39 research outputs found

    Joint analysis of stressors and ecosystem services to enhance restoration effectiveness

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    With increasing pressure placed on natural systems by growing human populations, both scientists and resource managers need a better understanding of the relationships between cumulative stress from human activities and valued ecosystem services. Societies often seek to mitigate threats to these services through large-scale, costly restoration projects, such as the over one billion dollar Great Lakes Restoration Initiative currently underway. To help inform these efforts, we merged high-resolution spatial analyses of environmental stressors with mapping of ecosystem services for all five Great Lakes. Cumulative ecosystem stress is highest in near-shore habitats, but also extends offshore in Lakes Erie, Ontario, and Michigan. Variation in cumulative stress is driven largely by spatial concordance among multiple stressors, indicating the importance of considering all stressors when planning restoration activities. In addition, highly stressed areas reflect numerous different combinations of stressors rather than a single suite of problems, suggesting that a detailed understanding of the stressors needing alleviation could improve restoration planning. We also find that many important areas for fisheries and recreation are subject to high stress, indicating that ecosystem degradation could be threatening key services. Current restoration efforts have targeted high-stress sites almost exclusively, but generally without knowledge of the full range of stressors affecting these locations or differences among sites in service provisioning. Our results demonstrate that joint spatial analysis of stressors and ecosystem services can provide a critical foundation for maximizing social and ecological benefits from restoration investments. www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1213841110/-/DCSupplementa

    Standardized Measures of Coastal Wetland Condition: Implementation at a Laurentian Great Lakes Basin-Wide Scale

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    Since European settlement, over 50 % of coastal wetlands have been lost in the Laurentian Great Lakes basin, causing growing concern and increased monitoring by government agencies. For over a decade, monitoring efforts have focused on the development of regional and organism-specific measures. To facilitate collaboration and information sharing between public, private, and government agencies throughout the Great Lakes basin, we developed standardized methods and indicators used for assessing wetland condition. Using an ecosystem approach and a stratified random site selection process, birds, anurans, fish, macroinvertebrates, vegetation, and physico-chemical conditions were sampled in coastal wetlands of all five Great Lakes including sites from the United States and Canada. Our primary objective was to implement a standardized basin-wide coastal wetland monitoring program that would be a powerful tool to inform decision-makers on coastal wetland conservation and restoration priorities throughout the Great Lakes basin

    Standardized Measures of Coastal Wetland Condition: Implementation at a Laurentian Great Lakes Basin-Wide Scale

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    Since European settlement, over 50 % of coastal wetlands have been lost in the Laurentian Great Lakes basin, causing growing concern and increased monitoring by government agencies. For over a decade, monitoring efforts have focused on the development of regional and organism-specific measures. To facilitate collaboration and information sharing between public, private, and government agencies throughout the Great Lakes basin, we developed standardized methods and indicators used for assessing wetland condition. Using an ecosystem approach and a stratified random site selection process, birds, anurans, fish, macroinvertebrates, vegetation, and physico-chemical conditions were sampled in coastal wetlands of all five Great Lakes including sites from the United States and Canada. Our primary objective was to implement a standardized basin-wide coastal wetland monitoring program that would be a powerful tool to inform decision-makers on coastal wetland conservation and restoration priorities throughout the Great Lakes basin

    Joint analysis of stressors and ecosystem services to enhance restoration effectiveness

    Get PDF
    Publisher's version/PDFWith increasing pressure placed on natural systems by growing human populations, both scientists and resource managers need a better understanding of the relationships between cumulative stress from human activities and valued ecosystem services. Societies often seek to mitigate threats to these services through large-scale, costly restoration projects, such as the over one billion dollar Great Lakes Restoration Initiative currently underway. To help inform these efforts, we merged high-resolution spatial analyses of environmental stressors with mapping of ecosystem services for all five Great Lakes. Cumulative ecosystem stress is highest in near-shore habitats, but also extends offshore in Lakes Erie, Ontario, and Michigan. Variation in cumulative stress is driven largely by spatial concordance among multiple stressors, indicating the importance of considering all stressors when planning restoration activities. In addition, highly stressed areas reflect numerous different combinations of stressors rather than a single suite of problems, suggesting that a detailed understanding of the stressors needing alleviation could improve restoration planning. We also find that many important areas for fisheries and recreation are subject to high stress, indicating that ecosystem degradation could be threatening key services. Current restoration efforts have targeted high-stress sites almost exclusively, but generally without knowledge of the full range of stressors affecting these locations or differences among sites in service provisioning. Our results demonstrate that joint spatial analysis of stressors and ecosystem services can provide a critical foundation for maximizing social and ecological benefits from restoration investments

    Inverse responses of species richness and niche specialization to human development

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    International audienceAim: Humans impact biodiversity by altering land use and introducing nonnative species. Yet the extent to which coexistence processes, such as competition and niche shifts, mediate these relationships is not clear. This study compares how human development influences wetland plant diversity by examining patterns of species richness, niche specialization and nonnative species occurrences along a human development gradient.Location: Alberta, Canada.Taxon: Plants.Methods: We computed species richness and niche specialization (a measure of the range of human development extents over which a species occurs) from species occurrence data across 1582 wetlands. We tested associations between human development extent and species richness, niche specialization and nonnative species using linear mixed models. We used nonmetric multidimensional scaling ordination to examine whether community composition differed among wetlands surrounded by different human development extents.Results: Species richness and niche specialization show contrasting relationships with human development: richness was highest and niche specialization was lowest at intermediate human development extents, suggesting that competitive ability and environmental filtering may contribute to low richness at low and high development extents, respectively. Wetlands surrounded by the highest and lowest human development extents had similar levels of richness and niche specialization, but differed in community composition. The proportion of nonnative species increased with increasing human development, alternatively suggesting that the substitution of native species by nonnatives in developed areas may contribute to reduced richness and influence community assembly.Main conclusions: These findings demonstrate that human land development plays a major role in shaping species richness by influencing the number of nonnative species and the niche specialization of species inhabiting a wetland. Furthermore, these findings suggest that the proportion of nonnative species is an overlooked facto

    Watershed Land Use and Local Habitat: Implications for Habitat Assessment

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    Our understanding of anthropogenic stressor effects on wetland biota and ecosystem processes would benefit from better defined relationships between landscape and local stressors. We assessed the connection between watershed land use and local habitat and local disturbance in Great Lakes coastal ecosystems across a full range of anthropogenic stress. In addition, we identified dominant structuring variables, described redundancy, and assessed the relative influence of local versus watershed scale features on local habitat quality with on-site assessments conducted at 143 sample sites. Associations between habitat variables and watershed stressors were found, but only a small proportion of variation was explained. Overall, watershed agriculture was a stronger predictor of local habitat variables than was development. Variance partitioning revealed that disturbance and land use accounted for more variance in habitat than spatial factors or wetland type. This indicates that local and watershed-scale assessments are discrete approaches that document stress at different hierarchical scales and an assumed direct connection between watershed stress and local habitat and disturbance is an over-simplification. Therefore, assessments of stress should include both watershed scale and on-site habitat assessments. Furthermore, these results indicate that local scale mitigation/restoration could minimize negative impacts of changing land use
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