Recreation, tourism and nature in a changing world : proceedings of the fifth international conference on monitoring and management of visitor flows in recreational and protected areas : Wageningen, the Netherlands, May 30-June 3, 2010

Proceedings of the fifth international conference on monitoring and management of visitor flows in recreational and protected areas : Wageningen, the Netherlands, May 30-June 3, 201

Spatial variability of aircraft-measured surface energy fluxes in permafrost landscapes

Arctic ecosystems are undergoing a very rapid change due to global warming and their response to climate change has important implications for the global energy budget. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how energy fluxes in the Arctic will respond to any changes in climate related parameters. However, attribution of these responses is challenging because measured fluxes are the sum of multiple processes that respond differently to environmental factors. Here, we present the potential of environmental response functions for quantitatively linking energy flux observations over high latitude permafrost wetlands to environmental drivers in the flux footprints. We used the research aircraft POLAR 5 equipped with a turbulence probe and fast temperature and humidity sensors to measure turbulent energy fluxes along flight tracks across the Alaskan North Slope with the aim to extrapolate the airborne eddy covariance flux measurements from their specific footprint to the entire North Slope. After thorough data pre-processing, wavelet transforms are used to improve spatial discretization of flux observations in order to relate them to biophysically relevant surface properties in the flux footprint. Boosted regression trees are then employed to extract and quantify the functional relationships between the energy fluxes and environmental drivers. Finally, the resulting environmental response functions are used to extrapolate the sensible heat and water vapor exchange over spatio-temporally explicit grids of the Alaskan North Slope. Additionally, simulations from the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model were used to explore the dynamics of the atmospheric boundary layer and to examine results of our extrapolation

Child’s Play

Few things make Japanese adults feel quite as anxious today as the phenomenon called the “child crisis.” Various media teem with intense debates about bullying in schools, child poverty, child suicides, violent crimes committed by children, the rise of socially withdrawn youngsters, and forceful moves by the government to introduce a more conservative educational curriculum. These issues have propelled Japan into the center of a set of global conversations about the nature of children and how to raise them. Engaging both the history of children and childhood and the history of emotions, contributors to this volume track Japanese childhood through a number of historical scenarios. Such explorations—some from Japan’s early modern past—are revealed through letters, diaries, memoirs, family and household records, and religious polemics about promising, rambunctious, sickly, happy, and dutiful youngsters

Child’s Play

Few things make Japanese adults feel quite as anxious today as the phenomenon called the “child crisis.” Various media teem with intense debates about bullying in schools, child poverty, child suicides, violent crimes committed by children, the rise of socially withdrawn youngsters, and forceful moves by the government to introduce a more conservative educational curriculum. These issues have propelled Japan into the center of a set of global conversations about the nature of children and how to raise them. Engaging both the history of children and childhood and the history of emotions, contributors to this volume track Japanese childhood through a number of historical scenarios. Such explorations—some from Japan’s early modern past—are revealed through letters, diaries, memoirs, family and household records, and religious polemics about promising, rambunctious, sickly, happy, and dutiful youngsters

High-resolution reconstruction of atmospheric CO2 concentrations during the last interglacial based on the EDC ice core

The successful reconstruction of past atmospheric CO2 concentrations from Antarctic ice cores started in the early 1980s. Each newly published record is the product of painstaking discrete measurements of hand-sized samples from ice cores that can reach more than 3 kilometers of depth. Hence, high-resolution reconstructions of CO2 are usually limited to a specific window of time of the last 800 thousand years (800 ka). Using the EDC ice core, we reconstructed atmospheric CO2 concentrations during Marine Isotope Stage 5 (MIS 5; 135–106 ka). The new dataset covers the penultimate deglaciation, the last interglacial, and the last glacial inception in unprecedented centennial resolution. Our new record shows remarkably stable CO2 concentrations for ten thousand years during MIS 5e. Simultaneously, a series of worldwide climatic changes took place, such as falling temperatures in the oceans and over the poles, growing ice sheets, generalized climate instability in the Northern Hemisphere, and changes in the Earth’s orbital parameters. The lack of marked variability in the CO2 record during this period can be explained by an unusual combination of dynamic carbon fluxes and the lack of a suitable deep ocean storage reservoir. As enigmatic as the plateau is the last glacial inception when CO2 suddenly drops from interglacial levels and resumes its coupling with Antarctic temperature. We propose that a Northern Hemisphere trigger sourced this threshold-like behavior. Despite the centennial-scale resolution achieved with the MIS 5 record, we only tentatively interpret submillennial CO2 features. While building the dataset, we realized that CO2 showed sharp oscillations between neighboring data points, too fast to be fingerprinted by true atmospheric variability. Much of the ensuing work tackled the understanding of CO2 fluctuations at the centimeter scale and how they affected our record. We concluded that while the high resolution allowed the establishment of precisely timed slope changes, individual fluctuations at the centennial scale were likely the result of fractionation effects during the bubble enclosure process in the ice core. The measurement device used to reconstruct CO2 at the University of Bern is the end product of decades of accumulated knowledge on how to measure CO2 from ancient air bubbles trapped in polar ice. The centrifugal ice microtome (CIM), continuously developed and improved since 2008, is a dry-extraction technique with state-of-the-art precision and high sample throughput. During this Ph.D., the implemented improvements regarding the CIM related to statistical analysis of different potential sources of error. These finesses allowed for a deeper understanding of the system’s intricacies and increased confidence when interpreting its output concentrations

Child’s Play

Few things make Japanese adults feel quite as anxious today as the phenomenon called the “child crisis.” Various media teem with intense debates about bullying in schools, child poverty, child suicides, violent crimes committed by children, the rise of socially withdrawn youngsters, and forceful moves by the government to introduce a more conservative educational curriculum. These issues have propelled Japan into the center of a set of global conversations about the nature of children and how to raise them. Engaging both the history of children and childhood and the history of emotions, contributors to this volume track Japanese childhood through a number of historical scenarios. Such explorations—some from Japan’s early modern past—are revealed through letters, diaries, memoirs, family and household records, and religious polemics about promising, rambunctious, sickly, happy, and dutiful youngsters