The dynamics of ecosystems, biodiversity management and social institutions at high northern latitudes

Ecosystems at high latitudes are highly dynamic, influenced by a multitude of large-scale disturbances. Due to global change processes these systems may be expected to be particularly vulnerable, affecting the sustained production of renewable wood resources and abundance of plants and animals on which local cultures depend. In this paper, we assess the implications of new understandings of high northern latitude ecosystems and what must be done to manage systems for resilience. We suggest that the focus of land management should shift from recovery from local disturbance to sustaining ecosystem functions in the face of change and disruption. The role of biodiversity as insurance for allowing a system to reorganize and develop during the disturbance and reorganization phases needs to be addressed in management and policy. We emphasize that the current concepts of ecological reserves and protected areas need to be reconsidered to developp dynamic tools for sustainable management of ecosystems in face of change. Characteristics of what may be considered as customary reserves at high latitudes are often consistent with a more dynamic view of reserves. We suggest new directions for addressing biodiversity management in dynamic landscapes at high latitudes, and provide empirical examples of insights from unconventional perspectives that may help improve the potential for sustainable management of biodiversity and the generation of ecosystem services.     

Effectiveness of Marine Protected Areas in Managing the Drivers of Ecosystem Change: A Case of Mnazi Bay Marine Park, Tanzania

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are being promoted in Tanzania to mitigate the drivers of ecosystem change such as overfishing and other anthropogenic impacts on marine resources. The effectiveness of MPAs in managing those drivers was assessed in three ecological zones, seafront, mangrove, and riverine of Mnazi Bay Marine Park, using Participatory Community Analysis techniques, questionnaire survey, checklist and fishery resource assessment methods. Eleven major drivers of ecosystem change were identified. Resource dependence had a major effect in all ecological zones of the park. The results indicated that the park’s legislations/regulations, management procedures, and conservation efforts are reasonably effective in managing its resources. The positive signs accrued from conservation efforts have been realized by the communities in terms of increased catch/income, awareness and compliance. However, some natural and anthropogenic drivers continued to threaten the park’s sustainability. Furthermore, implementation of resource use and benefit sharing mechanisms still remained a considerable challenge to be addressed.     

Reconnecting Cities to the Biosphere: Stewardship of Green Infrastructure and Urban Ecosystem Services

Within-city green infrastructure can offer opportunities and new contexts for people to become stewards of ecosystem services. We analyze cities as social–ecological systems, synthesize the literature, and provide examples from more than 15 years of research in the Stockholm urban region, Sweden. The social–ecological approach spans from investigating ecosystem properties to the social frameworks and personal values that drive and shape human interactions with nature. Key findings demonstrate that urban ecosystem services are generated by social–ecological systems and that local stewards are critically important. However, land-use planning and management seldom account for their role in the generation of urban ecosystem services. While the small scale patchwork of land uses in cities stimulates intense interactions across borders much focus is still on individual patches. The results highlight the importance and complexity of stewardship of urban biodiversity and ecosystem services and of the planning and governance of urban green infrastructure.     

Baltic Sea management: Successes and failures

Severe environmental problems documented in the Baltic Sea in the 1960s led to the 1974 creation of the Helsinki Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Baltic Sea Area. We introduce this special issue by briefly summarizing successes and failures of Baltic environmental management in the following 40 years. The loads of many polluting substances have been greatly reduced, but legacy pollution slows recovery. Top predator populations have recovered, and human exposure to potential toxins has been reduced. The cod stock has partially recovered. Nutrient loads are decreasing, but deep-water anoxia and cyanobacterial blooms remain extensive, and climate change threatens the advances made. Ecosystem-based management is the agreed principle, but in practice the various environmental problems are still handled separately, since we still lack both basic ecological knowledge and appropriate governance structures for managing them together, in a true ecosystem approach.     

Baltic Sea ecosystem-based management under climate change: Synthesis and future challenges

Ecosystem-based management (EBM) has emerged as the generally agreed strategy for managing ecosystems, with humans as integral parts of the managed system. Human activities have substantial effects on marine ecosystems, through overfishing, eutrophication, toxic pollution, habitat destruction, and climate change. It is important to advance the scientific knowledge of the cumulative, integrative, and interacting effects of these diverse activities, to support effective implementation of EBM. Based on contributions to this special issue of AMBIO, we synthesize the scientific findings into four components: pollution and legal frameworks, ecosystem processes, scale-dependent effects, and innovative tools and methods. We conclude with challenges for the future, and identify the next steps needed for successful implementation of EBM in general and specifically for the Baltic Sea.     

SoilTrEC: a global initiative on critical zone research and integration

Soil is a complex natural resource that is considered non-renewable in policy frameworks, and it plays a key role in maintaining a variety of ecosystem services (ES) and life-sustaining material cycles within the Earth's Critical Zone (CZ). However, currently, the ability of soil to deliver these services is being drastically reduced in many locations, and global loss of soil ecosystem services is estimated to increase each year as a result of many different threats, such as erosion and soil carbon loss. The European Union Thematic Strategy for Soil Protection alerts policy makers of the need to protect soil and proposes measures to mitigate soil degradation. In this context, the European Commission-funded research project on Soil Transformations in European Catchments (SoilTrEC) aims to quantify the processes that deliver soil ecosystem services in the Earth's Critical Zone and to quantify the impacts of environmental change on key soil functions. This is achieved by integrating the research results into decision-support tools and applying methods of economic valuation to soil ecosystem services. In this paper, we provide an overview of the SoilTrEC project, its organization, partnerships and implementation.     

Regime shifts and resilience in China’s coastal ecosystems

Regime shift often results in large, abrupt, and persistent changes in the provision of ecosystem services and can therefore have significant impacts on human wellbeing. Understanding regime shifts has profound implications for ecosystem recovery and management. China’s coastal ecosystems have experienced substantial deterioration within the past decades, at a scale and speed the world has never seen before. Yet, information about this coastal ecosystem change from a dynamics perspective is quite limited. In this review, I synthesize existing information on coastal ecosystem regime shifts in China and discuss their interactions and cascading effects. The accumulation of regime shifts in China’s coastal ecosystems suggests that the desired system resilience has been profoundly eroded, increasing the potential of abrupt shifts to undesirable states at a larger scale, especially given multiple escalating pressures. Policy and management strategies need to incorporate resilience approaches in order to cope with future challenges and avoid major losses in China’s coastal ecosystem services.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13280-015-0692-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.     

Does leakage exist in China’s typical protected areas? Evidence from 13 national nature reserves

Environmental Science and Pollution Research - There is profound interest in knowing the degree to which the effectiveness of China’s nature reserves, and whether leakage is common around the...     

The performance of nature reserves in capturing the biological diversity on Hainan Island,China

Purpose  

The performance of nature reserves depends on the degree to which they represent a region's full biodiversity. Here, we conducted a study on Hainan Island, China, to assess how well Hainan's biodiversity features were captured by existing nature reserves. We also explored the driving forces behind the current protection pattern so as to provide guidelines for improving the island's conservation system.     

An interdisciplinary assessment of private conservation areas in the Western United States

Conservation easements are the fastest growing private conservation strategy in the United States. However, mechanisms to assess private land conservation as well as their support by the general public are not well understood. This study uses the ecosystem services framework for assessing existing private lands in Idaho and identifies areas for future conservation easements. Using conservation targets of the land trust as a guide for selecting ecosystem services, we (a) mapped the spatial delivery of conservation targets across public and private lands, (b) explored public awareness in terms of social importance and vulnerability, and (c) mapped future priority areas by characterizing conservation bundles. We found that public lands provided the highest levels of conservation targets, and we found no difference in conservation target provision between private areas and conservation easements. The spatial characterization of conservation target bundles identified potential future priority areas for conservation easements, which can guide planning of land trust conservation efforts.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1007/s13280-020-01323-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.     

A framework for the social valuation of ecosystem services

Methods to assess ecosystem services using ecological or economic approaches are considerably better defined than methods for the social approach. To identify why the social approach remains unclear, we reviewed current trends in the literature. We found two main reasons: (i) the cultural ecosystem services are usually used to represent the whole social approach, and (ii) the economic valuation based on social preferences is typically included in the social approach. Next, we proposed a framework for the social valuation of ecosystem services that provides alternatives to economics methods, enables comparison across studies, and supports decision-making in land planning and management. The framework includes the agreements emerged from the review, such as considering spatial–temporal flows, including stakeholders from all social ranges, and using two complementary methods to value ecosystem services. Finally, we provided practical recommendations learned from the application of the proposed framework in a case study.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13280-014-0555-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.     

Reserves, resilience and dynamic landscapes

In a world increasingly modified by human activities, the conservation of biodiversity is essential as insurance to maintain resilient ecosystems and ensure a sustainable flow of ecosystem goods and services to society. However, existing reserves and national parks are unlikely to incorporate the long-term and large-scale dynamics of ecosystems. Hence, conservation strategies have to actively incorporate the large areas of land that are managed for human use. For ecosystems to reorganize after large-scale natural and human-induced disturbances, spatial resilience in the form of ecological memory is a prerequisite. The ecological memory is composed of the species, interactions and structures that make ecosystem reorganization possible, and its components may be found within disturbed patches as well in the surrounding landscape. Present static reserves should be complemented with dynamic reserves, such as ecological fallows and dynamic successional reserves, that are part of ecosystem management mimicking natural disturbance regimes at the landscape level.     

典型危险废物的工程力学特性

掌握填埋废物的工程力学特性是确保危险废物填埋堆体稳定性的重要前提条件,因此,针对6种典型危险废物的工程力学特性开展了调查研究.研究结果表明,污泥类危险废物的含水率和有机质含量远高于非污泥类危险废物,而前者的比重则显著低于后者.污泥类危险废物的渗透系数相对较小,比污染土壤和飞灰炉渣混合物的渗透系数小1个数量级,比滤池填料的渗透系数小2个数量级.不同危险废物的无侧限抗压强度排序为:飞灰炉渣混合物(314.3 kPa)和滤池填料(278.9 kPa)＞污染土壤(124.9 kPa)＞杭州氧气厂污泥(68.6 kPa)、锌铬污泥(71.4 kPa)、油泥(58.4 kPa).不同危险废物的粘聚力排序为:飞灰炉渣混合物(40.8 kPa)、滤池填料(31.1 kPa)＞污染土壤(20.9 kPa)＞杭州氧气厂污泥(1.94kPa)、锌铬污泥(3.10 kPa)、油泥(1.81 kPa).此外,不同危险废物的内摩擦角差异相对较小,其变化范围在18.8°～35.0°之间.综合分析可知,飞灰炉渣混合物和滤池填料的工程力学特性较好,而污泥类危险废物的工程力学特性则较差.     

A fuzzy logic expert system for evaluating policy progress towards sustainability goals

Evaluating progress towards environmental sustainability goals can be difficult due to a lack of measurable benchmarks and insufficient or uncertain data. Marine settings are particularly challenging, as stakeholders and objectives tend to be less well defined and ecosystem components have high natural variability and are difficult to observe directly. Fuzzy logic expert systems are useful analytical frameworks to evaluate such systems, and we develop such a model here to formally evaluate progress towards sustainability targets based on diverse sets of indicators. Evaluation criteria include recent (since policy enactment) and historical (from earliest known state) change, type of indicators (state, benefit, pressure, response), time span and spatial scope, and the suitability of an indicator in reflecting progress toward a specific objective. A key aspect of the framework is that all assumptions are transparent and modifiable to fit different social and ecological contexts. We test the method by evaluating progress towards four Aichi Biodiversity Targets in Canadian oceans, including quantitative progress scores, information gaps, and the sensitivity of results to model and data assumptions. For Canadian marine systems, national protection plans and biodiversity awareness show good progress, but species and ecosystem states overall do not show strong improvement. Well-defined goals are vital for successful policy implementation, as ambiguity allows for conflicting potential indicators, which in natural systems increases uncertainty in progress evaluations. Importantly, our framework can be easily adapted to assess progress towards policy goals with different themes, globally or in specific regions.     

Patagonian Fjord Ecosystems in Southern Chile as a Highly Vulnerable Region: Problems and Needs

Southern Chile encompasses one of the most extensive fjord regions of the world, the Patagonia, currently exposed to natural and anthropogenic perturbations. These fjord ecosystems provide important services to humans, which have not been adequately measured and valued. As a consequence, ecosystem services are commonly ignored in public policy design and in the evaluation of development projects. Here we tackle questions that are highly relevant for the nation’s development, namely (1) understanding fjord functioning, and (2) developing management strategies based on ecosystem services, in order to secure simultaneous and adequate use of these ecosystems which area influenced by ecological (e.g., biogeochemical) and productive (e.g., aquaculture, fisheries) processes. We also seek to strengthen the analysis of fjord ecosystem value from the economical (including coastal zoning), socio-cultural, institutional, and governmental points of view. In addition, the investigation of current and future effects of climate change on this large region offers a unique opportunity to understand the social and economic consequences of a global phenomenon at local to regional scales. Biogeochemical and socio-economic models will be used to simulate future scenarios under a gamut of management options.     

Reconnecting to the Biosphere

Humanity has emerged as a major force in the operation of the biosphere, with a significant imprint on the Earth System, challenging social-ecological resilience. This new situation calls for a fundamental shift in perspectives, world views, and institutions. Human development and progress must be reconnected to the capacity of the biosphere and essential ecosystem services to be sustained. Governance challenges include a highly interconnected and faster world, cascading social-ecological interactions and planetary boundaries that create vulnerabilities but also opportunities for social-ecological change and transformation. Tipping points and thresholds highlight the importance of understanding and managing resilience. New modes of flexible governance are emerging. A central challenge is to reconnect these efforts to the changing preconditions for societal development as active stewards of the Earth System. We suggest that the Millennium Development Goals need to be reframed in such a planetary stewardship context combined with a call for a new social contract on global sustainability. The ongoing mind shift in human relations with Earth and its boundaries provides exciting opportunities for societal development in collaboration with the biosphere--a global sustainability agenda for humanity.     

Resilience and Challenges of Marine Social–Ecological Systems Under Complex and Interconnected Drivers

In this paper, we summarize the contributions made by an interdisciplinary group of researchers from different disciplines (biology, ecology, economics, and law) that deal with key dimensions of marine social–ecological systems. Particularly, the local and global seafood provision; the feasibility and management of marine protected areas; the use of marine ecosystem services; the institutional dimension in European fisheries, and the affordable models for providing scientific advice to small-scale fisheries. This Special Issue presents key findings from selected case studies around the world available to educators, policy makers, and the technical community. Together, these papers show that a range of diverse ecological, economic, social, and institutional components often mutually interact at spatial and temporal scales, which evidence that managing marine social–ecological systems needs a continuous adaptability to navigate into new governance systems.     

The policy consequences of defining rewilding

More than 30 years after it was first proposed as a biodiversity conservation strategy, rewilding remains a controversial concept. There is currently little agreement about what the goals of rewilding are, and how these are best achieved, limiting the utility of rewilding in mainstream conservation. Achieving consensus about rewilding requires agreeing about what “wild” means, but many different definitions exist, reflecting the diversity of values in conservation. There are three key debates that must be addressed to find a consensual definition of “wild”: (1) to which extent can people and “wild” nature co-exist?; (2) how much space does “wild” nature need? and (3) what kinds of “wild” nature do we value? Depending on the kinds of “wild” nature rewilding aims to create, rewilding policy will be faced with managing different opportunities and risks for biodiversity and people.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13280-021-01560-8.     

Ecosystem services in coupled social–ecological systems: Closing the cycle of service provision and societal feedback

Both the ‘cascade model’ of ecosystem service provision and the Driver-Pressure-State-Impact-Response framework individually contribute to the understanding of human–nature interactions in social–ecological systems (SES). Yet, as several points of criticism show, they are limited analytical tools when it comes to reproducing complex cause–effect relationships in such systems. However, in this paper, we point out that by merging the two models, they can mutually enhance their comprehensiveness and overcome their individual conceptual deficits. Therefore we closed a cycle of ecosystem service provision and societal feedback by rethinking and reassembling the core elements of both models. That way, we established a causal sequence apt to describe the causes of change to SES, their effects and their consequences. Finally, to illustrate its functioning we exemplified and discussed our approach based on a case study conducted in the Alpujarra de la Sierra in southern Spain.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13280-015-0651-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.     

Impacts of Nomad Sedentarization on Social and Ecological Systems at Multiple Scales in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region,China

China’s government is now promoting the Nomad Sedentarization Project (NSP) in large areas of grassland as a solution for ecological restoration and poverty alleviation. To examine the effects of this policy, we conducted in-depth interviews at two of the project’s sites and examined the social and ecological systems at village, county, and catchment scales in Jinghe County of Xinjiang. We found that (1) the NSP in one village greatly improved the household standard of living and changed their resource utilization modes; (2) the success in this village can be attributed to resources imported from the social and ecological systems at larger scales, and could not be repeated in a second nearby village with different constraints; and (3) the NSP is poorly adapted to local ecosystem characteristics, and may therefore have negative impacts at larger scales. To avoid these problems, holistic assessments are necessary to judge the NSP’s impacts on social and ecological systems at multiple scales, and the program must be implemented cautiously to account for the potential risks in ecologically vulnerable areas.