Biological Ecosystem Research Articles

A high resolution, multiproxy Late‐glacial record of climate change and intrasystem responses in northwest England

AbstractA lacustrine carbonate sequence from Hawes Water, Lancashire, UK, has been studied using stable isotopic, lithological, pollen and mineral magnetic analysis. The data reveal four abrupt climatic oscillations in the Late‐glacial Interstadial leading up to the onset of the Loch Lomond Stadial. The data also point to climatic warming relatively early within the stadial, ca. 12 500 GRIP yr, prior to the onset of the Holocene. The oxygen isotope record is taken as a signature of climate forcing against which the response of the lake‐system can be monitored. By adopting this approach it is revealed that the response of the biological system to the rapid climatic oscillations is non‐linear and primarily a function of the antecedent conditions. A significant end‐Devensian isotopic excursion (A) is matched by only minor changes in the cold‐adapted floras and faunas. During the warmer interstadial, the response of the biological ecosystem (events B–D) is clearly influenced by thresholds: major changes in the catchment vegetation associated with relatively minor oscillations in the isotopic signature. The stratigraphical patterns reveal significant lag effects between the onset of climate deterioration and resulting changes in vegetation. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Industrial Ecosystems as Food Webs

SummaryColocated industries exchange products and by‐products in ways reminiscent of the exchange of resources in biological ecosystems. To better understand these “industrial ecosys‐tems”, we have applied food‐web theory to a set of 19 actual and hypothetical eco‐industrial parks and integrated biosys‐tems. We find a linear relationship between number of industrial tenants and number of linkages among them and connectance values of 0.5 to 0.6 (typical of biological ecosystems). The results may provide initial perspective on designing eco‐industrial parks to maximize the utilization of resources and minimize the generation of wastes. Increased connectance in industrial ecosystems, however, does not necessarily imply increased stability or improved environmental performance.

Exergy and industrial ecology—Part 1: An exergy-based definition of consumption and a thermodynamic interpretation of ecosystem evolution

A central theme of industrial ecology (IE) is the idea of using the cyclical resource-use patterns observed in mature, biological ecosystems as a model for designing increasingly mature ‘industrial ecosystems’ whose productivity relies less on resource extraction and waste emission. In this two part series, we will use a thermodynamic interpretation of ecosystem evolution to strengthen this biological–industrial (B–I) ecosystem analogy. We begin by describing limitations in the current analogy and discussing resulting implications for the development and implementation of IE principles. We propose that these limitations arise largely from a poor definition of resource consumption. We then show that defining resource consumption as a process of removing exergy from a resource provides a basis for interpreting ecosystem evolution as a process of allowing consumption to occur with decreasing levels of depletion, i.e., a process of ‘de-linking’ consumption and depletion. We use thermodynamic principles to deduce the limitations and interrelation of several strategies for de-linking consumption and depletion. Lastly, we explore the benefits and limitations of using the proposed interpretation of ecosystem evolution as an analogy for the development of industrial systems.

Using Multiple Chemical Criteria for Critical Loads of Acidity in Maritime Regions

Critical loads have become a well-establishedpart of the work programme of the UnitedNations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) Conventionon Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (CLRTAP). Thelinking of ecosystem response to deposition level is thecentral principal of the critical loads approach. Foreach ecosystem, a biological indicator is chosen, asuitable chemical criterion selected and a criticalchemical limit assigned. The Bc:Al ratio is the mostwidely used chemical criterion for setting criticalloads. However, critical loads based on this criterionare very sensitive to marine deposition. In regions whichreceive high depositions of marine-derived base cations,such as the Republic of Ireland (ROI) and the UnitedKingdom (UK), critical loads based on the Bc:Al criterionwill inevitably be high. Therefore, it is proposed thatcritical loads are estimated using multiple chemicalcriteria with appropriate critical limits to protect thechosen biological indicators. The range of publishedchemical criteria have been applied to the ROI and theUK. The chemical criterion corresponding to the mostsensitive critical load have been mapped and thecontribution of each to the final maps investigated. Thesimulations indicate that the most sensitive criteria forsetting critical loads are based on specifying critical Hor Al concentrations. However, the choice of critical limits andmodel parameters will ultimately effect the criticalloads. Therefore, it is important that appropriate criticallimits are chosen to protect the biological indicator andreceptor ecosystem from long-term damage.

Massively parallel algorithms from physics and biology

In this paper the recent developments of lattice kinetic models are discussed followed by the fundamental concepts of Evolutionary Algorithms and their application to optimization, machine learning, Neural networks and many other areas. Finally, the application of Evolutionary Algorithms to the biological eco-system is presented.

Recovery and Identification of Viable Bacteria Immured in Glacial Ice

An extraction system has been constructed that melts ice from the interior of ice cores and collects the resulting water aseptically. Using this system, bacteria entrapped in ice cores from different geographic locations, that range in age from 5 to 20,000 years old, have been isolated and characterized. Ice cores from the Guliya ice cap on the Tibetan Plateau (China) contained the highest number of colony-forming units per milliliter (∼180 cfu ml −1) and representatives of many different bacterial species. Much lower numbers of bacteria (>20 cfu ml −1) were recovered from Sajama (Bolivia) ice cores, although in general such nonpolar ice cores contained more culturable bacteria than samples of polar ice, presumably due to the closer proximity of major biological ecosystems. More bacteria were recovered from Late Holocene ice from the Taylor Dome region than from ice of the same age from the Antarctic peninsula or from Greenland. Bacterial isolates were identified, in terms of their closest phylogenetic relatives, by determining small-subunit ribosomal RNA-encoding DNA sequences (16S rDNAs), and most were related to spore-forming Bacillus and Actinomycetes species, or to nonsporulating Gram positive bacteria. The numbers of recoverable bacteria did not correlate directly with the age of the ice, indicating that most bacteria were deposited episodically in snowflakes and/or attached to larger particles of inorganic and organic debris. By identifying the features that facilitate microbial survival within terrestrial ice, extrapolations to the likelihood of microorganisms surviving frozen in water ice on Mars, Europa, or within comets will be improved.

Telling into Wholeness

Each year, Teaching Sociology publishes the address given by the recipient of the Hans O. Mauksch Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Sociology. This annual award is presented by the ASA Section on Undergraduate Education, and the recipient is blessed or doomed by the expectation that an address will be given to the Section membership the following year. As the 1998 award recipient, I took this opportunity to collect my thoughts on educating for sustainable communities. Modernity glorifies hyperconsumerism and hyperindividualism, and gives rise to a consciousness of human separation from and superiority to nature. To counter these threats to our biological and sociological ecosystems, higher education in general, and sociology in particular, must adopt postmodern strategies to educate for survival. The metanarratives that served the modern age, such as science and progress, prove inadequate for the postmodern age of ecological crisis. We urgently need a more life-centered vision. The ecological perspective replants our feet on the bedrock of biological and sociological connectedness. Although science has been central to modernity's destructiveness, ecology is a subversive science which can serve us well as both science and story; it is the central transformative image of a new postmodern metanarrative

Introduction To The Special Section On The Electromagnetic Properties Of Sea Ice

PPROXIMATELY 13% of the world’s oceans is covered by sea ice during some portion of the year. This volume of ice has significant effects on the world’s climate, ocean currents, and biological ecosystems. Furthermore, the extent of sea ice cover is used as an input parameter in many meteorological forecasting models. It is difficult to obtain ground-based measurements over large regions of the Arctic, where the distances are vast, the climate is hostile, and the operations are expensive. The material composition of sea ice varies with temperature and winds. Thus, remote sensing of sea ice may be the preferred method to obtain quantitative information about sea ice. This Special Section of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING presents results obtained by the Accelerated Research Initiative (ARI) on the Electromagnetic Properties of Sea Ice (EMPOSI) that was sponsored by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), Washington, DC. Briefly stated, the ARI had three broad objectives, as follows. To better understand the mechanisms and processes that link the morphological characteristics with its electromagnetic properties. To further develop and verify predictive models for the interactions of visible and microwave radiation with sea ice. To develop and verify the techniques in the mathematical theory of inverse scattering theory that are applicable

Evaluating the performance of filter radiometers as a means of improving the uncertainty of ultraviolet measurements

Improving the accuracy of the measurement of ultraviolet (UV) radiation is one of the most challenging problems facing radiometrists today. The difficulties arise in part from the stability and performance of the optical components required to make the measurements, such as sources, detectors, filters and diffusers, as well as from the relative intensity of the UV radiation compared with the visible background. A particular application of note is the need to measure changes in the level of terrestrial solar UVB radiation. This is required to assess the effects of ozone depletion and the potentially damaging impact on the biological ecosystem. To have a meaningful global measurement programme, uncertainties of around 1 % to 2 % are required. However, this is less than or close to the quoted uncertainties of primary UV spectral irradiance scales maintained by national standards laboratories. This paper describes work being undertaken at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) to improve the measurement of UV radiation, in terms of establishing both primary spectral emission scales and improved transfer standards. Most of this work is centred around improving the design and characterization of filter radiometers. The paper presents details on the performance of the components used to construct the filter radiometers, as well as that of the complete devices. Calibration of the complete filter radiometers has been carried out using radiation from both monochromators and tunable lasers, and a comparison of the results obtained by the two methods is presented.

Transforming the Integrated Conservation and Development Project (ICDP) Approach: Observations from the Ranomafana National Park Project, Madagascar

Preservation of the biological diversity and ecosystems in protected areas can be achieved through projects linking conservation of the protected areas with improved standards of living for resident peoples within surrounding buffer zones. This is the hypothetical claim of the integrated conservation and development project (ICDP) approach to protected area management. This paper, based on several years of experience with the Ranomafana National Park Project in Madagascar, questions the major assumptions of this approach from ethical and practical perspectives. The four basic strategies available to ICDPs – protected areas, buffer zones, compensation, and economic development – are analyzed and shown to be deficient or untested in the case of Ranomafana. Recommendations are made to explore conservation models other than the western conception of the national park, to modify the notion of a buffer zone outside the protected area, to redistribute money or other resources directly to the poor people living in and around the protected areas, and to eliminate the middle men in the development business. An appeal is made to focus on local education, organization and discipline in order to promote self-determination and self-reliance among resident peoples of protected areas. The paper argues that a public works program, similar to the Roosevelt administration's Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s, funded through a hard-currency endowment or other innovative financing mechanism, should be tried as a replacement for the currently questionable ICDP approach at Ranomafana.

Islands: Biological Diversity and Ecosystem Function.

Oceanic islands represent a set of systems in which biological diversity varies as a consequence of remoteness or size, not environment; they are also generally simpler than continental ecosystems. Islands therefore provide an opportunity to determine the direct effects of biological diversity on ecosystem function. This volume addresses the following topics: components of biological diversity on islands and their patterns of variation; the modern threats to the maintenance of biological diversity on islands; the consequences of island biology and its modification by humanity regarding aspects of ecosystem function; the global implications of islands for conservation; and how islands can help one to understand the processes inducing changes throughout the world.

ON THE CONCEPT OF INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY

▪ Abstract The term industrial ecology was conceived to suggest that industrial activity can be thought of and approached in much the same way as a biological ecosystem and that in its ideal form it would strive toward integration of activities and cyclization of resources, as do natural ecosystems. Beyond this attractive but fuzzy notion, little has been done to explore the usefulness of the analogy. This paper examines the structural framework of biological ecology and the tools used for its study, and it demonstrates that many aspects of biological organisms and ecosystems (for example, food webs, engineering activities, community development) do have parallels in industrial organisms and ecosystems. Some of the tools of biological ecology appear to be applicable to industrial ecology, and vice versa. In a world in which no biological ecosystem is free of human influence and no industrial ecosystem is free of biological influence, it is appropriate to abandon the artificial division between the two frameworks and develop a new synthesis—Earth system ecology—as the logical construct for all of Earth's ecosystems.

MICROCOSM EXPERIMENTS HAVE LIMITED RELEVANCE FOR COMMUNITY AND ECOSYSTEM ECOLOGY: REPLY

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Possibilities and Limits for Controlling Eutrophication by Biomanipulation

AbstractEcotechnology aims at the implementation of such a complex physical, chemical and/or biological ecosystem structure, which leads to a maximum capacity of the ecosystem to improve the water quality by ecosystem‐internal mechanisms. Numerous ecological control variables can be used in ecotechnology, however only mortality caused by predation, feeding or grazing on all trophic levels provides the possibility of a top‐ down control of the community structure. There are two contrasting concepts regarding the efficiency of top‐down control: (1) the “cascading trophic interactions” hypothesis (Carpenter et al., 1985), which postulates that changes at the top of the food web are transmitted down to primary producers, and (2) the “bottom‐up/top‐down” hypothesis (McQueen et al., 1986), which predicts that top‐down effects are strong at the top but weaken near the bottom of the food web. This paper describes an examination of these concepts by summarizing the effects of strong (Bautzen reservoir) and extremely strong (Lake Gräfenhain) enhancement of the stock of piscivorous fish. Both investigations refer to long‐term whole‐lake experiments. The results seem to confirm the “bottom‐up/top‐down” hypothesis. Effects at the top are strong, although sustained effects regarding dominance of Daphnia are achieved only at an “optimum” (relatively low but not zero) density of zooplanktivorous fish. Far below the optimum density an efficient invertebrate predator was able to compensate almost completely the fish predation pressure on large Daphnia. On the other hand, the optimum density can easily be exceeded during periods when high numbers of 0+ fish occur. Especially the effective control of 0+ fish of the intentionally enhanced piscivorous species is a key problem. At the bottom of the “classical” food web, the effects are restricted to a change of the phytoplankton compositions (mean biomass is not reduced).The contradiction between the latter results and other findings from lakes having lower phosphorus loadings (e. g. Stenson, 1988) can be solved only if the “bottom‐up/top‐down” hypothesis is combined with the hypothesis of a “biomanipulation efficiency threshold of the P‐loading” (Benndorf, 1987). The latter hypothesis predicts that the desired reduction of mean phytoplankton biomass as a strong top‐down effect at the bottom of the food web can be expected only below a threshold of the P‐loading. Below this threshold a set of biomanipulation‐induced indirect effects on phosphorus metabolism causes a reduction of the in‐lake P‐concentration. Consequently, sustained reduction of the phytoplankton biomass by biomanipulation can be achieved only by P‐limitation, which is an indirect bottom‐up effect induced by top‐down control of the food web. Taking into consideration the combination of the “bottom‐up/top‐down” and “P‐threshold” hypothesis, an attempt is made to predict the effects of biomanipulation regarding phytoplankton and water transparency under different conditions of lake morphology, P‐loading and light climate.

Global climate change and California: potential impacts and responses

California's extraordinary ecological and economic diversity has brought it prosperity, pollution, and overpopulation. These factors and the state's national and international ties make California an essential test case for the impact of global climate change--temperature increases, water shortages, more ultraviolet radiation. The scientists in this forward-looking volume give their best estimates of what the future holds. Beginning with an overview by Joseph Knox, the book discusses the greenhouse effect, the latest climate modeling capabilities, the implications of climate change for water resources, agriculture, biological ecosystems, human behavior, and energy. The warning inherent in a scenario of unchecked population growth and energy use in California applies to residents of the entire planet. The sobering conclusions related here include recommendations for research that will help us all prepare for potential climate change.

Uptake, transformation and fixation of Se(VI) by a mixed selenium-tolerant ecosystem

The uptake, transformation and fate of Se, added as selenate to a mixed microbial ecosystem containing Se-tolerant bacteria and cyanobacteria, has been studied in simulated laboratory ponds. There was evidence of concerted activities of the microbial community in the system. Motile bacteria were responsible for transport into a surface mat and the combined actions of the microbial consortium provide chemical conditions under which the Se could be reduced to the elemental form and physically entrained in the mat. Strong qualitative indications of the formation of volatile alkylselenium compounds were also observed. The removal of Se from the water column was rapid and essentially quantitative. The advantages of such biological ecosystems for remediation of Se-contaminated aquatic ecosystems are discussed.

The Self‐Thinning Rule: Dead or Unsupported?‐‐A Reply to Lonsdale

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Lead in marine planktonic organisms and pelagic food webs

The bioaccumulation of lead in biological ecosystems traditionally has been interpreted in terms of the atomic ratio of Pb to Ca. In marine planktonic ecosystems, however, most of the particulate Ca is skeletal and its amount variable among taxa. The Pb in plankton can be partitioned between skeletal and nonskeletal components. In planktonic samples collected in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, <0.5% of the Pb was associated with CaCO3 (primarily foraminiferan, coccolithophorid, and pteropod skeletons), while up to 54% of the Pb in these samples may have been associated with the SrSO4 skeletons and protoplasm of Acantharia. Atomic ratios of Pb to Ca were highly variable, principally because of the varying amounts of CaCO3 in the samples. Therefore, normalizing Pb concentrations to biomass rather than Ca is preferable for interpreting the bioactivity of Pb in planktonic food webs. We develop a simple model based on the ratio of surface area to volume of organisms to make predictions about the relative importance of organism size and food‐web interactions in the transfer of Pb between trophic levels. For small organisms (<270‐µm spherical radius or the equivalent surface: volume ratio), Pb concentration is determined almost entirely by surface area. For larger organisms, total body Pb will be a function of both the size of the prey and the distribution of Pb within tissues. The role of food‐web interactions (e.g. grazing) in determining the amount of Pb in plankton of different sizes will only be important for large plankton and nekton, where very little of it is adsorbed on the animal surface.

HUMAN LIFE AND CULTURE: DYNAMIC COMPONENTS OF ECOSYSTEMS

Abstract. Contemporary humanity—especially urban‐industrial civilization with its domination of nature—is disturbing complex, integrated, self‐regulating systems that have evolved over long periods of time. We are threatening not only biological ecosystems but also human self‐regulating capabilities at both the biological and the social‐systems levels. This paper presents examples of such disturbance both in the organism—respiratory‐cardiovascular problems related to environmental pollution‐and at the population level—rates of infant mortality and relations between fertility and mortality in light of economic and emotional factors. Prospects for our future survival and flourishing are thus linked less to technical know‐how than to ecological understanding.

Sensitivity of ruminal microorganisms to pentachlorophenol.

Pentachlorophenol (PCP) is used extensively as a biocidal agent, and there is considerable concern about the adverse effects of this compound in biological ecosystems. The effects of PCP on the growth and fermentative activity of cultures of mixed ruminal microorganisms and the sensitivity of 14 ruminal bacterial species to PCP in pure culture were examined in this study. Increasing concentrations of PCP (9.4 to 375.4 microM) depressed growth and propionate concentrations in cultures of mixed ruminal microorganisms. Wide differences in the sensitivities of ruminal bacterial strains to various concentrations of PCP were observed. Cellulolytic strains were highly sensitive to PCP, while amylolytic, sugar-utilizing, and intermediate acid-utilizing strains were more resistant. Growth of major succinate-producing strains was depressed by PCP. Strains which depend on substrate level phosphorylation appeared to be more resistant. The data suggest that the adverse effects of PCP on ruminal microorganisms may be the result of its role as both an uncoupler of electron transport and a protonophore.