Agricultural Land Fragmentation at Urban Fringes: An Application of Urban-To-Rural Gradient Analysis in Adelaide

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. (CC BY 4.0).One of the major consequences of expansive urban growth is the degradation and loss of productive agricultural land and agroecosystem functions. Four landscape metrics—Percentage of Land (PLAND), Mean Parcel Size (MPS), Parcel Density (PD), and Modified Simpson’s Diversity Index (MSDI)—were calculated for 1 km × 1 km cells along three 50 km-long transects that extend out from the Adelaide CBD, in order to analyze variations in landscape structures. Each transect has different land uses beyond the built-up area, and they differ in topography, soils, and rates of urban expansion. Our new findings are that zones of agricultural land fragmentation can be identified by the relationships between MPS and PD, that these occur in areas where PD ranges from 7 and 35, and that these occur regardless of distance along the transect, land use, topography, soils, or rates of urban growth. This suggests a geometry of fragmentation that may be consistent, and indicates that quantification of both land use and land-use change in zones of fragmentation is potentially important in planning

Reconfiguring an Irrigation Landscape to Improve Provision of Ecosystem Services

Over-allocation of fresh water resources to consumptive uses, coupled with recurring drought and the prospect of climate change, is compromising the stocks of natural capital in the world’s basins and reducing their ability to provide ecosystem services. To combat this, governments world wide are making significant investment in efforts to improve sharing of water between consumptive uses and the environment, with many investments centred on modernisation of inefficient irrigation delivery systems, and the purchase of water by government for environmental flows. In this study, spatial targeting was applied within a cost-benefit framework to reconfigure agricultural land use in an irrigation district to achieve a 20% reduction in agricultural water use to increase environmental flows and improve the provision of other ecosystem services. We demonstrate using spatial planning and optimisation models that a targeted land use reconfiguration policy approach could potentially increase the net present value of ecosystem services by up to AUS$463.7m. This provides a threshold level of investment that would be justified on the basis of benefits that the investment produces. The increase in ecosystem services include recovering 61 GL of water for environmental flows, the sequestration of 10.6m tonnes of CO2-e/yr, a 13 EC (?S/cm) reduction in river salinity, and an overall 24$68.7m in economic returns to agriculture which may be only marginally offset by the increased value of ecosystem services resulting from the return of 61 GL of water to the environment.landscape planning, geographic information systems, cost-benefit analysis, irrigation, climate change, water management, spatial targeting, environmental valuation

Drought: understanding and reducing vulnerability through monitoring and early warning systems

DrIVER project report. Report of the DrIVER workshop, 17 March 2015, Wallingford, UK

Using ecosystem services to represent the environment in hydro-economic models

[EN] Demand for water is expected to grow in line with global human population growth, but opportunities to augment supply are limited in many places due to resource limits and expected impacts of climate change. Hydro-economic models are often used to evaluate water resources management options, commonly with a goal of understanding how to maximise water use value and reduce conflicts among competing uses. The environment is now an important factor in decision making, which has resulted in its inclusion in hydro-economic models. We reviewed 95 studies applying hydro-economic models, and documented how the environment is represented in them and the methods they use to value environmental costs and benefits. We also sought out key gaps and inconsistencies in the treatment of the environment in hydro-economic models. We found that representation of environmental values of water is patchy in most applications, and there should be systematic consideration of the scope of environmental values to include and how they should be valued. We argue that the ecosystem services framework offers a systematic approach to identify the full range of environmental costs and benefits. The main challenges to more holistic representation of the environment in hydro-economic models are the current limits to understanding of ecological functions which relate physical, ecological and economic values and critical environmental thresholds; and the treatment of uncertainty. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.The authors acknowledge the backing of Universitat Politecnica de Valencia through its Support Programme for Research and Development. Support by the CSIRO for an internship visit by the lead author is also acknowledged. We also wish to thank the European Commission for financing the Seventh Framework Program project ENHANCE (FP7-ENV-2012, 308438) and the H2020 project IMPREX (H2020-WATER-2014-2015, 641811), and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness for granting the project NUTEGES (VI Plan Nacional de I+D+i 2008-2011, CGL2012-34978).Momblanch Benavent, A.; Connor, JD.; Crossman, ND.; Paredes Arquiola, J.; Andreu Álvarez, J. (2016). Using ecosystem services to represent the environment in hydro-economic models. Journal of Hydrology. 538:293-303. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2016.04.019S29330353

Global socio-economic impacts of changes in natural capital and ecosystem services:State of play and new modeling approaches

The year 2020 is a critical year for sustainable development policy and practice with the review and renewal of various international commitments including the Sustainable Development Goals, the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Paris Agreement. The post-2020 agenda needs to be informed by more robust analytical approaches that capture the interactions between the economy, society and the environment. In this paper, we review the state of the art in available models and datasets that lay the groundwork for future analytical work to inform this agenda. Based on this review, we propose an integrated modeling approach for global analysis to underpin international policy discourse and advocacy, and; a sub-global approach focusing on evaluating specific strategies and policy portfolios to make progress toward sustainability commitments considering detailed local country context. Both approaches rely on integrating whole of economy computable general equilibrium models with spatial land use land cover and ecosystem services models. Endogenizing feedbacks between modeling system components ensures that evidence is based on interactions between all system components. Recent advances in methods, data and available tools discussed herein reduce barriers to entry for this type of complex systems analysis and increases the timeliness of policy advice

Drought forecasting isn\u27t just about water- to get smart we need health and financial data too

The Millennium Drought taught Australians many lessons about living under extremely dry conditions – not just about how to conserve water, but also about human suffering. In a drought, farmers find it more difficult to make an income, leading to mental health problems and raising the rate of male suicides. In the city, the impact is felt through water restrictions and more expensive infrastructure. With very dry conditions returning to Tasmania, central Queensland and western Victoria, are we better prepared for the next big drought? This is an issue not just for Australia, but across the world, from California, to England, to the Levant region in the eastern Mediterranean, which from 1998-2012 experienced its worst drought in 900 years

Ecosystem services classification : A systems ecology perspective of the cascade framework

Creative Commons License (CC BY 4.0)Ecosystem services research faces several challenges stemming from the plurality of interpretations of classifications and terminologies. In this paper we identify two main challenges with current ecosystem services classification systems: i) the inconsistency across concepts, terminology and definitions, and; ii) the mix up of processes and end-state benefits, or flows and assets. Although different ecosystem service definitions and interpretations can be valuable for enriching the research landscape, it is necessary to address the existing ambiguity to improve comparability among ecosystem-service-based approaches. Using the cascade framework as a reference, and Systems Ecology as a theoretical underpinning, we aim to address the ambiguity across typologies. The cascade framework links ecological processes with elements of human well-being following a pattern similar to a production chain. Systems Ecology is a long-established discipline which provides insight into complex relationships between people and the environment. We present a refreshed conceptualization of ecosystem services which can support ecosystem service assessment techniques and measurement. We combine the notions of biomass, information and interaction from system ecology, with the ecosystem services conceptualization to improve definitions and clarify terminology. We argue that ecosystem services should be defined as the interactions (i.e. processes) of the ecosystem that produce a change in human well-being, while ecosystem components or goods, i.e. countable as biomass units, are only proxies in the assessment of such changes. Furthermore, Systems Ecology can support a re-interpretation of the ecosystem services conceptualization and related applied research, where more emphasis is needed on the underpinning complexity of the ecological system.Peer reviewe

Land system science and sustainable development of the earth system: A global land project perspective

Land systems are the result of human interactions with the natural environment. Understanding the drivers, state, trends and impacts of different land systems on social and natural processes helps to reveal how changes in the land system affect the functioning of the socio-ecological system as a whole and the tradeoff these changes may represent. The Global Land Project has led advances by synthesizing land systems research across different scales and providing concepts to further understand the feedbacks between social-and environmental systems, between urban and rural environments and between distant world regions. Land system science has moved from a focus on observation of change and understanding the drivers of these changes to a focus on using this understanding to design sustainable transformations through stakeholder engagement and through the concept of land governance. As land use can be seen as the largest geo-engineering project in which mankind has engaged, land system science can act as a platform for integration of insights from different disciplines and for translation of knowledge into action

Land, water, and people: from cascading effects to integrated flood and drought responses

Land, water, and people; it is the most basic and traditional of relationships, yet today the relationship has become so complex that we find ourselves ill-equipped to understand all of its interconnections and to plan a future that is sustainable. Why is it important to talk about land and water, and why talk about them together in the context of understanding prospects for human well-being? That land and water resources are essential for sustaining life is of course well understood, as are the many stresses on these resources; but, less obvious and appreciated is the convergence of recent weather-related events that directly afflict our land and water resources together and across the world