Corporate Rescue: This Year, Next Year...

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Sexual and geographic dimorphism in northern rockhopper penguins breeding in the South Atlantic Ocean

The Endangered northern rockhopper penguin Eudyptes moseleyi, like all penguins, is monomorphic, making sex determination of individuals in the field challenging. We examined the degree of sexual size dimorphism of adult birds across the species’ breeding range in the Atlantic Ocean and developed discriminant functions (DF) to predict individuals’ sex using morphometric measurements. We found significant site-specific differences in both bill length and bill depth, with males being the larger sex on each island. Across all islands, bill length contributed 78% to dissimilarity between sexes. Penguins on Gough Island had significantly longer bills, whilst those from Tristan da Cunha had the deepest. Island-specific DFs correctly classified 82-94% of individuals, and all functions performed significantly better than chance. The model for Nightingale Island correctly classified the greatest proportion of individuals (94-95%), while that for Tristan da Cunha performed the poorest (80-82%). A discriminant function derived from all sites accurately sexed 86-88% of northern rockhopper penguins achieving similar accuracy to island-specific functions. While molecular techniques conclusively determine an individual’s sex, morphometric measurements can provide a reliable estimate with close to 90% accuracy using a method that is less invasive and requires little technical expertise. Sexing is an important tool for meaningful interpretation of ecological data. Consideration of sex-specific differences in future studies will aid investigation of a potential sex-dependent vulnerability in this Endangered species.© The authors 2019. Open Access under Creative Commons by Attribution Licence. Use, distribution and reproduction are unrestricted. Authors and original publication must be credited. The attached file is the published pdf

新破產清盤法: 陷阱與漏洞

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Special study: Legal transition programme review

This study is an evaluation of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development's Legal Transition Programme’s activities from 2001-2011, through a review of a sample of 30 legal reform projects and advisory projects in Armenia, Hungary, Mongolia, Russia and Serbia. It was conducted by the Evaluation department in conjunction with three external experts: Professor Douglas Arner (University of Hong Kong), Professor Charles Booth (University of Hawaii) and Professor Gordon Walker (LaTrobe University). Overall the programme was found to be successful due to its compatibility with the Bank’s activities and highly relevant due to its support of the Bank’s investments through contributions to legal improvements. The programme’s projects have made a core contribution to the transition process, influencing domestic policy formulation and contributing to stronger free market economies. The transition impact and sustainability of the programme was found to be excellent.published_or_final_versio

The mechanisms of North Atlantic CO2 uptake in a large Earth System Model ensemble

The oceans currently take up around a quarter of the carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted by human activity. While stored in the ocean, this CO2 is not influencing Earth's radiation budget; the ocean CO2 sink therefore plays an important role in mitigating global warming. CO2 uptake by the oceans is heterogeneous, with the subpolar North Atlantic being the strongest CO2 sink region. Observations over the last 2 decades have indicated that CO2 uptake by the subpolar North Atlantic sink can vary rapidly. Given the importance of this sink and its apparent variability, it is critical that we understand the mechanisms behind its operation. Here we explore the combined natural and anthropogenic subpolar North Atlantic CO2 uptake across a large ensemble of Earth System Model simulations, and find that models show a peak in sink strength around the middle of the century after which CO2 uptake begins to decline. We identify different drivers of change on interannual and multidecadal timescales. Short-term variability appears to be driven by fluctuations in regional seawater temperature and alkalinity, whereas the longer-term evolution throughout the coming century is largely occurring through a counterintuitive response to rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations. At high atmospheric CO2 concentrations the contrasting Revelle factors between the low latitude water and the subpolar gyre, combined with the transport of surface waters from the low latitudes to the subpolar gyre, means that the subpolar CO2 uptake capacity is largely satisfied from its southern boundary rather than through air-sea CO2 flux. Our findings indicate that: (i) we can explain the mechanisms of subpolar North Atlantic CO2 uptake variability across a broad range of Earth System Models; (ii) a focus on understanding the mechanisms behind contemporary variability may not directly tell us about how the sink will change in the future; (iii) to identify long-term change in the North Atlantic CO2 sink we should focus observational resources on monitoring lower latitude as well as the subpolar seawater CO2; (iv) recent observations of a weakening subpolar North Atlantic CO2 sink may suggest that the sink strength has peaked and is in long-term decline.This work was supported by the EU FP7 Collaborative Project CarboOcean (Grant Agreement Number 264879), the Joint DECC/Defra Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme (GA01101), and the NERC directed research programme RAGNARoCC (NE/K002473/1)

Sources of uncertainty in future projections of the carbon cycle

This is the final version of the article. Available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.The inclusion of carbon cycle processes within CMIP5 Earth System Models provides the opportunity to explore the relative importance of differences in scenario and climate model representation to future land and ocean carbon fluxes. A two-way ANOVA approach was used to quantify the variability owing to differences between scenarios and between climate models at different lead times. For global ocean carbon fluxes, the variance attributed to differences between Representative Concentration Pathway scenarios exceeds the variance attributed to differences between climate models by around 2025, completely dominating by 2100. This contrasts with global land carbon fluxes, where the variance attributed to differences between climate models continues to dominate beyond 2100. This suggests that modelled processes that determine ocean fluxes are currently better constrained than those of land fluxes, thus we can be more confident in linking different future socio-economic pathways to consequences of ocean carbon uptake than for land carbon uptake. The apparent agreement in atmosphere-ocean carbon fluxes, globally, masks strong climate model differences at a regional level. The North Atlantic and Southern Ocean are key regions, where differences in modelled processes represent an important source of variability in projected regional fluxesMOHC authors were supported by the Joint DECC / Defra Met Office Hadley Centre Cli- mate Programme (GA01101). SY was supported by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University grant “Bayesian Modelling for Quantifying Uncertainty in Climate Predictions” (1-ZV9Z). We acknowl- edge use of R software package (R Core Team 2013). We acknowledge the World Climate Re- search Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling, which is responsible for CMIP and we thank the climate modelling groups for providing their GCM output (listed in Table 1). Support of this dataset was provided by the Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy

The impact of angular momentum on black hole accretion rates in simulations of galaxy formation

Feedback from energy liberated by gas accretion onto black holes (BHs) is an attractive mechanism to explain the exponential cut-off at the massive end of the galaxy stellar mass function (SMF). Semi-analytic models of galaxy formation in which this form of feedback is assumed to suppress cooling in haloes where the gas cooling time is large compared to the dynamical time do indeed achieve a good match to the observed SMF. Furthermore, hydrodynamic simulations of individual halos in which gas is assumed to accrete onto the central BH at the Bondi rate have shown that a self-regulating regime is established in which the BH grows just enough to liberate an amount of energy comparable to the thermal energy of the halo. However, this process is efficient at suppressing the growth not only of massive galaxies but also of galaxies like the Milky Way, leading to disagreement with the observed SMF. The Bondi accretion rate, however, is inappropriate when the accreting material has angular momentum. We present an improved accretion model that takes into account the circularisation and subsequent viscous transport of infalling material and include it as a "subgrid" model in hydrodynamic simulations of the evolution of halos with a wide range of masses. The resulting accretion rates are generally low in low mass (\lsim 10^{11.5} \msun) halos, but show outbursts of Eddington-limited accretion during galaxy mergers. During outbursts these objects strongly resemble quasars. In higher mass haloes, gas accretion occurs continuously, typically at $~10$ % of the Eddington rate, which is conducive to the formation of radio jets. The resulting dependence of the accretion behaviour on halo mass induces a break in the relation between galaxy stellar mass and halo mass in these simulations that matches observations

Towards quantifying uncertainty in predictions of Amazon 'dieback'.

This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from The Royal Society via http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2007.0028Simulations with the Hadley Centre general circulation model (HadCM3), including carbon cycle model and forced by a 'business-as-usual' emissions scenario, predict a rapid loss of Amazonian rainforest from the middle of this century onwards. The robustness of this projection to both uncertainty in physical climate drivers and the formulation of the land surface scheme is investigated. We analyse how the modelled vegetation cover in Amazonia responds to (i) uncertainty in the parameters specified in the atmosphere component of HadCM3 and their associated influence on predicted surface climate. We then enhance the land surface description and (ii) implement a multilayer canopy light interception model and compare with the simple 'big-leaf' approach used in the original simulations. Finally, (iii) we investigate the effect of changing the method of simulating vegetation dynamics from an area-based model (TRIFFID) to a more complex size- and age-structured approximation of an individual-based model (ecosystem demography). We find that the loss of Amazonian rainforest is robust across the climate uncertainty explored by perturbed physics simulations covering a wide range of global climate sensitivity. The introduction of the refined light interception model leads to an increase in simulated gross plant carbon uptake for the present day, but, with altered respiration, the net effect is a decrease in net primary productivity. However, this does not significantly affect the carbon loss from vegetation and soil as a consequence of future simulated depletion in soil moisture; the Amazon forest is still lost. The introduction of the more sophisticated dynamic vegetation model reduces but does not halt the rate of forest dieback. The potential for human-induced climate change to trigger the loss of Amazon rainforest appears robust within the context of the uncertainties explored in this paper. Some further uncertainties should be explored, particularly with respect to the representation of rooting depth