The local impacts of climate change in the Ferlo, Western Sahel

Recent increases in the accuracy of climate models have enhanced the possibilities for analyzing the impacts of climate change on society. This paper explores how the local, economic impacts of climate change can be modeled for a specific eco-region, the Western Sahel. The people in the Sahel are highly dependent on their natural resource base, and these resources are highly vulnerable to climate change, in particular to changes in rainfall. Climate models project substantial changes in rainfall in the Sahel in the coming 50 years, with most models predicting a reduction in rainfall. To connect climate change to changes in ecosystem productivity and local income, we construct an ecological¿economic model that incorporates rangeland dynamics, grazing and livestock prices. The model shows that decreased rainfall in the Sahel will considerably reduce local incomes, in particular if combined with increases in rainfall variability. Adaptation to these climate change projections is possible if reductions in rainfall are followed by destocking to reach efficient grazing levels. However, while such a strategy is optimal from the perspective of society, the stocking rate is determined by individual pastoralists that face few incentives to destoc

A spatially explicit and quantitative vulnerability assessment of ecosystem service change in Europe

Environmental change alters ecosystem functioning and may put the provision of services to human at risk. This paper presents a spatially explicit and quantitative assessment of the corresponding vulnerability for Europe, using a new framework designed to answer multidisciplinary policy relevant questions about the vulnerability of the human-environment system to global change. Scenarios were constructed for a range of possible changes in socio-economic trends, land uses and climate. These scenarios were used as inputs in a range of ecosystem models in order to assess the response of ecosystem function as well as the changes in the services they provide. The framework was used to relate the impacts of changing ecosystem service provision for four sectors in relation to each other, and to combine them with a simple, but generic index for societal adaptive capacity. By allowing analysis of different sectors, regions and development pathways, the vulnerability assessment provides a basis for discussion between stakeholders and policymakers about sustainable management of Europe¿s natural resource

Towards critical event monitoring, detection and prediction for self-adaptive future Internet applications

The Future Internet (FI) will be composed of a multitude of diverse types of services that offer flexible, remote access to software features, content, computing resources, and middleware solutions through different cloud delivery models, such as IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. Ultimately, this means that loosely coupled Internet services will form a comprehensive base for developing value added applications in an agile way. Unlike traditional application development, which uses computing resources and software components under local administrative control, FI applications will thus strongly depend on third-party services. To maintain their quality of service, those applications therefore need to dynamically and autonomously adapt to an unprecedented level of changes that may occur during runtime. In this paper, we present our recent experiences on monitoring, detection, and prediction of critical events for both software services and multimedia applications. Based on these findings we introduce potential directions for future research on self-adaptive FI applications, bringing together those research directions

Policy impacts on regulating ecosystem services: looking at the implications of 60 years of landscape change on soil erosion prevention in a Mediterranean silvo-pastoral system

Context: Policy decisions form a major driver of land use change, with important implications for socially and environmentally susceptible regions. It is well known that there can be major unintended consequences, especially where policies are not tailored to regionally specific contexts. Objectives: In this paper we assess the implications of 60 years of agricultural policies on soil erosion prevention (SEP) by vegetation, an essential regulating ecosystem service in Mediterranean Europe. Methods: To assess these implications we produced and analysed a time series of land cover/use and environmental conditions datasets (from 1951 to 2012) in relation to changing agricultural policies for a specific region in the southern Portugal. A set of indicators related to SEP allowed us to identify that land use intensification as increased soil erosion in the last 60 years. Results: Particularly in the last 35 years, as a consequence of headage payments for cattle, the agricultural policy had a significant effect in the density and renewal of the tree cover, resulting in drastic effects for the provision of the SEP service. These are more significant after 1986, coinciding with the implementation of several Common Agricultural Policy instruments focused on increasing the modernization and productivity capacity of farm systems. Conclusions: The results show some unintended effects of agricultural policy mechanisms on ecosystem service provision and highlight the need for context-based policies, tailored to the environmental constrains and potentials of each region

Handbook for Surveillance and Monitoring of European Habitats. First Edition

The primary objective of this Handbook is to describe the methodology appropriate for coordinating information on habitats in order to obtain statistically robust estimates of their extent and associated changes in biodiversity. Such detailed rules are necessary if surveillance; i.e., recording information at a point in time; is to be repeated subsequently as monitoring, otherwise real changes cannot be separated reliably from background noise. The BioHab procedure will also map all Pan-European classifications, such as EUNIS, where possible, as a basis for their surveillance and monitoring throughout Europe. The basis of the General Habitat Categories is the classification of plant Life Forms produced by the Danish botanist Raunkiaer early in the 20th century. These Life Forms e.g. annuals or trees, transcend species. They are based on the scientific hypothesis that habitat structure is related to the environment. The BioHab General Habitat Categories cover the pan-European region (except Turkey) with 130 GHC¿s derived from 16 Life Forms (LF¿s). They have been field tested in all the environmental zones in Europe. Variation within a General Habitat Category is then expressed by environmental and global qualifiers, which are combinations of soil humidity, nutrient status, acidity and other habitat characteristics. Important additional information is given by adding codes from predefined lists of site and management qualifiers

A low-lying scalar meson nonet in a unitarized meson model

A unitarized nonrelativistic meson model which is successful for the description of the heavy and light vector and pseudoscalar mesons yields, in its extension to the scalar mesons but for the same model parameters, a complete nonet below 1 GeV. In the unitarization scheme, real and virtual meson-meson decay channels are coupled to the quark-antiquark confinement channels. The flavor-dependent harmonic-oscillator confining potential itself has bound states epsilon(1.3 GeV), S(1.5 GeV), delta(1.3 GeV), kappa(1.4 GeV), similar to the results of other bound-state qqbar models. However, the full coupled-channel equations show poles at epsilon(0.5 GeV), S(0.99 GeV), delta(0.97 GeV), kappa(0.73 GeV). Not only can these pole positions be calculated in our model, but also cross sections and phase shifts in the meson-scattering channels, which are in reasonable agreement with the available data for pion-pion, eta-pion and Kaon-pion in S-wave scattering.Comment: A slightly revised version of Zeitschrift fuer Physik C30, 615 (1986

Current-Induced Effects in Nanoscale Conductors

We present an overview of current-induced effects in nanoscale conductors with emphasis on their description at the atomic level. In particular, we discuss steady-state current fluctuations, current-induced forces, inelastic scattering and local heating. All of these properties are calculated in terms of single-particle wavefunctions computed using a scattering approach within the static density-functional theory of many-electron systems. Examples of current-induced effects in atomic and molecular wires will be given and comparison with experimental results will be provided when available.Comment: revtex, 10 pages, 8 figure