Management of land for purposes of conservation and sustainable local development.

Michael Adams’ Biosphere Reserves lecture will serve as something of a “boot camp” for students interested in working in management of land for purposes of conservation and sustainable local development. In the lecture on the Biosphere Reserves will include historical aspects, issues of conservation across a range of ecosystems, sustainable development, and the associated “Logistics” pertaining to requirements of Biosphere Reserves (see below in next line); The Logistics include such issues as use of reserves for education, training, management, research, networking with agencies, outreach to surrounding communities; The important connections with local people, indigenous peoples in many instances, and the specific stakeholders relevant to specific reserves;Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Biomedical program at Space Biospheres Ventures

There are many similarities and some important differences between potential health problems of Biosphere 2 and those of which might be anticipated for a space station or a major outpost on Mars. The demands of time, expense, and equipment would not readily allow medical evacuation from deep space for a serious illness or major trauma, whereas personnel can easily be evacuated from Biosphere 2 if necessary. Treatment facilities can be somewhat less inclusive, since distance would not compel the undertaking of heroic measures or highly complicated surgical procedures on site, and with personnel not fully trained for these procedures. The similarities are given between medical requirements of Biosphere 2 and the complex closed ecological systems of biospheres in space or on Mars. The major problems common to all these would seem to be trauma, infection, and toxicity. It is planned that minor and moderate degrees of trauma, including debridement and suturing of wounds, x ray study of fractures, will be done within Biosphere 2. Bacteriologic and fungal infections, and possibly allergies to pollen or spores are expected to be the commonest medical problem within Biosphere 2

A Comment on Tectonics and the Future of Life on Terrestrial Planets

It is argued that the tight interconnection between biological, climatological, and geophysical factors in the history of the terrestrial biosphere can teach us something of wider importance regarding the general astrobiological evolution of planets in the Galactic habitable zone of the Milky Way. Motivated by a recent debate on the future of Earth's biosphere, we suggest an additional reason why the impact of plate tectonics on the biological evolution is significant on the global Galactic level.Comment: 5 pages, no figures; Precambrian Research, submitte

Use and Conservation of the Biosphere: Proceedings of the Intergovernmental Conference of Experts on the Scientific Basis for Rational Use and Conservation of the Resources of the Bioshpere, Paris, 4-13 September 1968. Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 1970. 272 pp. Paper, $6.00 (available in U.S.A. from Unipub, Inc., P.O. Box 433, New York, N.Y. 10016).

Excerpt: The Intergovernmental Conference of Experts on the Scientific Basis for Rational Use and Conservatiori of the Resources of the Biosphere was sponsored by UNESCO and attended by 326 delegates from 63 nations, 11 international organizations, and 14 nongovernmental organizations. For the purposes of discussion, the biosphere was defined as being that part of the planet earth in which life exists. The resources considered were largely restricted to living organisms; inorganic resources were included only insofar as they provide a medium for the support of plant and animal life. Oceanic resources were left to other international conferences for study

Modeling the thermal behavior of biosphere 2 in a non-controlled environment using bond graphs

Biosphere 2 is a closed ecological system of high complexity built to deepen the understanding of ecological systems, to study the dynamics of closed ecologies, and to learn to control their behavior. The use of modeling and simulation is crucial in the achievement of these goals. Understanding a physical system is almost synonymous with possessing a model of its comportment. The main goal of this study is the development of a dynamic bond graph model that represents the thermal behavior of the complex ecological system under study, Biosphere 2. In this work, a first model that captures the behavior of the ecological system in a non-controlled environment is presented.Postprint (published version

Transnational Perspectives on the Paris Climate Agreement Beyond Paris: Redressing American Defaults in Caring for Earth’s Biosphere

Anxiety about the fate of human civilization is rising. International Law has an essential role to play in sustaining community of nations. Without enhancing International Environmental Law, the biosphere that sustains all nations is imperiled. Laws in the United States can either impede or advance global environmental stewardship. What is entailed in such a choice? The biosphere is changing. At a time when extraordinary technological prowess allows governments the capacity to know how deeply they are altering Earth\u27s biosphere, nations experience a perverse inability to cooperate together. The Arctic is melting rapidly, with knock on effects for sea level rise and alterations in the hydro-logic cycle world-wide. As both the UN Global Environment Outlook (Geo-5) or the Special Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “Global Warming 1.5° C” indicate, global environmental trends are destabilizing and can overwhelm societies on each continent. Governments do not respond effectively. Their tepid response to climate change, as embodied in the Paris Agreement of 2015, is the best evidence that States need to reassess their cooperation. Shallow considerations of realpolitik no longer suffice. Nor do otherwise conventional questions, born of once sound practices from the “business as usual” eras, about how governments might methodically shape new treaties or incrementally advance international law while Earth\u27s biosphere rapidly degrade. States will need to rediscover the benefits and burdens of international cooperation. The aspirational norms of the United Nations Charter are still in force, albeit too little encouraged. More than needing reaffirmation, they require progressive development. Collaborative principles of law can be framed to provide the shared vision that States will require as the Earth\u27s human population grows from 7.6 billion today toward 9.8 billion by 2050. This article suggests the contributions that international environmental law can made toward this objective

A global biogeocenotical biosphere simulation

This model of the D. Forrester type, constructed in differential equations, predicts the food and mineral supply for the factors biosphere population, depending on two socio-economic factors, until about the year 2500. If contemporary rates of natural resources utilization are maintained and there is no management of the environment, food resources will begin to limit human population growth after 2200, and mineral resources will after 2300. A decrease in the biosphere pollution, increase in effective agricultural production, and discovery of new energy sources may forestall or completely avert the onset of a crisis situation. Conservation measures, according to the model, are to a considerable extent realizable only if carried out simultaneously in both areas

Estimating causal networks in biosphere–atmosphere interaction with the PCMCI approach

Local meteorological conditions and biospheric activity are tightly coupled. Understanding these links is an essential prerequisite for predicting the Earth system under climate change conditions. However, many empirical studies on the interaction between the biosphere and the atmosphere are based on correlative approaches that are not able to deduce causal paths, and only very few studies apply causal discovery methods. Here, we use a recently proposed causal graph discovery algorithm, which aims to reconstruct the causal dependency structure underlying a set of time series. We explore the potential of this method to infer temporal dependencies in biosphere-atmosphere interactions. Specifically we address the following questions: How do periodicity and heteroscedasticity influence causal detection rates, i.e. the detection of existing and non-existing links? How consistent are results for noise-contaminated data? Do results exhibit an increased information content that justifies the use of this causal-inference method? We explore the first question using artificial time series with well known dependencies that mimic real-world biosphere-atmosphere interactions. The two remaining questions are addressed jointly in two case studies utilizing observational data. Firstly, we analyse three replicated eddy covariance datasets from a Mediterranean ecosystem at half hourly time resolution allowing us to understand the impact of measurement uncertainties. Secondly, we analyse global NDVI time series (GIMMS 3g) along with gridded climate data to study large-scale climatic drivers of vegetation greenness. Overall, the results confirm the capacity of the causal discovery method to extract time-lagged linear dependencies under realistic settings. The violation of the method's assumptions increases the likelihood to detect false links. Nevertheless, we consistently identify interaction patterns in observational data. Our findings suggest that estimating a directed biosphere-atmosphere network at the ecosystem level can offer novel possibilities to unravel complex multi-directional interactions. Other than classical correlative approaches, our findings are constrained to a few meaningful set of relations which can be powerful insights for the evaluation of terrestrial ecosystem models

GEOCHEMICAL SOIL MAPPING, PHYTOEXTRACTION OF CRITICAL ELEMENTS AND ENERGY PLANT PRODUCTION IN THE POST MINING AREA OF FREIBERG

The soil, heterogeneous in nature, is a very important part of the environment. It plays a major role in the existence, health and functioning of the organisms found in it, the other compartments of the biosphere and the life forms in them. Therefore, a negative deviation from a healthy soil will have a great impact on the biosphere and the environment at large. Some of these unhealthy deviations are caused by human activities and the aftermath of such activities such as mining and resource prospecting within the earth crust. Since these deviations are now very common and because economic gains from mining and prospecting of resources must continue, several research works are focused on highlighting the possible ways of carrying out sustainable mining and restoring the soil back to health conditions