Global Change and the Ecology of Cities

Urban areas are hot spots that drive environmental change at multiple scales. Material demands of production and human consumption alter land use and cover, biodiversity, and hydrosystems locally to regionally, and urban waste discharge affects local to global biogeochemical cycles and climate. For urbanites, however, global environmental changes are swamped by dramatic changes in the local environment. Urban ecology integrates natural and social sciences to study these radically altered local environments and their regional and global effects. Cities themselves present both the problems and solutions to sustainability challenges of an increasingly urbanized world

Forest landscape ecology and global change: an introduction

Forest landscape ecology examines broad-scale patterns and processes and their interactions in forested systems and informs the management of these ecosystems. Beyond being among the richest and the most complex terrestrial systems, forest landscapes serve society by providing an array of products and services and, if managed properly, can do so sustainably. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the field of forest landscape ecology, including major historical and present topics of research, approaches, scales, and applications, particularly those concerning edges, fragmentation, connectivity, disturbance, and biodiversity. In addition, we discuss causes of change in forest landscapes, particularly land-use and management changes, and the expected structural and functional consequences that may result from these drivers. This chapter is intended to set the context and provide an overview for the remainder of the book and poses a broad set of questions related to forest landscape ecology and global change that need answers

The Dynamics of Man's History and Economic Development: A Refocus on Ecological Disturbance and Climate Change

Man’s history and developmental endeavour have been advancing alongside a trail of ecological ramifications and climate change. Since prehistoric times, scientists have not recorded an accelerated shift in ecology during any other epoch beside that of modern man on the planet. The paper seeks to explore how man’s history and development affects ecology and climate. It uses desk analysis to recollect data from global assessment reports and runs a One paired Sample Means t-Test, 1 tailed, 8 df, at Pearson Correlation value 0.458 and 0.5 level. Findings show that, there is global climate change, seen in global warming trends; and imbalance in ecological footprint, seen in depletion of air, water and land sinks. The t-Test reveals significant net loss of global forest cover. The study also, found that at present, processes of development generally tend to damage ecology. Therefore, the study recommends a refocus to sustainable means of development

Modelling understorey dynamics in temperate forests under global change : challenges and perspectives

The understorey harbours a substantial part of vascular plant diversity in temperate forests and plays an important functional role, affecting ecosystem processes such as nutrient cycling and overstorey regeneration. Global change, however, is putting these understorey communities on trajectories of change, potentially altering and reducing their functioning in the future. Developing mitigation strategies to safeguard the diversity and functioning of temperate forests in the future is challenging and requires improved predictive capacity. Process-based models that predict understorey community composition over time, based on first principles of ecology, have the potential to guide mitigation endeavours but such approaches are rare. Here, we review fourteen understorey modelling approaches that have been proposed during the last three decades. We evaluate their inclusion of mechanisms that are required to predict the impact of global change on understorey communities. We conclude that none of the currently existing models fully accounts for all processes that we deem important based on empirical and experimental evidence. Based on this review, we contend new models are needed to project the complex impacts of global change on forest understoreys. Plant functional traits should be central to such future model developments, as they drive community assembly processes and provide valuable information on the functioning of the understorey. Given the important role of the overstorey, a coupling of understorey models to overstorey models will be essential to predict the impact of global change on understorey composition and structure, and how it will affect the functioning of temperate forests in the future

ENERGY EFFICIENCY AND LIFE CYCLE ANALYSIS OF ORGANIC AND CONVENTIONAL OLIVE GROVES IN THE MESSARA VALLEY, CRETE, GREECE.

Environmental Impacts of agricultural activities have to be assessed in order to address cultural practices and the type of farming that are best suited to avoid the trade-off between the Ecology and the Economy. Furthermore, this study, comparing the environmental impacts with the Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) of Organic and Conventional olive oil production, is proposing to consider the relationship between the Energy Efficiency and the environmental impacts, notably the Climate Change (Global Warming contribution through Greenhouse Gas emission). The LCA is used to take into account the impacts of the production system from the Cradle (input production) to the Farm gate (final farm product) and considers 7 environmental impacts potential categories: Global Warming, Acidification, Eutrophication, Biodiversity, Erosion, Resource depletion, Ground water depletion. The study also assesses the Energy efficiency of both systems. The results show a clear difference between organic and conventional production, namely a two-fold improvement of the energy efficiency in the organic production. Even if the differences are reduced when the results are calculated on the yield rather than the area, the organic methods have a far smaller contribution to Global warming, Eutrophication, Biodiversity loss, Soil loss, Groundwater depletion and Energy use whereas, the Acidification potential is comparable in both cases. The study recommends encouraging some of the cultural practices that are used in the organic farming methods in order to reduce the burden of agriculture on the local and global ecology as well as the natural resources

Entomogenic Climate Change

Rapidly expanding insect populations, deforestation, and global climate change threaten to destabilize key planetary carbon pools, especially the Earth's forests which link the micro-ecology of insect infestation to climate. To the extent mean temperature increases, insect populations accelerate deforestation. This alters climate via the loss of active carbon sequestration by live trees and increased carbon release from decomposing dead trees. A positive feedback loop can emerge that is self-sustaining--no longer requiring independent climate-change drivers. Current research regimes and insect control strategies are insufficient at present to cope with the present regional scale of insect-caused deforestation, let alone its likely future global scale. Extensive field recordings demonstrate that bioacoustic communication plays a role in infestation dynamics and is likely to be a critical link in the feedback loop. These results open the way to novel detection and monitoring strategies and nontoxic control interventions.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure; http://cse.ucdavis.edu/~chaos/chaos/pubs/ecc.ht

Development of innovative tools for understanding marine biodiversity and assessing good environmental status: the EU project DEVOTES

AZTI-Tecnalia organized the XVII edition of SIEBM – Iberian Symposium on Marine Biology Studies, in Donostia – San Sebastián, from 11th to 14th September 2012. The objectives of the Symposia are to show the recent advances in marine biology research, within the Iberian Peninsula (Portugal, Spain and the Maccaronesian islands) and also South American countries. The research topics covered by the Symposium, divided in scientific sessions, include aquaculture and parasitism; benthic ecology; ecological assessment, environmental impacts and pollution monitoring; genetics and taxonomy; global change; management of living resources; modelling and habitat suitability; pelagic ecology; restoration, conservation and planning; and, finally, a miscellaneous section. A special session on marine environment assessment has been organized, related to the European Water Framework Directive and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive. This article is the contribution given to the Symposium by the DEVOTES Coordinator, Àngel Borja