Climate change, humidity, and mortality in the United States

This paper estimates the effects of humidity and temperature on mortality rates in the United States (c. 1973-2002) in order to provide an insight into the potential health impacts of climate change. I find that humidity, like temperature, is an important determinant of mortality. Coupled with Hadley CM3 climate-change predictions, I project that mortality rates are likely to change little on the aggregate for the United States. However, distributional impacts matter: mortality rates are likely to decline in cold and dry areas, but increase in hot and humid areas. Further, accounting for humidity has important implications for evaluating these distributional effects.     

Climate change and its consequences for water and wastewater management

Life, in combination with solar radiation and abiotic processes, is most probably the reason why liquid water has existed on Earth for over billions of years, and the global mean temperature has remained in a lifeenabling range. Efforts to limit or even reverse global warming must be derived from the knowledge of the Earth’s complex life-support system. In this context, the balance between liquid and gaseous water plays a crucial role, and water management becomes an important field of innovation and action, globally, on the scale of watersheds but also on the very local level. Cascading use, reuse, and temporary storage of water in urban settings must be considered to limit over-extraction of water from natural resources, and to maintain the life supporting function of ecosystems. At the same time, public health requirements, cost efficiency, and reliability demands are to be met.     

Warming modifies trophic cascades and eutrophication in experimental freshwater communities

Climate warming is occurring in concert with other anthropogenic changes to ecosystems. However, it is unknown whether and how warming alters the importance of top-down vs. bottom-up control over community productivity and variability. We performed a 16-month factorial experimental manipulation of warming, nutrient enrichment, and predator presence in replicated freshwater pond mesocosms to test their independent and interactive impacts. Warming strengthened trophic cascades from fish to primary producers, and it decreased the impact of eutrophication on the mean and temporal variation of phytoplankton biomass. These impacts varied seasonally, with higher temperatures leading to stronger trophic cascades in winter and weaker algae blooms under eutrophication in summer. Our results suggest that higher temperatures may shift the control of primary production in freshwater ponds toward stronger top-down and weaker bottom-up effects. The dampened temporal variability of algal biomass under eutrophication at higher temperatures suggests that warming may stabilize some ecosystem processes.     

Sustainability of agricultural and wild cereals to aerotechnogenic exposure

In recent decades, the problem of the constantly increasin level of anthropogenic load on the environment is becoming more and more acute. Some of the most dangerous pollutants entering the environment from industrial emissions are heavy metals. These pollutants are not susceptible to biodegradation over time, which leads to their accumulation in the environment in dangerous concentrations. The purpose of this work is to study the sustainability of cultivated and wild plants of the Poaceae family to aerotechnogenic pollution in the soil. The content of heavy metals in couch grass (Elytrigia repens (L.) Nevski), meadow bluegrass (Poa pratensis L.) and soft wheat (Triticum aestivum) plants grown in the impact zone of Novocherkassk Power Station has been analyzed. Contamination of cultivated and wild cereals with Pb, Zn, Ni and Cd has been established. It has been shown that the accumulation of heavy metals is individual for each plant species. An average and close correlation have been established between the total HM content and the content of their mobile forms in the soil and their content in plants. For the plants studied, the translocation factor (TF) and the distribution coefficient (DC) of HM have been calculated. The TF is formed by the ratio of the concentration of an element in the root plant dry weight to the content of its mobile compounds in the soil. The DC value makes it possible to estimate the capacity of the aboveground parts of plants to absorb and accumulate elements under soil pollution conditions and is determined as the ratio of the metal content in the aboveground biomass to its concentration in the roots. TF and DC values have shown a significant accumulation of elements by plants from the soil, as well as their translocation from the root system to the aboveground part. It has been revealed that even within the same Poaceae family, cultural species are more sensitive to man-made pollution than wild-growing ones.

     

Uncertainty in the assessment of hazard,exposure and risk

The terminology, concepts and current approaches to uncertainty in the assessment of hazard, exposure and risk are reviewed. Five generic questions are discussed on uncertainty, including sources, levels, when and how it should be dealt with or reduced, what are our gaps in understanding and how they can be addressed. A case study of lead exposure of children in Lavrion, Greece, is used to exemplify these questions and possible answers. Estimation of uncertainty may be improved by the use of interorganisational studies to capture sources of uncertainty that are often overlooked. Gaps identified in our understanding of uncertainty include: a limitation in the availability of basic measurements, a lack of knowledge of the environmental processes, an inability to predict the effects of mixtures, the aetiology of disease and devising procedures for optimal resource allocation in impact assessment.     

Environmental change and declining resource availability for small-mammal communities in the Great Basin

Changes in climate and land use can impact natural systems across all levels of ecological organization. Most documented and anticipated effects consider species' properties, including phenologies, geographic distributions, and abundances. Responses of higher-level aggregate community or ecosystem properties have not been considered as they are assumed to be relatively stable due to compensatory dynamics and diversity-stability relationships. However, this assumption may not be as fundamental as previously thought. Here we assess stability in the aggregate properties of total abundance, biomass, and energy consumption for small-mammal communities in the Great Basin, using paired historical and modern survey data spanning nearly a century of environmental change. Results show marked declines in each aggregate property independent of spatial scale, elevation, or habitat type, and a reallocation of available biomass and energy favoring diet and habitat generalists. Because aggregate properties directly reflect resource availability, our findings indicate a regionwide decline in resources of 50% over the past century, which may signal a resource crisis. This work illustrates the power of using aggregate properties as indicators of ecological conditions and environmental change at broad spatial and temporal scales.     

Climate warming and predation risk during herbivore ontogeny

Phenological effects of climate change are expected to differ among species, altering interactions within ecological communities. However, the nature and strength of these effects can vary during ontogeny, so the net community-level effects will be the result of integration over an individual's lifetime. I resolved the mechanism driving the effects of warming and spider predation risk on a generalist grasshopper herbivore at each ontogenetic stage and quantified the treatment effects on a measure of reproductive fitness. Spiders caused nymphal grasshoppers to increase the proportion of herbs in their diet, thus having a positive indirect effect on grasses and a negative indirect effect on herbs. Warming strengthened the top-down effect by affecting spiders and grasshoppers differently. In cooler, ambient conditions, grasshoppers and spiders had a high degree of spatial overlap within the plant canopy. Grasshopper position was unaffected by temperature, but spiders moved lower in the canopy in response to warming. This decreased the spatial overlap between predator and prey, allowing nymphal grasshoppers to increase daily feeding time. While spiders decreased grasshopper growth and reproductive fitness in ambient conditions, spiders had no effect on grasshopper fitness in warmed treatments. The study demonstrates the importance of considering the ontogeny of behavior when examining the effects of climate change on trophic interactions.     

Climate change and the cost of conserving species in Madagascar

We examined the cost of conserving species as climate changes. We used a Maxent species distribution model to predict the ranges from 2000 to 2080 of 74 plant species endemic to the forests of Madagascar under 3 climate scenarios. We set a conservation target of achieving 10,000 ha of forest cover for each species and calculated the cost of achieving this target under each scenario. We interviewed managers of projects to restore native forests and conducted a literature review to obtain the net present cost per hectare of management actions to maintain or establish forest cover. For each species, we added hectares of land from lowest to highest cost per additional year of forest cover until the conservation target was achieved throughout the time period. Climate change was predicted to reduce the size of species' ranges, the overlap between species' ranges and existing or planned protected areas, and the overlap between species' ranges and existing forest. As a result, climate change increased the cost of achieving the conservation target by necessitating successively more costly management actions: additional management within existing protected areas (US$0-60/ha); avoidance of forest degradation (i.e., loss of biomass) in community-managed areas ($160-576/ha); avoidance of deforestation in unprotected areas ($252-1069/ha); and establishment of forest on nonforested land within protected areas ($802-2710/ha), in community-managed areas ($962-3226/ha), and in unprotected areas ($1054-3719/ha). Our results suggest that although forest restoration may be required for the conservation of some species as climate changes, it is more cost-effective to maintain existing forest wherever possible.     

Resource development,rural communities and rapid growth: Managing social change in the modern boomtown

Resource development in the western United States of America offers the prospect of rapid population and economic growth which may dramatically alter the traditional social bases of these rural communities. Reports from other western boomtowns suggests that such rapid growth can lead to substantial community disruption with a disproportionate increase in social problems and an eventual lowered productivity in the synthetic fuels industry. Changes related to population growth need not produce such disruptive results. Cooperation among industry, government, and community and well planned and coordinated human services and programs designed to relieve the stresses of change, to provide a sense of community, and to integrate newcomers into the community can reduce or prevent many of the negative impacts as well as reduce overall costs by building on existing resources.     

Aphid population response to agricultural landscape change: A spatially explicit,individual-based model

A spatially explicit individual-based simulation model has been developed to represent aphid population dynamics in agricultural landscapes. The application of the model to Rhopalosiphum padi (L.) population dynamics is detailed, including an outline of the construction of the model, its parameterisation and validation. Over time, the aphids interact with the landscape and with one another. The landscape is modified by varying a simple pesticide regime, and the multi-scale spatial and temporal implications for a population of aphids is analysed. The results show that a spatial modelling approach that considers the effects on the individual of landscape properties and factors such as wind speed and wind direction provides novel insight into aphid population dynamics both spatially and temporally. This forms the basis for the development of further simulation models that can be used to analyse how changes in landscape structure impact upon important species distributions and population dynamics.     

Regional human health risk assessment of cadmium and hexachlorocyclohexane for agricultural land in China

Widespread pollution of agricultural soil is posing great risks to food safety and human health. The absence of human health-based Generic Assessment Criteria (GAC) for agricultural land means Chinese farmers struggle to manage these risks efficiently and effectively. Cadmium (Cd) and hexachlorocyclohexane (HCH), two of the most concerned contaminants, demonstrate threshold toxicity meaning that background exposure (MDI_oral) is considered when deriving soil Generic Assessment Criteria (GAC). The CLEA (Contaminated Land Exposure Assessment) model was used to derive GAC for Cd and HCH that reflect differences in diet and soil characteristics across 19 provinces/cities. For both cadmium and alpha-HCH, Sichuan had the lowest GAC of 0.379 mg kg^?1 and 0.0136 mg kg^?1, respectively, resulting from its significant high MDI_oral values, which are approximately six to nine times larger than the average MDI_oral for all the 19 provinces/cities. Jiangxi province had the highest GAC of 1.230 mg kg^?1 and 0.0866 mg kg^?1, respectively, for cadmium and alpha-HCH, caused by its notable low MDI_oral values and low vegetable consumption rate. Human health risk assessment based on regional GAC for Cd revealed that agricultural land with very high to high risks is located in southern China, while very low-risk land is located in northern China. For HCH, alpha- and gamma-HCH pose negligible health risks, but beta-HCH poses some health risk in some of the provinces/cities. When applying the regional GAC for beta-HCH, agricultural land in Beijing and Sichuan posed the highest risk, and those in Heilongjiang and Jiangxi had the lowest risk. This reflects the significant influence of background and vegetable consumption pathway on the GAC. Regional GACs could simplify and speed up risk assessment of agricultural land in different regions of China, by avoiding the need to calculate site-specific assessment criteria, thus saving time and money by avoiding over or under remediation.

     

Variability of species' roles in marine communities: change of paradigms for conservation priorities

The structure and organisation of aquatic communities, moulded in each environment by combinations of abiotic factors, recruitment and productivity rates, rely upon a network of both pairwise and transitive interactions among organisms. In many cases, a few strong interactors drive basic ecological processes by playing a leading role in channelling the available resources. Among these, keystone species may control the outputs of local biodiversity through large indirect effects, disproportionately large relative to their abundance. Functional roles are not fixed labels, and species interactions have variable outputs in both time and space: also, in spite of a growing literature on species interactions, terminology is often poorly applied. This leads to the loss of the informative value of concepts, like the keystone species, which might represent useful trade-offs between science and environmental politics. Species' roles are often used to set taxonomic conservation priorities, although this might even be regarded as unethical, ecologically wrong, or in disregard of the evolutionary meaning of species coexistence and interaction. A re-assessment of species' roles is given here, attempting to highlight their limits and applicability. Electronic supplementary material to this paper can be obtained by using the Springer LINK server located at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00227-001-0769-2.     

Climate change impacts on a large-scale erosion coast of Hai Hau district,Vietnam and the adaptation

Among the effects of global warming, sea level rise (SLR) and severe typhoons pose the greatest threat to the stability of human settlements along coastlines. Therefore, countermeasures must be developed to mitigate the influences of strong typhoons and persistent SLR for coastal protection. This study assesses climate change impacts on coastal erosion, especially in two projected SLR scenarios of RCP2.6 and RCP8.5. The results show that SLR and severe typhoons lead to the increase of coastal erosion, beach lowering and scour. Moreover, as in projected SLR scenarios, average waves in high tide can cause severe soil erosion at inner slopes and lead to dyke failure by 2060. The paper highlights the need for additional countermeasures to protect the coast of Hai Hau district against SLR and severe typhoons. Among the alternatives available for countering these threats, applying soil stabilization and soil improvement combined with geosynthetics are promising strategies for coastal structures. Hybrid structures can be used with earth reinforcement and soil improvement. Additionally, the paper emphasizes the importance of multiple protective adaptations, including geosynthetics and ecological engineering measures against climate change-induced severe erosion on the coast of Hai Hau district.     

Limited change in the diversity and structure of subtidal communities over four decades

A unique archive of photographs from 1969 to 1974 permitted a test of the hypothesis that the diversity and composition of contemporary epilithic communities on subtidal rock walls in the San Juan Islands, WA, USA, has changed over 40 years. Notably, the richness and diversity of sessile taxa was significantly higher in 2008–2011. Furthermore, the multivariate community structure of sessile and mobile taxa differed between the historic and modern eras. Historic communities were characterized by a high percent cover of bare rock and non-calcified algal crusts, consistent with the effects of grazing by chitons and urchins. The rate of sessile community turnover, an index less susceptible to spatial sampling artifacts than richness or diversity, was not significantly different between the two eras. Together with the naturally high spatial variability in these epilithic communities, and the limited replication of historic quadrats, we interpret cautiously the data as evidence of limited change despite a clear shift in temperature and predator (fish) guild composition. The lack of substantial change in rock wall communities may be due in part to their vertical topography, which limits physical disturbance and the preemption of space by weedy algae, two processes that are often associated with “phase-shifts” in other marine ecosystems.     

Climate change effects on phytoplankton depend on cell size and food web structure

We investigated the effects of warming on a natural phytoplankton community from the Baltic Sea, based on six mesocosm experiments conducted 2005–2009. We focused on differences in the dynamics of three phytoplankton size groups which are grazed to a variable extent by different zooplankton groups. While small-sized algae were mostly grazer-controlled, light and nutrient availability largely determined the growth of medium- and large-sized algae. Thus, the latter groups dominated at increased light levels. Warming increased mesozooplankton grazing on medium-sized algae, reducing their biomass. The biomass of small-sized algae was not affected by temperature, probably due to an interplay between indirect effects spreading through the food web. Thus, under the higher temperature and lower light levels anticipated for the next decades in the southern Baltic Sea, a higher share of smaller phytoplankton is expected. We conclude that considering the size structure of the phytoplankton community strongly improves the reliability of projections of climate change effects.     

Using urine as a biomarker in human exposure risk associated with arsenic and other heavy metals contaminating drinking groundwater in intensively agricultural areas of Thailand

Environmental Geochemistry and Health - Urine used as a biomarker was collected and compared between two groups of participants: (1) a groundwater-drinking group and (2) a non-groundwater-drinking...     

Analytical methods of data gathering for risk assessment of contaminated soils in agricultural production

For the detection, analysis and assessment of contaminated land a procedure in separate steps is urgently recommended. During screening analyses informations about toxic gases, contents of heavy metals and halogenated organics are provided. When certain threshold values are exceeded, more sophisticated methods of residue analysis may help to decide on soil decontamination or change of exploitation.     

Influence of wave exposure on South African mussel beds and their associated infaunal communities

This study investigates effects of wave exposure on beds of the mussel Mytilus galloprovincialis and the infaunal communities associated with them. Nine sites of varying wave exposure were sampled near Groenrivier, on the west coast of South Africa. Wave exposure was measured using a Palumbi device, and exposure ranged from 7.17×10³ to 18.49×10³ N m^–2. Percentage mussel cover at each site was measured using 50×50 cm quadrats, and three 10×10 cm samples were removed from the mussel beds in the mid-intertidal zones of each site for examination of infauna. Percentage mussel cover, mean mussel length, mussel biomass and mussel bed depth all peaked at intermediate exposures, declining towards both the most sheltered and most exposed sites. Infaunal species diversity and richness both showed the reverse trend, peaking at the most sheltered and most exposed sites, and declining at intermediate exposures. Neither infaunal abundance, nor biomass, was significantly correlated to wave exposure, although abundance was highest at sheltered sites and biomass greatest at the most exposed site, which was dominated by limpets and large robust polychaetes.Communicated by J.P. Thorpe, Port Erin