Dynamic Emergy Accounting Of Water And Carbon Ecosystem Services: A Model To Simulate The Impacts Of Land-use Change

Expansion of agriculture over ecosystem areas is widely recognized as one of the most significant human alterations to the global environment over the last century. Although food and fiber production are essential ecosystem services (ES) to humankind, the clearing of forests for agricultural use is associated with changes in land cover which affect a wide range of ES at local, regional and global scales. Considering the importance of climate change, freshwater scarcity, soil erosion and other environmental issues, this paper aims to simulate the impact of land-use change on the ecosystem services related to water and carbon biogeochemical processes. The system under study is the Taquarizinho river basin, located in the eastern region of Mato Grosso do Sul State, Brazil, inserted in the upland borders of one of the largest wetland systems of the world, the Pantanal. Formerly occupied by Brazilian savannah (Cerrado), more than half of Taquarizinho watershed was converted both to agriculture and pasture lands since the 1960s. In order to quantify the impact of land-use change on ES provided by Taquarizinho over the years, this paper introduces the hydro-carbon model, which dynamically represents ecosystem services related to water and carbon cycles, such as canal discharge, groundwater recharge, evapotranspiration, biomass carbon sequestration, litter carbon sequestration, and soil carbon sequestration. The hydro-carbon model uses emergy for estimating the monetary value of ecosystem services provided by the river basin under different land-use scenarios. In this paper, extreme scenarios represent typical land-use types in Taquarizinho basin: native savanna (NS), agroforestry systems (AF), conventional tillage agriculture (CT), no-tillage multiple cropping agriculture (NT), degraded pastures (DP), and pastures under improved management (IP). Results in this paper reveal a hierarchy related to water and carbon ES provision, in descending order: native savanna (247EM$ha-1y-1), agroforestry system (204EM$ha-1y-1), pastures under improved management (180EM$ha-1y-1), no-tillage multiple cropping agriculture (160EM$ha-1y-1), degraded pastures (104EM$ha-1y-1) and conventional tillage agriculture (75EM$ha-1y-1). © 2013 Elsevier B.V.271113131Aduan, R.E., Klink, C.A., Davidson, E.A., Effects of land use change and tree coverage decrease in key aspects of the carbon budget of the Brazilian Cerrado Savanna (2002) 2 Conferência Científica Internacional do LBA, 2, 2002, , LBA, ManausAltieri, M.A., The ecological role of biodiversity in agroecosystems (1999) Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment, 74, pp. 19-31Bacchi, C.G.V., (2007), p. 105. , Análise de modelos matemáticos na estimativa da produção de sedimentos em bacias com o auxílio de um SIG. 2007. Dissertation (Master Degree in Environmental Technologies). 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Environmental Impacts Of Technology Learning Curve For Cellulosic Ethanol In Brazil

This study presents a Life Cycle Assessment of second-generation ethanol production in Brazil considering current and future technologies to represent its technology evolution, compared to the first-generation process. With the start of the learning curve of the cellulosic ethanol production, improvements are expected on both biomass industrial conversion and agricultural production phases. Increased sugarcane yields and gradual introduction of more productive varieties, such as energy cane, are expected, affecting both first- and second-generation ethanol production processes. In environmental impact categories very relevant in the biofuel production debate, such as climate change, fossil depletion and agricultural land occupation, scenarios with second-generation process present lower impacts than first-generation process for the same time horizon. There is a trend of reduction of environmental impacts over time, reflecting the environmental advantages due to advances on the learning curve of second-generation ethanol technology and on biomass production system. The contribution of second-generation ethanol production will be extremely relevant to help Brazil to meet its targets in the international environmental agreements. © 2016 Elsevier B.V

Potential of land-based climate change mitigation strategies on abandoned cropland

Natural revegetation, afforestation, and lignocellulosic crops for bioenergy, possibly coupled with a developing technology like carbon capture and storage, are the most common land-based climate change mitigation options. However, they can compete for land and threaten food security or nature conservation. Using abandoned cropland for their deployment can minimize these risks, but associated potentials are unclear. Here, we compare alternative land-based mitigation options by integrating historical and future (up to 2050) abandoned cropland with site-specific biomass yields and life-cycle emissions. Considering natural revegetation in biodiversity priority areas and different measures in the remaining land can achieve a mitigation potential of 0.8–4.0 GtCO2-equivalents yr−1 (2–11% of 2021 global CO2 emissions). Afforestation generally provides larger climate benefits than bioenergy, but bioenergy with carbon capture and storage delivers the highest mitigation in most locations. Overall, these results offer refined estimates of mitigation potentials from abandoned cropland and highlight opportunities for context-specific mitigation measures

Transverse momentum spectra of charged particles in proton-proton collisions at 1as=900 GeV with ALICE at the LHC

The inclusive charged particle transverse momentum distribution is measured in proton-proton collisions at s=900 GeV at the LHC using the ALICE detector. The measurement is performed in the central pseudorapidity region (|\u3b7|<0.8) over the transverse momentum range 0.15<10 GeV/c. The correlation between transverse momentum and particle multiplicity is also studied. Results are presented for inelastic (INEL) and non-single-diffractive (NSD) events. The average transverse momentum for |\u3b7|<0.8 is \u3008pT\u3009INEL=0.483\ub10.001 (stat.)\ub10.007 (syst.) GeV/c and \u3008pT\u3009NSD=0.489\ub10.001 (stat.)\ub10.007 (syst.) GeV/c, respectively. The data exhibit a slightly larger \u3008pT\u3009 than measurements in wider pseudorapidity intervals. The results are compared to simulations with the Monte Carlo event generators PYTHIA and PHOJET. \ua9 2010