Effects Of Global Environmental Change Research Articles

A review of vulnerability indicators for deltaic social–ecological systems

The sustainability of deltas worldwide is under threat due to the consequences of global environmental change (including climate change) and human interventions in deltaic landscapes. Understanding these systems is becoming increasingly important to assess threats to and opportunities for long-term sustainable development. Here, we propose a simplified, yet inclusive social–ecological system (SES)-centered risk and vulnerability framework and a list of indicators proven to be useful in past delta assessments. In total, 236 indicators were identified through a structured review of peer-reviewed literature performed for three globally relevant deltas—the Mekong, the Ganges–Brahmaputra–Meghna and the Amazon. These are meant to serve as a preliminary “library” of potential indicators to be used for future vulnerability assessments. Based on the reviewed studies, we identified disparities in the availability of indicators to populate some of the vulnerability domains of the proposed framework, as comprehensive social–ecological assessments were seldom implemented in the past. Even in assessments explicitly aiming to capture both the social and the ecological system, there were many more indicators for social susceptibility and coping/adaptive capacities as compared to those relevant for characterizing ecosystem susceptibility or robustness. Moreover, there is a lack of multi-hazard approaches accounting for the specific vulnerability profile of sub-delta areas. We advocate for more comprehensive, truly social–ecological assessments which respond to multi-hazard settings and recognize within-delta differences in vulnerability and risk. Such assessments could make use of the proposed framework and list of indicators as a starting point and amend it with new indicators that would allow capturing the complexity as well as the multi-hazard exposure in a typical delta SES.

Economic Issues on Food Safety.

A globalised food trade, with a huge increase of the exchanged volume, extensive production and complex supply chains are contributing towards an increased number of microbiological food safety outbreaks. All of these factors are putting pressure on the stakeholders, either public or private, in terms of rule and control. In fact, this scenario could force manufacturers to be lenient towards food safety control intentionally, or unintentionally, and result in a major foodborne outbreak that causes health problems and economic loss. As a response to emerging calls for the adoption of a systemic approach to food safety, we try to identify and discuss the several related economics issue in this field. Based on an extensive analysis of academic and policy literatures on the economic effects of global environmental change at different stages of the food system, we highlight the main issues involving economists in the field of food safety. In the first part, we assessed the several approaches and problems related to the evaluation of food safety improvements, followed by an overview of drivers of food safety demand in the second part. The third section is devoted to discussing changes occurred at the institutional level in building and managing food safety policies. The last section summarises the main considerations aroused from the work.

Biodiversity and ecosystem stability across scales in metacommunities.

Although diversity-stability relationships have been extensively studied in local ecosystems, the global biodiversity crisis calls for an improved understanding of these relationships in a spatial context. Here, we use a dynamical model of competitive metacommunities to study the relationships between species diversity and ecosystem variability across scales. We derive analytic relationships under a limiting case; these results are extended to more general cases with numerical simulations. Our model shows that, while alpha diversity decreases local ecosystem variability, beta diversity generally contributes to increasing spatial asynchrony among local ecosystems. Consequently, both alpha and beta diversity provide stabilising effects for regional ecosystems, through local and spatial insurance effects respectively. We further show that at the regional scale, the stabilising effect of biodiversity increases as spatial environmental correlation increases. Our findings have important implications for understanding the interactive effects of global environmental changes (e.g. environmental homogenisation) and biodiversity loss on ecosystem sustainability at large scales.

Global environmental change effects on ecosystems: the importance of land-use legacies.

One of the major challenges in ecology is to predict how multiple global environmental changes will affect future ecosystem patterns (e.g. plant community composition) and processes (e.g. nutrient cycling). Here, we highlight arguments for the necessary inclusion of land-use legacies in this endeavour. Alterations in resources and conditions engendered by previous land use, together with influences on plant community processes such as dispersal, selection, drift and speciation, have steered communities and ecosystem functions onto trajectories of change. These trajectories may be modulated by contemporary environmental changes such as climate warming and nitrogen deposition. We performed a literature review which suggests that these potential interactions have rarely been investigated. This crucial oversight is potentially due to an assumption that knowledge of the contemporary state allows accurate projection into the future. Lessons from other complex dynamic systems, and the recent recognition of the importance of previous conditions in explaining contemporary and future ecosystem properties, demand the testing of this assumption. Vegetation resurvey databases across gradients of land use and environmental change, complemented by rigorous experiments, offer a means to test for interactions between land-use legacies and multiple environmental changes. Implementing these tests in the context of a trait-based framework will allow biologists to synthesize compositional and functional ecosystem responses. This will further our understanding of the importance of land-use legacies in determining future ecosystem properties, and soundly inform conservation and restoration management actions.

Linking biodiversity and Global Environmental Changes in Brazilian coastal habitats

The Earth’s climate is changing at a time when society is re-evaluating its relationship with nature and with the services that natural systems provide to human societies. Human actions, which are the major cause of these changes, also reduce the ability of ecological systems to cope with and adapt to the new scenarios. As a result, in the near future only the biota but humanity as a whole will feel the effects of our unsustainable way of life. Among the expected effects, there is the compromising of ecosystem services that are the basis of life and the human economy in diferente parts of the globe.Oceans are central to the climate system, recycling half of the oxygen that we breathe and absorbing half of the carbon dioxide that we emit through the burning of fossil fuels. The oceans hold 97% of the Earth’s water and 95% of all mobile carbon, providing food and livelihoods. Determining the effects of Global Environmental Changes (GECs) on the oceans are critical to understanding what is changing, how is it changing, and how these changes will influence society. Direct and indirect effects of GECs on the marine environment are already perceptible, but others can only be projected based on observations, experimentation and modeling efforts. We have only a rudimentary understanding of the sensitivity, vulnerability and adaptability of natural and managed marine ecosystems to GECs, especially in the South Atlantic.On the Brazilian coast, the existing baseline, monitoring and predictive studies are insufficient to understand the detrimental effects of GECs. The lack of long-term studies of biodiversity has left Brazil far behind in global assessments of the consequences of GECs on coastal ecosystems. In contrast, the Brazilian coastline has vegetated ecosystems (mangroves, salt marshes, and seagrass and rhodolith beds) that together contain hundreds of millions of tons of stored carbon, making Brazil a good place to test new mechanisms to evaluate and conserve blue carbon. To promote the development of a regional science-policy agenda to respond to the urgent demand for sound scientific advice in the face of rapid changes to marine coastal ecosystems, it is necessary to integrate baseline studies to assess the habitat distribution and quality of the ecosystems, as well as the human threats and risks associated with local and regional climate-change scenarios; promote strategic monitoring of physical and biological parameters to fill critical gaps in knowledge; and provide an early warning system of GECs to coastal communities. There is also a need to refine regional and local scenarios of threats related to GECs, to assess the uncertainties, risks and thresholds at the organism and ecosystem levels. It is imperative to integrate Brazilian researchers and institutions in order to promote the consolidation of existing knowledge and the implementation of a broad and continuous observational network. The Network for Monitoring Benthic Coastal Habitats (ReBentos) was created to detect the effects of regional and global environmental changes on benthic habitats, by creating a time-series of data on biodiversity along the Brazilian coast. ReBentos is linked to the Coastal Zones Branch of the Climate Network, hosted by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, and the National Institute of Science and Technology for Climate Change. The network was supported in its early phase by the National Counsel of Technological and Scientific Development (CNPq), Sao Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), and Coordination for the Improvement of Higher-Education Personnel (CAPES). Currently, ReBentos (http://rebentos.org/) comprises 166 active researchers along the entire Brazilian coast, belonging to 57 educational/research institutions, both national and international, and 17 coastal states.The strategy adopted by ReBentos was to define standardized methods for biodiversity sampling, processing and data analysis, and for measuring abiotic and anthropogenic factors. The free-access e-book

Assessing the Influence of Climate Extremes on Ecosystems and Human Health in Southwestern Amazon Supported by the PULSE-Brazil Platform

The complexity of multi-dimensional climate, environmental and human health information complicates bringing together scientists, civil society, and decision makers to provide adequate mitigation and adaptation options for the consequences of global environmental change. To provide an effective pathway to conciliate (integrate) these datasets, we present PULSE-Brazil as the Platform for Understanding Long-term Sustainability of Ecosystems and human health. The overarching aim of this paper is to focus on two study cases in the Brazilian state of Acre, 1) analyzing recent socio-environmental disasters such as the impacts of droughts and consequent increases in fire detections on the incidence of respiratory diseases, and 2) evaluating the impacts of temperature increases in combination with rainfall seasonality upon the incidence of Dengue fever. Based on data available in PULSE-Brazil platform, we also aim to provide insights on the consequences of future climate variability on ecosystems and human health. Finally, we provide a discussion on the collaborative process between scientists and policymakers that defined the PULSE-Brazil platform specifications and datasets and propose a conceptual pathway for promoting the interaction between science and policy during the process of producing a tool that allows the understating of climate-relate processes. Our results clearly demonstrated that ecosystems are under increased fire risk in the future that will, in turn, affect the health of human populations. Moreover, humans are also exposed to critical Dengue fever outbreaks with the projected increase in minimum temperatures. Therefore, minimizing the impacts of these potentially ascending socio-environmental problems is the first step for adapting to a changing climate in the Amazon region. We expect that PULSE-Brazil will serve not only as a technical tool for supporting governance, management, mitigation and long-term adaptation plans for climate impacts and natural disasters, but also will take advantage of its graphical capabilities to be an instructive vehicle that facilitates information flow for societal governance.

Analyzing nonlinear variations in terrestrial vegetation in China during 1982-2012.

Quantifying the long-term trends of changes in terrestrial vegetation on a large scale is an effective method for detecting the effects of global environmental change. In view of the trend towards overall restoration and local degradation of terrestrial vegetation in China, it is necessary to pay attention to the spatial processes of vegetative restoration or degradation, as well as to clarify the temporal and spatial characteristics of vegetative growth in greater geographical detail. However, traditional linear regression analysis has some drawbacks when describing ecological processes. Combining nonparametric linear regression analysis with high-order nonlinear fitting, the temporal and spatial characteristics of terrestrial vegetative growth in China during 1982-2012 were detected using the third generation of Global Inventory Modeling and Mapping Studies (GIMMS3g) dataset. The results showed that high-order curves could be effective. The region joining Ordos City and Shaanxi Gansu Ningxia on the Loess Plateau may have experienced restoration-degradation-restoration processes of vegetative growth. In the Daloushan Mountains, degradation-restoration processes of vegetative growth may have occurred, and the occurrence of several hidden vegetative growth processes was located in different regions of eastern China. Changes in cultivated vegetation were inconsistent with changes in other vegetation types. In southern China and some high-altitude areas, temperature was the primary driver of vegetative growth on an interannual scale, while in the north, the effect of rainfall was more significant. Nevertheless, the influence of climate on vegetation activity in large urban areas was weak. The trend types of degradation-restoration processes in several regions were inconsistent with the implements of regional land development and protection strategy. Thus, the role of human activity cannot be ignored. In future studies, it will be still necessary to quantify the effects of human management on spatial patterns, develop trend-fitting methods, and explore more refined methods of analyzing the driving forces affecting large-scale changes in vegetative growth.

Global environmental change in the unique flora: Endangered plant communities in the Valencia region

The expected effects of global environmental change over the coming decades may worsen the situation for many currently endangered Valencian plants, even leading to the localised extinction of some species which have no replacement habitats. This paper analyses four cases of affected environments: coastal systems, wetlands, sub-Mediterranean shade forests, and high mountain vegetation.

An attack on two fronts: predicting how changes in land use and climate affect the distribution of stream macroinvertebrates

Summary Global environmental change entails not only climatic alterations, but also changes in land use. Freshwater ecosystems are particularly sensitive to both of these changes, and their sustainable management requires better information on likely responses. To examine the effects of climate and land use on the freshwater community, the distributions of stream macroinvertebrates of the Changjiang catchment in south‐east China were modelled. The present distributions of 72 taxa were predicted using environmental variables generated by regional climate, land‐use and hydrological models. Hydrological predictors, sensitive to both climate and land use, were the most relevant predictors in the species distribution models (SDMs), followed by land use. The stream macroinvertebrates’ distributions were then projected for the period 2021 to 2050 using three different future scenarios: (i) climate change, (ii) land‐use change and (iii) climate and land‐use change combined. Land‐use change was predicted to have the strongest negative impact on the community, with reductions in local richness (−20%), predicted diversity (−0.3%) and range size (−25%) and a general shift towards higher altitudes (+12%). The climate‐change scenario had a negative effect on predicted diversity (−0.1%) and resulted in a moderate altitudinal shift (+3%) along with increased richness (+15%) and range size (+19%). In the combined scenario, climate and land‐use changes counterbalanced each other to a certain degree, but had an overall detrimental effect. The results underscore the high relevance of land‐use change in future distribution predictions, exemplify the possible effect of interactions between land use and climate on hydrology and indicate how such responses can vary among freshwater taxa. The model also allows the detection of key environmental variables, the identification of vulnerable species and the definition of their potential distributions. This information is essential to establishing effective management and conservation strategies and gives a more comprehensive insight into the possible effects of global environmental change on freshwater ecosystems.

Integrative Games as the Technique of Technical University Students’ Professional Competences Formation in the Field of Health and Safety

In order to prevent and minimize the consequences of global environmental change caused by ecological, technological and economic problems, there need professionals with high-quality training in the field of health and safety. The article defines the special aspects of technical students’ professional competences formation of in the field of health and safety in the modern world. The authors propose a set of integrative games boosting the learning process, creating simulated professional activities (situations), making it possible to develop skills and influence the relationships of participants and ensuring the formation of social and professional activities and readiness for work. This article is intended for teachers, psychologists, researchers, potential employers, specialists in the field of health and safety. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n2s3p64

Reverse osmosis on a small barrier island: transformations of water, landscape, and vulnerability on Ocracoke Island, NC, USA

Globally, modifications to the landscape have drastically transformed social and ecological communities. The implication of global climate change for small islands and small island communities is especially troublesome. Socially, small islands have a limited resource base, deal with varying degrees of insularity, generally have little political power, and have limited economic opportunities. The physical attributes of small islands also increase their vulnerability to global climate change, including limited land area, limited fresh water supplies, and greater distances to resources. The focus of this research project is to document place-specific human–environmental interactions from a political ecology perspective as a means to address local concerns and possible consequences of global environmental change. The place in which these interactions are examined is the barrier island and village of Ocracoke, NC. I focus on the specific historical-geography of land and water management on Ocracoke as a means to examine relationships between local human–environmental interactions and environmental change. I provide an account of technological changes in potable water procurement and the paralleling development of island growth (i.e. people, buildings, tourism). Then, relying on interviews with island residents, I consider how advancements in local water infrastructure, specifically the installation of an additional reverse osmosis unit, are hinged on anticipated future economic development. Lastly the social dimensions of change are discussed with specific focus on the increase in housing density and overburdened septic drainage fields in relation to changing hydrologic processes with an examination of how all of these factors affect local vulnerability.

A new method for analysing socio-ecological patterns of vulnerability

This paper presents a method for the analysis of socio-ecological patterns of vulnerability of people being at risk of losing their livelihoods as a consequence of global environmental change. This method fills a gap in meth- odologies for vulnerability analysis by providing general- izations of the factors that shape vulnerability in specific socio-ecological systems and showing their spatial occur- rence. The proposed method consists of four steps that include both quantitative and qualitative analyses. To start, the socio-ecological system exposed to global environ- mental changes that will be studied needs to be determined. This could, for example, be farmers in drylands, urban populations in coastal areas and forest-dependent people in the tropics. Next, the core dimensions that shape vulnera- bility in the socio-ecological system of interest need to be defined. Subsequently, a set of spatially explicit indicators that reflect these core dimensions is selected. Cluster ana- lysis is used for grouping the indicator data. The clusters found, referred to as vulnerability profiles, describe dif- ferent typical groupings of conditions and processes that create vulnerability in the socio-ecological system under study, and their spatial distribution is provided. Interpre- tation and verification of these profiles is the last step in the analysis. We illustrate the application of this method by analysing the patterns of vulnerability of (smallholder) farmers in drylands. We identify eight distinct vulnerability profiles in drylands that together provide a global overview of different processes taking place and sub-national detail of their distribution. By overlaying the spatial distribution of these profiles with specific outcome indicators such as conflict occurrence or migration, the method can also be used to understand these phenomena better. Analysis of vulnerability profiles will in a next step be used as a basis for identifying responses to reduce vulnerability, for example, to facilitate the transfer of best practices to reduce vulnerability between different places.

Statistical ecology comes of age.

The desire to predict the consequences of global environmental change has been the driver towards more realistic models embracing the variability and uncertainties inherent in ecology. Statistical ecology has gelled over the past decade as a discipline that moves away from describing patterns towards modelling the ecological processes that generate these patterns. Following the fourth International Statistical Ecology Conference (1–4 July 2014) in Montpellier, France, we analyse current trends in statistical ecology. Important advances in the analysis of individual movement, and in the modelling of population dynamics and species distributions, are made possible by the increasing use of hierarchical and hidden process models. Exciting research perspectives include the development of methods to interpret citizen science data and of efficient, flexible computational algorithms for model fitting. Statistical ecology has come of age: it now provides a general and mathematically rigorous framework linking ecological theory and empirical data.

Evaluating the Effects of Global Environmental Changes on Ecosystems via Mycorrhizae, Soil Biota and Plant Traits

Global environmental change (GEC) which is a change in average weather conditions due to biotic and abiotic processes and human activities, affects above and belowground organisms such as mycorrhizae, soil biota and plants. As with other major components of terrestrial ecosystems, the trait responses of these above and below ground organisms to GEC have received limited attention. Most of the research have been pot-based with a few field especially monoculture studies using mycorrhizal traits. A major question that arises from all these studies is, whether the GEC effects on mycorrhizal fungi, soil biota and plant traits can directly influence ecosystem functions. This paper looks at the effects of GEC on ecosystems via mycorrhizal fungi traits such as speed of root colonization, hyphal length; soil biota traits such as running speed, palatability and plant traits such as seed size, shoot phenology and how these may retroact to influence ecosystem functions such as nutrient and carbon cycling.

Long‐Term Ecological Research and Network‐Level Science

With every passing year, the effects of global environmental change are becoming more pervasive and are occurring at a more accelerated pace. Climate change, land use change, atmospheric nitrogen deposition, ocean acidification and sea level rise, loss of biodiversity, and homogenization of Earth's ecosystems are all manifestations of human activities. These short‐ and long‐term effects of environmental changes continue to mount.

Sustainable Food Security: An Emerging Research and Policy Agenda

As a response to emerging calls for the adoption of a systemic approach to food security, in this article we identify and discuss inextricably linked barriers to ‘sustainable food security’. Based on an extensive analysis of recent academic and policy literatures on the economic, social and ecological effects of global environmental change at different stages of the food system, we highlight a series of cross-cutting issues and areas of disconnection between food production and consumption that call for a renovated focus on the different nodal points of the food system. As we suggest, a sustainable food security framework should move away from the conventional focus on individual components of the food system (e.g., supply and demand) and address more holistically the complex relationships between its different stages and actors.

Interactive effects of elevated UV-B radiation and N deposition on decomposition of Moso bamboo litter

Being two important agents of global environmental change, elevated ultraviolet-B (UV-B) radiation derived from anthropogenic driven ozone depletion and enhanced nitrogen (N) deposition may strongly affect litter decomposition, a crucial factor in biogeochemical cycling. However, the interactive effects of both agents together on litter decomposition are still unclear even though each has been well-documented independently. We conducted a field-based experiment in subtropical China to investigate the combined effects UV-B radiation and N deposition on the decomposition of Moso bamboo (Phyllostachys pubescens) leaf litter over a 20 months period. It was found that the combined effect significantly accelerated litter decomposition, C loss, and lignin degradation as well as facilitating phosphorous (P) release, although it had no measurable effect on N release. Moreover, the interactive effects of both agents together far exceeded the effects of each separately. Results indicated that the positive combined effect of UV-B radiation and N deposition on litter decomposition and C loss could potentially impact Moso bamboo forest ecosystem C cycling. These findings provide a new perspective to further understand the interactive effects of global environmental changes on terrestrial ecosystem processes.

Effects of global environmental changes on parasitoid–host food webs and biological control

Global environmental changes threaten biodiversity and the interactions between species, and food-web approaches are being used increasingly to measure their community-wide impacts. Here we review how parasitoid–host food webs affect biological control, and how their structure responds to environmental change. We find that land-use intensification tends to produce webs with low complexity and uneven interaction strengths. Dispersal, spatial arrangement of habitats, the species pool and community differences across habitats have all been found to determine how webs respond to landscape structure, though clear effects of landscape complexity on web structure remain elusive. The invasibility of web structures and response of food webs to invasion have been the subject of theoretical and empirical work respectively, and nutrient enrichment has been widely studied in the food-web literature, potentially driving dynamic instability and altering biomass ratios of different trophic levels. Combined with food-web changes observed under climate change, these responses of food webs could signal changes to biological control, though there have been surprisingly few studies linking food-web structure to pest control, and these have produced mixed results. However, there is strong potential for food-web approaches to add value to biological control research, as parasitoid–host webs have been used to predict indirect effects among hosts that share enemies, to study non-target effects of biological control agents and to quantify the use of alternative prey resources by enemies. Future work is needed to link food-web interactions with evolutionary responses to the environment and predator–prey interactions, while incorporating recent advances in predator biodiversity research. This holistic understanding of agroecosystem responses and functioning, made possible by food-web approaches, may hold the key to better management of biological control in changing environments.

Estimating the tolerance of species to the effects of global environmental change

Global environmental change is affecting species distribution and their interactions with other species. In particular, the main drivers of environmental change strongly affect the strength of interspecific interactions with considerable consequences for biodiversity. However, extrapolating the effects observed on pair-wise interactions to entire ecological networks is challenging. Here we propose a framework to estimate the tolerance to changes in the strength of mutualistic interaction that species in mutualistic networks can sustain before becoming extinct. We identify the scenarios where generalist species can be the least tolerant. We show that the least tolerant species across different scenarios do not appear to have uniquely common characteristics. Species' tolerance is extremely sensitive to the direction of change in the strength of mutualistic interaction, as well as to the observed mutualistic trade-offs between the number of partners and the strength of the interactions.

Historical ecology: Using unconventional data sources to test for effects of global environmental change

Predicting the future ecological impact of global change drivers requires understanding how these same drivers have acted in the past to produce the plant populations and communities we see today. Historical ecological data sources have made contributions of central importance to global change biology, but remain outside the toolkit of most ecologists. Here we review the strengths and weaknesses of four unconventional sources of historical ecological data: land survey records, "legacy" vegetation data, historical maps and photographs, and herbarium specimens. We discuss recent contributions made using these data sources to understanding the impacts of habitat disturbance and climate change on plant populations and communities, and the duration of extinction-colonization time lags in response to landscape change. Historical data frequently support inferences made using conventional ecological studies (e.g., increases in warm-adapted species as temperature rises), but there are cases when the addition of different data sources leads to different conclusions (e.g., temporal vegetation change not as predicted by chronosequence studies). The explicit combination of historical and contemporary data sources is an especially powerful approach for unraveling long-term consequences of multiple drivers of global change. Despite the limitations of historical data, which include spotty and potentially biased spatial and temporal coverage, they often represent the only means of characterizing ecological phenomena in the past and have proven indispensable for characterizing the nature, magnitude, and generality of global change impacts on plant populations and communities.