Systematic Conservation Planning in the Face of Climate Change: Bet-Hedging on the Columbia Plateau

Systematic conservation planning efforts typically focus on protecting current patterns of biodiversity. Climate change is poised to shift species distributions, reshuffle communities, and alter ecosystem functioning. In such a dynamic environment, lands selected to protect today's biodiversity may fail to do so in the future. One proposed approach to designing reserve networks that are robust to climate change involves protecting the diversity of abiotic conditions that in part determine species distributions and ecological processes. A set of abiotically diverse areas will likely support a diversity of ecological systems both today and into the future, although those two sets of systems might be dramatically different. Here, we demonstrate a conservation planning approach based on representing unique combinations of abiotic factors. We prioritize sites that represent the diversity of soils, topographies, and current climates of the Columbia Plateau. We then compare these sites to sites prioritized to protect current biodiversity. This comparison highlights places that are important for protecting both today's biodiversity and the diversity of abiotic factors that will likely determine biodiversity patterns in the future. It also highlights places where a reserve network designed solely to protect today's biodiversity would fail to capture the diversity of abiotic conditions and where such a network could be augmented to be more robust to climate-change impacts

Radiation hardness of silicon detectors for future colliders

The radiation hardness of silicon pad detectors, especially developed for the PLUG-calorimeter of the H1 experiment at HERA was investigated with respect to neutron and electron irradiation. Be(d,n)-neutrons with an average energy of 6.2 MeV up to a fluence of 10 15 n/cm$^2$ and 1.8 MeV electrons up to a dose of 1 MGy (10$^{16}$ e/cm$^2$ ) were used. Degradation effects of the diode properties regarding the reverse current, depletion voltage and charge collection efficiency are studied at room temperature and with no bias applied during irradiation. Special emphasis is put on the separation of the respective damage generation and its subsequent self annealing. The observed effects are discussed with respect to radiation levels to be envisioned for experiments with future colliding beam machines

Radiation hardness of silicon detectors for future colliders

The radiation hardness of silicon pad detectors, especially developed for the PLUG-calorimeter of the H1 experiment at HERA was investigated with respect to neutron and electron irradiation. Be(d,n)-neutrons with an average energy of 6.2 MeV up to a fluence of 10 15 n/cm$^2$ and 1.8 MeV electrons up to a dose of 1 MGy (10$^{16}$ e/cm$^2$ ) were used. Degradation effects of the diode properties regarding the reverse current, depletion voltage and charge collection efficiency are studied at room temperature and with no bias applied during irradiation. Special emphasis is put on the separation of the respective damage generation and its subsequent self annealing. The observed effects are discussed with respect to radiation levels to be envisioned for experiments with future colliding beam machines