Species loss from land use of oil palm plantations in Thailand

Industrial Ecolog

China's potential SO2 emissions from coal by 2050

Global Challenges (FGGA)Industrial Ecolog

Characterizing Land Use Impacts on Functional Plant Diversity for Life Cycle Assessments

Decision support tools such as life cycle assessment (LCA) increasingly aim to account for impacts on biodiversity. While taxonomic measures like species richness have been implemented, they do not fully grasp the impacts on ecosystem functioning. Functional diversity, derived from the species’ traits, is more representative of ecosystem processes. This study provides a framework for developing characterization factors for functional diversity as affected by land use. It exploits the large databases on plant traits and species composition that have recently become available and allow bringing biodiversity impact assessment to the next level. Three functional diversity indices therein describe different aspects of functional diversity, namely richness, evenness, and divergence. Applying our framework to Germany as a proof of concept, we show significant losses in functional plant diversity when converting natural forests to agricultural land use. Consistently across different forests and agricultural systems, functional richness decreases steeply and functional divergence moderately upon occupation. In contrast, functional evenness exhibits opposite trends. The resulting characterization factors are likely to be representative of temperate regions. The framework is flexible and applicable to larger scales and other impact categories. As such, it facilitates harmonizing biodiversity impact assessments and better represents ecosystem functioning by incorporating functional diversity.Environmental Biolog

Water use of electricity technologies: A global meta-analysis

Understanding the water use of power production is an important step to both a sustainable energy transition and an improved understanding of water conservation measures. However, there are large differences across the literature that currently present barriers to decision making. Here, the compiled inventory of the blue water use of power production from existing studies allowed to uncover the characteristics of water use and to investigate current uncertainties. The results show that photovoltaics, wind power, and run-of-the-river hydropower consume relatively little water, whereas reservoir hydropower and woody and herbaceous biomass can have an extremely large water footprint. The water consumption of power production can differ greatly across countries due to different geographic conditions. Only a few studies provided the values for the influencing factors of water use, such as the capacity factor. Values that are reported came mainly from assumptions and other literature rather than direct measurement. Omitting a life cycle stage may lead to significant underestimations. Water scarcity is attracting more attention, but the few existing results are not useable for a regional comparison due to data gaps and inconsistent measurements. In the future, a clear and detailed definition of the water footprint and system boundary of power production is essential to improving comparisons and energy systems modelling.Industrial Ecolog

Global human consumption threatens key biodiversity areas

Key biodiversity areas (KBAs) are critical regions for preserving global biodiversity. KBAs are identified by their importance to biodiversity rather than their legal status. As such, KBAs are often under pressure from human activities. KBAs can encompass many different land-use types (e.g., cropland, pastures) and land-use intensities. Here, we combine a global economic model with spatial mapping to estimate the biodiversity impacts of human land use in KBAs. We find that global human land use within KBAs causes disproportionate biodiversity losses. While land use within KBAs accounts for only 7% of total land use, it causes 16% of the potential global plant loss and 12% of the potential global vertebrate loss. The consumption of animal products accounts for more than half of biodiversity loss within KBAs, with housing the second largest at around 10%. Bovine meat is the largest single contributor to this loss, at around 31% of total biodiversity loss. In terms of land use, lightly grazed pasture contributes the most, accounting for around half of all potential species loss. This loss is concentrated mainly in middle- and low-income regions with rich biodiversity. International trade is an important driver of loss, accounting for 22-29% of total potential plant and vertebrate loss. Our comprehensive global, trade-linked analysis provides insights into maintaining the integrity of KBAs and global biodiversity.Industrial Ecolog

Closing yield and harvest area gaps to mitigate water scarcity related to China's rice production

Over the past decades, China's rice production area has experienced a substantial change in spatial distribution that has exacerbated national freshwater scarcity. To support the development of guidelines for sustainable water use in rice cropping, this study explores the potential for achieving a downscaled freshwater use boundary with high spatial resolution while maintaining China's current production levels. We found that, to operate within the boundary, which was defined using a water scarcity index, national irrigation water use for rice cropping should reduce by 10% in water-scarce regions, implying a 10% loss in national rice production without further intervention. However, using scenario analysis, we found that the production losses can be reduced to approximately 7% by closing yield gaps, and fully compensated by closing harvest area gaps in water-rich regions. The closing of both the yield and harvest area gaps allows an increase of 6.9 million metric tons of rice (3% of the national production). The water-rich regions which are suitable for double-rice systems show a high potential to increase rice production. The spatial redistribution of rice production under these scenarios resulted in a reduction in the national water-scarcity footprint related to rice cropping of 52-55%. These results demonstrate that, to reach the downscaled water use boundary, national redistribution of rice production is necessary and urgent. Our study provides detailed spatial information to support water and land use decisions.Industrial Ecolog

A note on brain actuated spelling with the Berlin brain-computer interface

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) are systems capable of decoding neural activity in real time, thereby allowing a computer application to be directly controlled by the brain. Since the characteristics of such direct brain-tocomputer interaction are limited in several aspects, one major challenge in BCI research is intelligent front-end design. Here we present the mental text entry application ‘Hex-o-Spell’ which incorporates principles of Human-Computer Interaction research into BCI feedback design. The system utilises the high visual display bandwidth to help compensate for the extremely limited control bandwidth which operates with only two mental states, where the timing of the state changes encodes most of the information. The display is visually appealing, and control is robust. The effectiveness and robustness of the interface was demonstrated at the CeBIT 2006 (world’s largest IT fair) where two subjects operated the mental text entry system at a speed of up to 7.6 char/min

A comparison between global nutrient retention models for freshwater systems

Environmental Biolog

Linking land use inventories to biodiversity impact assessment methods

There is generally a mismatch in the land use classification of life cycle inventory (LCI) databases and life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) methods. This mismatch can hinder the proper assessment of land use impacts on biodiversity. To facilitate such assessments, we matched the land use classes of two global LCIA methods to five widely used LCI databases, one LCI nomenclature, and one multi-regional input-output database. In unclear cases, we assumed the worst case. Assumptions were especially necessary for unspecified land use intensity classes. We conclude with recommendations for LCI database and LCIA method developers.Industrial Ecolog