = 6) reindeer of the Nenets breed. The composition of the bacterial community of the reindeer rumen was analyzed in the laboratory of the company BIOTROF + by the method of NGS sequencing (next-generation sequencing). The results showed that representatives of Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes occupied a dominant position in microbial communities like in other ruminants. The total content of this bacteria in animals of different age groups was not significantly different. The composition of the microbiota in calves was presented with a higher content of cellulolytic microorganisms of the genera Ruminococcus, Buturivibrio, Coprococcus compared with young and adults (p <0.05). The share of acid-utilizing bacteria of the genera Succiniclasticum and Selenomonas in calves was lower compared with young and adult individuals (p <0.05). The taxonomic analysis for the composition of microbial communities is confirmed by the results of biodiversity assessment using environmental indices. According to the results of assessment of α and β-diversity of the microbial communities of the rumen, the greatest uniqueness was found for the microbiomes of adults in comparison with calves and young. In general, the obtained results confirm the opinion of researchers that the microbial community can reflect the physiological state of animals.

The aim of the ‘‘Fish & Chips'' project is the development of DNA chips for the identification of marine organisms in European Seas as a cost effective, reliable and efficient technology in marine biodiversity and ecosystem science. Many marine organisms, such as (1) eggs and larvae of fishes and invertebrates, (2) zoo- and phytoplankton, and (3) benthic invertebrates, are difficult to identify by morphological characters, and for many groups the skills of specialised taxonomists are needed. The classical microscopy methods are extremely time consuming and require a high degree of taxonomic expertise. Consequently, the basic step of identifying such organisms is a major bottleneck in marine biodiversity and ecosystem science. The ‘‘Fish & Chips'' project aims to demonstrate that DNA chips can be a new innovative tool for the identification of marine animals and phytoplankton. The fish chips will comprise capture oligonucleotides for fishes of the North Sea, Baltic Sea, North-Eastern Atlantic, Mediterranean and Black Sea. This chip will facilitate ecosystem research in terms of ichthyoplankton community studies, as well as dispersal of fish eggs and larvae. The aim of the ‘‘Fish & Chips'' project is the development of DNA chips for the identification of marine organisms in European Seas as a cost effective, reliable and efficient technology in marine biodiversity and ecosystem science. Many marine organisms, such as (1) eggs and larvae of fishes and invertebrates, (2) zoo- and phytoplankton, and (3) benthic invertebrates, are difficult to identify by morphological characters, and for many groups the skills of specialised taxonomists are needed. The classical microscopy methods are extremely time consuming and require a high degree of taxonomic expertise. Consequently, the basic step of identifying such organisms is a major bottleneck in marine biodiversity and ecosystem science. The ‘‘Fish & Chips'' project aims to demonstrate that DNA chips can be a new innovative tool for the identification of marine animals and phytoplankton. The fish chips will comprise capture oligonucleotides for fishes of the North Sea, Baltic Sea, North-Eastern Atlantic, Mediterranean and Black Sea. This chip will facilitate ecosystem research in terms of ichthyoplankton community studies, as well as dispersal of fish eggs and larvae.The aim of the ‘‘Fish & Chips'' project is the development of DNA chips for the identification of marine organisms in European Seas as a cost effective, reliable and efficient technology in marine biodiversity and ecosystem science. Many marine organisms, such as (1) eggs and larvae of fishes and invertebrates, (2) zoo- and phytoplankton, and (3) benthic invertebrates, are difficult to identify by morphological characters, and for many groups the skills of specialised taxonomists are needed. The classical microscopy methods are extremely time consuming and require a high degree of taxonomic expertise. Consequently, the basic step of identifying such organisms is a major bottleneck in marine biodiversity and ecosystem science. The ‘‘Fish & Chips'' project aims to demonstrate that DNA chips can be a new innovative tool for the identification of marine animals and phytoplankton. The fish chips will comprise capture oligonucleotides for fishes of the North Sea, Baltic Sea, North-Eastern Atlantic, Mediterranean and Black Sea. This chip will facilitate ecosystem research in terms of ichthyoplankton community studies, as well as dispersal of fish eggs and larvae.The phytoplankton chip will focus mainly on unicellular algae from the North Sea. This DNA chip will enable monitoring of biodiversity, especially for pico- and nanoplankton species which lack morphological features for identification. The detection of harmful algae blooms is also an important application. The invertebrate chip will focus on important prey species of demersal fishes in the Mediterranean, as well as bioindicator organisms, such as polychaetes, that are difficult to identify by morphological characters.

This research discusses the protection and management of biodiversity in environmental law perspective. Indonesia has a large biodiversity which needs to be managed and protected. Indonesia has enacted laws and regulations on biodiversity, but they are still weakly and less effectively implemented. Furthermore, it is a fact that regulations stipulated by the government or certain sectors do not still accommodate interests of all parties. Legal issues examined here is whether Act No. 32 of 2009 on the Protection and Management of the Environment has protected biodiversity in Indonesia and how is the implementation of policies in protecting biodiversity during this time. The research results show that Act No. 32 of 2009 on the Protection and Management of the Environment has protected the biodiversity in Indonesia. Implementation of policies about the protection and management of biodiversity during this time can be viewed from the relationship of policy between the government and the regional government, such as the authority and institutions to manage and protect the environment, including instruments to manage biodiversity.

Biodiversity monitoring schemes are designed to infer trends in biodiversity over long time periods. The value of a biodiversity monitoring program depends largely on its data quality. High quality data allow to estimate temporal trends without bias and with high precision. Data quality largely depends on the initial design of the monitoring scheme, on properly conducted fieldwork, on various aspects of quality control mechanisms, and on the methods to analyse the data. In my thesis I show and discuss implications of design and data quality presenting five case studies using data from the Swiss Biodiversity Monitoring Scheme (BDM). The BDM is a long-term programme of the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment and was initiated in 2001 to monitor Switzerland’s biodiversity. The programme focuses on changes in species richness and surveys selected species groups in a systematic sampling grid all over the country. Defined and constant sampling methods are needed to allow for unbiased and precise estimations of biodiversity trends. In Chapter I, we analysed inter-observer variation of double-sampled vegetation plots. We could show that both systematic (directed) methodological errors and random variance of species counts were small. We concluded that BDM methods are adequate for detecting biodiversity trends. In the meantime this conclusion has been widely confirmed with recent data from quality control. Chapter II focuses on detectability of species that provides the link between a raw species count and true species richness. Variation in detectability between species or habitats may considerably bias trend estimates in biological studies. We therefore asked if capture-recapture methods were suitable to analyse differences in species detectability of butterflies and looked for underlying factors that may cause variation in detectability. Because the methods available at that time were not allowing the analysis of butterfly surveys over the whole season we had to restrict it to three mid-season surveys. We found that average detectability per count was 0.61 and was influenced by observer, transect and region. Individual species during one count were detected with a mean probability of 0.50. Since the study has been published in 2007 statistical methods have been substantially developed and nowadays enable detailed analyses of butterfly communities. In the study in Chapter III we demonstrated how data from the systematic BDM surveys could be used in combination with environmental variables. We tested different sets of variables for modelling plant species richness and produced species richness maps for Switzerland by predicting species richness for each kilometre square. We found that the final models performed similarly well. Average elevation was the best single variable for explaining plant species richness nationwide. Species richness maps typically showed belt-like patterns of highest richness at intermediate altitudes. We discussed different approaches for explaining such “mid-elevational peaks” of species richness. In the frame of the BDM vascular plants, butterflies and birds are surveyed on the same sites during the same years. These simultaneous studies may be considered as a major advantage of the BDM compared to the monitoring programs in other countries. In the final two chapters we therefore inferred patterns between the species groups. Chapter IV is based on data of the first iteration of surveys. We looked at the changes that had happened in surveyed species communities of plants, birds and butterflies within the period of 5 years. As a response to climate warming we expected species to shift their distribution towards higher altitudes. We used the “Community Temperature Index” (CTI) to test for differences in reaction to climate change. As expected, in the lowlands birds and butterflies tracked climate warming with an average uphill shift of 42 and 38m respectively, while plants showed a shift of only 8m. At higher elevations there was no significant CTI change in plants and butterflies. In general our results supported the idea that reactions to climate change in alpine landscapes were lowest and alpine landscapes could be safer places because of their highly varied surfaces. In the study in Chapter V we examined to what extent distribution patterns of butterfly species are shaped by interactions with their individual host plants or, alternatively, by environmental factors. Our findings indicated that butterfly - host plant interactions were not relevant in benign environments. In contrast, at the cold distribution limits there was a strong coincidence between butterfly and plant ranges. We argued that this could be evidence for butterfly species being limited by the distribution of their host plants in harsh environments and discussed the implications of the findings under climate change conditions. Finally I summarized the most important results and also included more recent experiences from other studies using BDM data and from unpublished analyses, e.g. from quality control. I concluded in discussing the strength and weaknesses of long-monitoring programmes and pointed out that they should be considered as a complementary data source and reference for experimentally orientated research.

Ubiquitous access to internet has resulted in more and more people going online to get their daily dose of news. In a 2010 survey conducted by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, 41% of the respondents said they get most of their news online, 10% more than those who said they got most of their news from a newspaper. A lot of socio-technical factors have contributed to this phenomenal rise in adoption of online news in recent years. One of the biggest reasons why people are increasingly reading news online is because it facilitates discussion with peers (Nguyen 2010), offering different viewpoints which aid in forming a rounded personal opinion about the news story. The Pew survey found that 37% of online news users (and 51% of 18-29 year olds) think that commenting on news stories is an important feature to have. A lot of people tend to shape their opinion by reading discussion comments, reflective articles, blogs and even tweets about the news. Hence, an increasing number of people rely on online sources of news – be it news websites or news aggregator services like Digg, Reddit, Google Reader, Flipboard, Pulse etc. The problem with these news websites and aggregators is that the only way people can gather public opinion is by actively searching through the endless stream of comments and feeds, filtering out spam (which is a growing problem) and then reading the relevant posts. A top trending story on Twitter will typically see multiple tweets per second, and keeping up with the rapid flow of incoming tweets is quite cumbersome and cognitively taxing. Hence it becomes increasingly difficult and time consuming for someone who wants to get the pulse of the people affected by a news story. Furthermore, in certain scenarios people might want to look at more fine grained opinions. Currently, there is no elegant way to extract geographic and demographic impact of a news story. What is the public sentiment in Indonesia about the Arab Spring? How did the public opinion about the Wikileaks disclosures change as the story unfolded during the course of a year? It is very difficult and tedious to observe such patterns using the currently available news providers. This work attempts to solve these problems by proposing a news aggregator platform which pulls news stories from various sources and also aggregates public responses, reflections, opinions and sentiments associated with those stories. This data is presented in ways that are easily understandable so readers can make better sense of the stories unfolding across the globe. Such a news aggregator platform that gathers and display public opinion and sentiments about a story, must deal with various challenges – 1. Opinions are very subjective. Different people feel about a story in different ways. With such an enormous amount of diverse opinions and subjectivity, how can we possibly aggregate the responses into something that makes sense as a whole? ________________________________ Acknowledgements: Prof. Yardi, S. for the guidance Sethi, P. (2013). Public opinion aggregation by annotation and tagging of online news stories. iConference 2013 Proceedings (pp. 891-894). doi:10.9776/13453 Copyright is held by the author. iConference 2013 February 12-15, 2013 Fort Worth, TX, USA 892 2. There isn’t really a unified web standard for expressing opinion (in textual form). Some people tweet in 140 characters, while others write elaborate blog posts. Some websites employ tags which a reader can use to define and classify their public opinion, while others rely on threaded comments and comment ranking systems. How can a platform be flexible enough to adapt to all these varied standards so that it can extract valuable data from various sources? Perhaps the platform can create a new standard of expression on the web which is flexible and comprehensive enough to be used to express diverse views about every news story in the world. 3. How to filter out spam while extracting public opinion? 4. Once the platform has access to the data it needs, how should it be displayed to the reader in a way that makes sense? What forms of visualizations, illustrations and graphical representations can be employed to give the reader a holistic view of how people feel about a story? 5. How can the platform determine and convey effects of geographical, demographic and temporal variations as the story unfolds? These are just a few out of possibly many issues which must be dealt with. Previous research on similar public opinion aggregation services has greatly focused on natural language processing, data mining and text categorization and clustering. Xiaojun (2010) proposed a framework for crawling the web for comments and applying various data mining algorithms on the data to extract relevant information. Diakopoulos and Shamma (2010) used tweets posted in conjunction with the live presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain to gauge public opinion. Brody and Diakopoulos (2011) studied the use of word lengthening to detect sentiment in microblogs. This research proposes a solution – The Opinionated Reader, which relies on sentiment tags and annotations associated with a news story. The essential idea is to create a commenting, discussion and sharing plug-in which can be used by news websites and aggregators as a commenting solution for their news pages. Users wanting to share or comment on a news story through the plug-in are asked to tag the news story with sentiment tags and annotate the story with their reaction (happy/positive or sad/negative). These tags and annotations are stored, aggregated and linked to each news story. A mobile application provides the front-end interface for users to access the news stories and the aggregated sentiment associated with each story. The basic architecture is explained as follows: The Opinionated Reader – Mobile/Tablet App The app fetches news articles from various web sources, based on the interests and preferences configured by the user. In every news article, a portion of the screen real estate is reserved for Opinions which shows graphical visualizations and illustrations of the public opinion surrounding the news story. These visualizations include: A Sentiment Graph indicating the popular tags associated with the story (E.g.: “Shocking”, “Inspiring”, “Amusing” etc.). See Figure 1 for example visualization. A Positivity Graph which plots the level of positivity associated with the story on a time scale from when the news broke. See Figure 2 for example visualization. Figure 1. Example Sentiment Graph Figure 2. Example Positivity Graph iConference 2013 February 12-15, 2013 Fort Worth, TX, USA 893 The user can choose to see these visualizations for a particular time period in the evolution history of the news story, or for a specific country. The app also facilitates people to tag and annotate news articles from within its interface. The Opinionated Reader – Commenting and Sharing Web Plug-in These days, a common way of adding discussion and commenting functionality to news websites is by using 3 rd party services (like DISQUS). The Opinionated Reader is a similar service which can be embedded into the news articles of various news websites to enable commenting and sharing. When someone wishes to comment on an article, the comment is directed through this plug-in, which allows the users to annotate the article with the sentiment tags and reactions along with their comments. The Opinionated Reader saves this information along with the commenter’s location and date of comment (See Figure 3). Figure 3. The Opinionated Reader Web Plug-in 'Add Comment' dialog mockup The Opinionated Reader – Back-end The Back-end maintains a database of news items extracted from RSS feeds of various news websites. Each news article is linked with the sentiment tags and reaction/positivity annotations extracted from the comments and annotations gathered by the commenting plug-in. This data is used by the mobile/tablet app to generate visualizations (Sentiment Graph and Positivity Graph). The back-end also performs data mining on the tags and annotations for geographies and tracks the opinions across time. The back end system responds to queries received from the mobile app with the news story and associated tags and annotations, which are then rendered by the mobile app for the user. iConference 2013 February 12-15, 2013 Fort Worth, TX, USA 894 Discussion and Conclusion This design idea is still in a nascent state and has long hours of research, brainstorming, designing and development to go before it can be realized into something tangible. Twitter has grown exponentially in importance as a news source and it would be vastly valuable to integrate Twitter with The Opinionated Reader. Possibilities include use of special hash tags and natural language processing of tweets to extract public sentiment. The current design supports only two reaction annotations – positive and negative. Not every news story fits this annotation paradigm. Further research about human reactions to news stories might unveil interesting insights which would help zero in on a more robust annotation rubric. Lastly, since this service is envisioned to be non-curated and non-moderated, the value served by the app depends on the users themselves. Greater adoption will lead to more annotations and tags, which translates into a more accurate public opinion as presented to the user.

This thesis studies natural and anthropogenic determinants of grassland&#13;\nbiodiversity in the Swiss Alps at the levels of plant communities within a landscape&#13;\n(Chapter 2), species diversity within plant communities (Chapter 2 and 3), biological&#13;\ninteractions between plants and herbivores and pathogens (Chapter 4), and diversity&#13;\nwithin a species (Chapter 5-8). Within-species diversity is studied in the widespread and&#13;\nagriculturally important grass species Poa alpina L.&#13;\n&#13;\nConclusion&#13;\nWith our comprehensive study across 12 villages we could demonstrate that&#13;\nhuman land use affects biodiversity at all levels and has largely shaped present&#13;\nbiodiversity during the hundreds of years of agricultural activity. Additionally, we&#13;\nshowed that cultural traditions still affect man-made landscape diversity. Still persisting&#13;\nsocio-economic differences among cultural traditions are likely to be responsible for this&#13;\ncultural effect.&#13;\nThe reduction of labor for farmers by grazing of formerly unfertilized meadows or&#13;\nabandonment of pastures and meadows will reduce land use diversity, and the number of&#13;\nparcels of high biological value used at low intensity will decrease. Thus, biodiversity&#13;\nwill decrease both between and within grassland parcels. Therefore, financial incentives&#13;\nare needed to stop the ongoing changes in agriculture in order not to risk losses in&#13;\nbiodiversity. Financial incentives should promote high biodiversity within parcels of&#13;\nland, but as not all levels of biodiversity react in the same way a high landscape diversity&#13;\nat the village level is also necessary.&#13;\nUnfertilized meadows are the most laborious type of grassland, and therefore they&#13;\nare most likely to get abandoned, especially when they are steep and at high altitudes and&#13;\nthereby not easily accessible. Due to their significance for plant species richness and&#13;\ncomposition, financial incentives for the conservation of these unfertilized meadows are&#13;\nespecially important.&#13;\nWe showed that, in contrast to widespread reservations against grazing,&#13;\nparticularly low-intensity grazing has several positive aspects at all levels of biodiversity,&#13;\nand from a biodiversity point of view, grazing is clearly preferable to abandonment of&#13;\ngrasslands.&#13;\nIn summary, to protect biodiversity at all levels of biological integration, a highly&#13;\ndiverse landscape has to be promoted. Therefore, financial incentives should aim at high&#13;\nland use diversity, which is likely to be most successfully promoted at the village level.&#13;\nA reduced diversity of land use types or even abandonment of whole regions will&#13;\nseverely reduce biodiversity. At the same time, landscape attractiveness for tourists will&#13;\nbe reduced and the remnants of cultural heritage in the Swiss Alps will be endangered.&#13;\nThe conservation of all levels of biodiversity and of their cultural, esthetical, ecological,&#13;\nand economic value requires the persistence of the diverse landscapes of the Alps.

Climate change will significantly affect avian biodiversity on a global scale. Increasing temperatures over the next century will lead to shifts in species distributions, alterations in the timing of breeding and migration, changes in morphology and shifts in genetic frequencies among avian populations. The global hotspots of avian diversity are found in mountainous rainforests, regions which may be difficult to access. Therefore, effective ways of monitoring rainforest bird assemblages are vital, for both ecologists and conservationists. This thesis addresses the challenge of monitoring the effects of climate change on rainforest bird assemblages. I used two methods, point counts and automated acoustic recording, to sample the rainforest birds occupying three elevational gradients in rainforests on the east coast of Australia. In doing so, I had the following aims: 1) to determine whether biodiversity data from automated acoustic recordings made using automated recording units (ARUs) was comparable to data generated using a traditional method (point counts), 2) to assess the ability of ARUs to monitor cryptic rainforest species for long time periods, 3) to identify birds that could be used as indicator species of elevation for the purpose of long-term climate change monitoring, and 4) to investigate the driving factors of bird species richness and abundance along elevational gradients in Australian rainforests. Existing studies showed contrasting results when comparing the effectiveness of traditional avian sampling methodologies with ARUs. To address this in an Australian rainforest context, we collected data on the birds of Eungella National Park in central Queensland over two sampling periods. We found that data from point counts and ARUs was broadly similar. On average, point counts detected more species than recordings of the same duration. The respective strengths and weaknesses of point counts and ARUs are complementary, and they should be used simultaneously in future biodiversity surveys. ARUs can sample remotely, simultaneously, and for long time periods. Using ARUs, we collected a year’s worth of data on two cryptic species inhabiting rainforest in north-eastern New South Wales. Bassian Thrush Zoothera lunulata and Russet-tailed Thrush Z. heinei are secretive inhabitants of wet forests on the eastern coast of Australia. We found that the two species had differential elevational preferences: Bassian Thrush preferred elevations above 900m asl, and Russet-tailed Thrush preferred elevations below 700m asl. Recordings of song indicated that Russet-tailed Thrush bred earlier than Bassian Thrush in 2015. This, along with the elevational preferences of the two species, may be related to temperature. The use of ARUs enabled us to quantify the elevational preferences and likely breeding times of these cryptic species. Populations of Bassian Thrush in north-eastern New South Wales and south-eastern Queensland are likely to decline with increasing temperatures. Upwards shifts in the elevational ranges of rainforest birds are expected due to increasing global temperatures. Identifying the current elevational distributions of indicator species has been suggested as one way of monitoring such upwards shifts. Previous research in our study region had identified indicator species among various invertebrate and plant taxa, but information on vertebrate indicators was lacking. Using data on the elevational preferences of birds collected over one year, we identified avian indicators of lowland and highland rainforest sites in north-eastern New South Wales. These indicators may be used to detect future shifts in species elevational preferences in the region. Previous research in tropical rainforests of the Wet Tropics identified temperature as an important driver of bird species’ distributions. There was a comparative lack of information for the subtropical rainforests of north-eastern New South Wales. Our data from elevational gradients in this region indicated that temperature was significantly positively correlated with both avian species richness and abundance. Species richness declined with elevation; there was no consistent elevational pattern in abundance. We found that species’ functional traits mediated their responses to the changes in environmental conditions along the gradient: large-bodied and small-bodied species are likely to be affected in different ways by increasing temperatures. My research has determined effective ways of monitoring the effects of climate change on rainforest bird assemblages. In doing so, I have also addressed major gaps in the knowledge of two relatively understudied biodiversity hotspots on the eastern coast of Australia. The baseline data presented in this thesis allows future researchers to detect changes in the avian biodiversity of the study regions, and represents a significant contribution to ornithology and climate change research in Australia and internationally.

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

Wetlands are ecosystems in which water covers the land. They provide economical, ecological, societal and recreational benefits to humans. Although complete documentation is lacking, wetlands make a significant part of Ethiopia covering an area of 13,700 km2. Wetlands with a great potential for ecotourism development in the country include the rift valley lakes, the floodplains in Gambella, the Awash River Gorge with spectacular waterfalls, the Lake Tana and the Lake Ashenge, the Wenchi Crater Lake and the Wetlands in Sheko district are among others. Similarly, the Wetlands of Ethiopia are home to various aquatic biodiversity. Some of the biodiversity potential areas are the Cheffa Wetland and Lake Tana basin in the North, the rift valley lakes namely, Lake Zeway, Abaya and Chamo, and the Baro River and the Dabus Wetland in the Western Ethiopia. However, the wetlands in the country are impacted by a combination of social, economic, development related and climatic factors that lead to their destruction. Correspondingly, the wetlands holding a considerable biodiversity potential in the country lack adequate management. To address the challenges and enhance the wetland’s role in ecotourism and biodiversity, a sustainable form of wetland resource use should be developed. As a result, integrating wetlands with ecotourism and developing as livelihood option for local communities is important for sustainable conservation of wetlands. Awareness rising, empowering stakeholders involved in wetland resource conservation, enhancing stakeholders’ participation, undertaking the restoration of degraded wetlands and promoting scientific studies on wetlands of the country are crucial to conserve wetlands and at the same time promote their ecotourism and biodiversity importance. Moreover, implementing the integrated wetland resource management approach and addressing policy, management and coordination issues that arise on wetland resource conservation aids to promote the significance of wetlands in ecotourism and biodiversity conservation in Ethiopia. Key words: Wetlands, ecotourism, biodiversity conservation, implication, Ethiopia.

More and more methods in the area of biodiversity research grounds upon new opportunities arising from modern sensing devices that in principle make it possible to continuously record sensor data from the environment. However, these opportunities allow easy recording of huge amount of data, while its evaluation is difficult, if not impossible due to the enormous effort of manual inspection by the researchers. At the same time, we observe impressive results in computer vision and machine learning that are based on two major developments: firstly, the increased performance of hardware together with the advent of powerful graphical processing units applied in scientific computing. Secondly, the huge amount of, in part, annotated image data provided by today's generation of Facebook and Twitter users that are available easily over databases (e.g., Flickr) and/or search engines. However, for biodiversity applications appropriate data bases of annotated images are still missing. In this presentation we discuss already available methods from computer vision and machine learning together with upcoming challenges in automatic monitoring in biodiversity research. We argue that the key element towards success of any automatic method is the possibility to keep the human in the loop - either for correcting errors and improving the system's quality over time, for providing annotation data at moderate effort, or for acceptance and validation reasons. Thus, we summarize already existing techniques from active and life-long learning together with the enormous developments in automatic visual recognition during the past years. In addition, to allow detection of the unexpected such an automatic system must be capable to find anomalies or novel events in the data. We discuss a generic framework for automatic monitoring in biodiversity research which is the result of collaboration between computer scientists and ecologists of the past years. The key ingredients of such a framework are initial, generic classifier, for example, powerful deep learning architectures, active learning to reduce costly annotation effort by experts, fine-grained recognition to differentiate between visually very similar species, and efficient incremental update of the classifier's model over time. For most of these challenges, we present initial solutions in sample applications. The results comprise the automatic evaluation of images from camera traps, attribute estimation for species, as well as monitoring in-situ data in environmental science. Overall, we like to demonstrate the potentials and open issues in bringing together computer scientists and ecologist to open new research directions for either area.

The Republic of Maldives has one of the richest marine biodiversity of the world. The country’s coral reefs are the seventh largest in the world, representing some 5% of the global reef area. Its 21,000 km2 of reefs are home to 250 species of coral, which teem with over 1,000 species of fish and this unique environment is the bedrock of their economy as well. Fisheries and tourism are their two largest industries which are heavily dependent on a healthy and diverse marine ecosystem. These two industries alone provide three quarters of jobs, 90% of the GDP and two thirds of foreign exchange earnings for the Maldives. Moreover, healthy coral reefs help protect the islands from natural disasters and guard against the adverse effects of climate change. However, in recent years, the economic and environmental health of Maldives has been put to jeopardy by taking the biodiversity as granted and neglecting the natural environment for earning short-term profits. The real time protection of the Maldivian biodiversity is, thus, not only important for the country’s environmental health but it is also an economic and developmental imperative. As the nation has witnessed political unrest and social instability in the recent years, the legal instrument and management mechanics for the ecosystem conservation and protection is hardly available. An inspiration for a proper compliance mechanism is thus a sine qua non for the Maldives. India, being a remarkable growth holder in terms of marine biodiversity conservation, could be a source helpful in shaping the future legal mechanism for the preservation and management of marine ecosystem in the Maldives. The Indian legal system has a distinct arrangement for the conservation of its biodiversity in general and its marine ecosystem in particular. There are 31 Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) in India, which cover a total area of 6271.2 km2. It has made strong coastal regulation laws for ensuring effective management of marine biodiversity which could be helpful in shaping the future legal compliance mechanism for the protection and conservation of Maldives’ ecosystem. Keywords: Marine biodiversity, Legal mechanism, Conservation, Management, Protected areas

Spatio-temporal dynamics and hydro-ecology of intermittent streams in eastern Australia