The overlooked role of New York City urban yards in mitigating and adapting to climate change

There is a dearth of research focusing on the role that urban residential open space plays in climate change adaptation, despite evidence suggesting that environmental benefits accrue when even small pockets of open space are made permeable and vegetated. In densely built New York City, there are 21,448?ha (53,000 acres) of such land. One city block with adjoining contiguous open space was investigated to quantify its existing environmental value and also its potential to provide enhanced services through redesign. The study block's open space was found to be 35% permeable and planted with 96 trees, storing 45,359?kg (100,000?lb) of carbon. Simulations conducted using the United States Environmental Protection Agency Stormwater Management Model contrasting normal, light, and heavy precipitation years suggested that increases in annual precipitation could be fully mitigated by reducing impervious surface cover by 25%. The preservation of the existing vegetated residential urban open space and the conversion of paved surfaces to a pervious condition both appear to be effective strategies for enhancing the city's ability to adapt to and mitigate for climate change.     

Treatment of municipal landfill leachate by catalytic wet air oxidation: Assessment of the role of operating parameters by factorial design

The wet air oxidation (WAO) of municipal landfill leachate catalyzed by cupric ions and promoted by hydrogen peroxide was investigated. The effect of operating conditions such as WAO treatment time (15-30 min), temperature (160-200 °C), Cu²⁺ concentration (250-750 mg L⁻¹) and H₂O₂ concentration (0-1500 mg L⁻¹) on chemical oxygen demand (COD) removal was investigated by factorial design considering a two-stage, sequential process comprising the heating-up of the reactor and the actual WAO. The leachate, at an initial COD of 4920 mg L⁻¹, was acidified to pH 3 leading to 31% COD decrease presumably due to the coagulation/precipitation of colloidal and other organic matter. During the 45 min long heating-up period of the WAO reactor under an inert atmosphere, COD removal values up to 35% (based on the initial COD value) were recorded as a result of the catalytic decomposition of H₂O₂ to reactive hydroxyl radicals. WAO at 2.5 MPa oxygen partial pressure advanced treatment further; for example, 22 min of oxidation at 200 °C, 250 mg L⁻¹ Cu²⁺ and 0-1500 mg L⁻¹ H₂O₂ resulted in an overall (i.e. including acidification and heating-up) COD reduction of 78%. Amongst the operating variables in question, temperature had the strongest influence on both the heating-up and WAO stages, while H₂O₂ concentration strongly affected the former and reaction time the latter. Nonetheless, the effects of temperature and H₂O₂ concentration were found to depend on the concentration levels of catalyst as suggested by the significance of their 3rd order interaction term.     

Weather,salience of climate change and congressional voting

Climate change is a complex long-run phenomenon. The speed and severity with which it is occurring is difficult to observe, complicating the formation of beliefs for individuals. We use Google search intensity data as a proxy for the salience of climate change and examine how search patterns vary with unusual local weather. We find that searches for “climate change” and “global warming” increase with extreme temperatures and unusual lack of snow. Furthermore, we demonstrate that effects of abnormal weather extend beyond search behavior to observable action on environmental issues. We examine the voting records of members of the U.S. Congress from 2004 to 2011 and find that members are more likely to take a pro-environment stance on votes when their home state experiences unusual weather.     

Assessment of Tree Rings as a Hydrologic Record in a Humid Subtropical Environment1

Crockett, Kris, Jonathan B. Martin, Henri D. Grissino-Mayer, Evan R. Larson, and Thomas Mirti, 2010. Assessment of Tree Rings as a Hydrologic Record in a Humid Subtropical Environment. Journal of the American Water Resources Association (JAWRA) 1-13. DOI: 10.1111/j.1752-1688.2010.00464.x Abstract: Information about long-term variability of streamflow is important to allocate water resources, but few historical records extend more than 75 years into the past, requiring proxy records to evaluate flow prior to that time. Flow proxies have been found in tree-ring widths in temperate regions, but have rarely been used in humid subtropical environments because the relationship between tree growth and climate was believed to be weakened by limited seasonality and stress on tree growth from drought conditions. Tree-ring residual chronologies from two forests sampled from northern Florida correlate well with historical annual discharge (r² values as high as 0.47) from 3 of 15 river-gauging stations that were used to compare with the tree-ring chronologies. The best correlations occur where streamflow has little contribution from spring discharge or continuous flow from lakes and wetlands. Streams lack correlations with the tree-ring residual chronologies (r² values as low as 0.0002) where springs and continuous discharge from lakes mute variations in their flow. Tree-ring chronologies appear to be useful for reconstruction of prehistorical variations of some streamflow in humid subtropical regions, but interpretations of the reconstructions must consider the local hydrologic conditions.     

MODELING THE EFFECTS OF VARIABLE ANNUAL FLOW ON RIVER CHANNEL MEANDER MIGRATION PATTERNS,SACRAMENTO RIVER,CALIFORNIA, USA1

ABSTRACT: Flow regulation impacts the ecology of major rivers in various ways, including altering river channel migration patterns. Many current meander migration models employ a constant annual flow or dominant discharge value. To assess how flow regulation alters river function, variable annual flows ‐ based on an empirical relationship between bank erosion rates and cumulative effective stream power ‐ were added into an existing migration model. This enhanced model was used to evaluate the potential geomorphic and ecological consequences of four regulated flow scenarios (i.e., different hydrographs) currently being proposed on the Sacramento River in California. The observed rate of land reworked correlated significantly with observed cumulative effective stream power during seven time increments from 1956 to 1975 (r²= 0.74, p = 0.02). The river was observed to rework 3.0 ha/yr of land (a mean channel migration rate of 7.7 m/yr) with rates ranging from 0.8 ha/yr to 5.1 ha/yr (2.0 to 13.3 m/yr), during the analyzed time periods. Modeled rates of land reworked correlated significantly with observed rates of land reworked for the variable flow model (r²= 0.78, p = 0.009). The meander migration scenario modeling predicted a difference of 1 to 8 percent between the four flow management scenarios and the base scenario.     

Decision Support for Road System Analysis and Modification on the Tahoe National Forest

The United States Forest Service is required to analyze road systems on each of the national forests for potential environmental impacts. We have developed a novel and inexpensive way to do this using the Ecosystem Management Decision Support program (EMDS). We used EMDS to integrate a user-developed fuzzy logic knowledge base with a grid-based geographic information system to evaluate the degree of truth for assertions about a roads environmental impact. Using spatial data for natural and human processes in the Tahoc National Forest (TNF, California, USA), we evaluated the assertion the road has a high potential for impacting the environment. We found a high level of agreement between the products of this evaluation and ground observations of a TNF transportation engineer, as well as occurrences of road failures. We used the modeled potential environmental impact to negatively weight roads for a least-cost path network analysis to 1573 points of interest in the forest. The network analysis showed that out of 8233 km of road analyzed in the forest, 3483 km (42%) must be kept in a modified road network to ensure access to these points. We found that the modified network had improved patch characteristics, such as significantly fewer cherry stem roads intruding into patches, an improved area-weighted mean shape index, and larger mean patch sizes, as compared to the original network. This analysis system could be used by any public agency to analyze infrastructure for environmental or other risk and included in other mandated analyses such as risks to watersheds.     

Analysis of volatile and semivolatile organic compounds in municipal wastewater using headspace solid-phase microextraction and gas chromatography.

The aim of this work was to develop a simple and fast analytical method for the determination of a wide range of organic compounds (volatile and semivolatile compounds) in municipal wastewater. The headspace-solid-phase microextraction (HS-SPME) and gas chromatography (with mass spectroscopy) was used for determination of the organic compounds. In this study, 39 organic compounds were determined, including 3 sulfur compounds, 28 substituted benzenes, and 8 substituted phenols. The extraction parameters, such as types of SPME fiber, extraction temperature, extraction time, desorption time, salt effect, and magnetic stirring, were investigated. The method had very good repeatability, because the relative standard deviations ranged from 0.5 to 12%. The detection limit of each compound was at or below the microgram-per-liter level. This method was applied for determination of the organic compounds in raw wastewater, primary effluent, secondary effluent, and chlorinated secondary effluent samples from the Chania Municipal Wastewater Treatment Plant (Crete, Greece).     

Oceanographic influences on the dive behavior of juvenile loggerhead turtles (Caretta caretta) in the North Pacific Ocean

Satellite telemetry data from 17 juvenile loggerhead turtles (43.5–66.5 cm straight carapace length) were used in conjunction with oceanographic data to analyze the influence of regional and seasonal oceanography on dive behavior in the North Pacific Ocean. Combined dive behavior for all individuals showed that turtles spent more than 80% of their time at depths <5 m, and more than 90% of their time at depths <15 m. Multivariate classifications of dive data revealed four major dive types, three representing deeper, longer dives, and one representing shallower dives shorter in duration. Turtles exhibited variability in these dive types across oceanographic regions, with deeper, longer dives in the Hawaii longline swordfish fishing grounds during the first quarter of the year, as well as in the Kuroshio Extension Bifurcation Region and the region near the Baja California Peninsula, Mexico. Turtles in the Kuroshio Extension Bifurcation Region also exhibited dive variability associated with mesoscale eddy features, with turtles making deeper, longer dives while associated with the strongest total kinetic energy. Turtles in the central North Pacific exhibited seasonality in dive behavior that appeared to reflect synchronous latitudinal movements with the North Pacific Subtropical Front and the associated seasonal, large-scale oceanography. Turtles made deeper, longer dives during the first quarter of the year within this region, the reported time and area where the highest loggerhead bycatch occurs by the longline fishery. These results represent the first comprehensive study of dive data for this species in this region. The increased understanding of juvenile loggerhead dive behavior and the influences of oceanography on dive variability should provide further insight into why interactions with longline fisheries occur and suggest methods for reducing the bycatch of this threatened species.     

The "cultural filter", human transport of mussel shell, and the applied potential of zooarchaeological data

Large assemblages of animal bones and/or shells from archaeological sites can provide data valuable for modern conservation efforts, e.g., by providing accurate historical baselines for species reintroductions or habitat restoration. Such data are underused by natural scientists, partly due to assumptions that archaeological materials are too biased by prehistoric human actions (the so-called "cultural filter") to accurately reflect past biotic communities. In order to address many paleobiological, archaeological, or applied research questions, data on past species, communities, and populations must first be demonstrated to be representative at the appropriate level. We discuss different ways in which one kind of cultural bias, human transport of specimens, can be tested at different scales, using freshwater mussel shells from prehistoric sites in the Tombigbee River basin of Mississippi and Alabama to show how representativeness of samples can be assessed.     

Revisiting the classics: considering nonconsumptive effects in textbook examples of predator-prey interactions

Predator effects on prey dynamics are conventionally studied by measuring changes in prey abundance attributed to consumption by predators. We revisit four classic examples of predator-prey systems often cited in textbooks and incorporate subsequent studies of nonconsumptive effects of predators (NCE), defined as changes in prey traits (e.g., behavior, growth, development) measured on an ecological time scale. Our review revealed that NCE were integral to explaining lynx-hare population dynamics in boreal forests, cascading effects of top predators in Wisconsin lakes, and cascading effects of killer whales and sea otters on kelp forests in nearshore marine habitats. The relative roles of consumption and NCE of wolves on moose and consequent indirect effects on plant communities of Isle Royale depended on climate oscillations. Nonconsumptive effects have not been explicitly tested to explain the link between planktonic alewives and the size structure of the zooplankton, nor have they been invoked to attribute keystone predator status in intertidal communities or elsewhere. We argue that both consumption and intimidation contribute to the total effects of keystone predators, and that characteristics of keystone consumers may differ from those of predators having predominantly NCE. Nonconsumptive effects are often considered as an afterthought to explain observations inconsistent with consumption-based theory. Consequently, NCE with the same sign as consumptive effects may be overlooked, even though they can affect the magnitude, rate, or scale of a prey response to predation and can have important management or conservation implications. Nonconsumptive effects may underlie other classic paradigms in ecology, such as delayed density dependence and predator-mediated prey coexistence. Revisiting classic studies enriches our understanding of predator-prey dynamics and provides compelling rationale for ramping up efforts to consider how NCE affect traditional predator-prey models based on consumption, and to compare the relative magnitude of consumptive and NCE of predators.