Status and trends of terrestrial arthropod abundance and diversity in the North Atlantic region of the Arctic

Ambio - The Circumpolar Biodiversity Monitoring Programme (CBMP) provides an opportunity to improve our knowledge of Arctic arthropod diversity, but initial baseline studies are required to...     

Can preferential credit programs speed up the adoption of low-carbon agricultural systems in Mato Grosso,Brazil? Results from bioeconomic microsimulation

The need to balance agricultural production and environmental protection shifted the focus of Brazilian land-use policy toward sustainable agriculture. In 2010, Brazil established preferential credit lines to finance investments into low-carbon integrated agricultural systems of crop, livestock and forestry. This article presents a simulation-based empirical assessment of integrated system adoption in the state of Mato Grosso, where highly mechanized soybean–cotton and soybean–maize double-crop systems currently prevail. We employ bioeconomic modeling to explicitly capture the heterogeneity of farm-level costs and benefits of adoption. By parameterizing and validating our simulations with both empirical and experimental data, we evaluate the effectiveness of the ABC Integration credit through indicators such as land-use change, adoption rates and budgetary costs of credit provision. Alternative scenarios reveal that specific credit conditions might speed up the diffusion of low-carbon agricultural systems in Mato Grosso.

     

Characterizing fish responses to a river restoration over 21 years based on species’ traits

Understanding restoration effectiveness is often impaired by a lack of high‐quality, long‐term monitoring data and, to date, few researchers have used species’ trait information to gain insight into the processes that drive the reaction of fish communities to restoration. We examined fish‐community responses with a highly resolved data set from 21 consecutive years of electrofishing (4 years prerestoration and 17 years postrestoration) at multiple restored and unrestored reaches from a river restoration project on the Lippe River, Germany. Fish abundance peaked in the third year after the restoration; abundance was 6 times higher than before the restoration. After 5–7 years, species richness and abundance stabilized at 2 and 3.5 times higher levels relative to the prerestoration level, respectively. However, interannual variability of species richness and abundance remained considerable, illustrating the challenge of reliably assessing restoration outcomes based on data from individual samplings, especially in the first years following restoration. Life‐history and reproduction‐related traits best explained differences in species’ responses to restoration. Opportunistic short‐lived species with early female maturity and multiple spawning runs per year exhibited the strongest increase in abundance, which reflected their ability to rapidly colonize new habitats. These often small‐bodied and fusiform fishes typically live in dynamic and ephemeral instream and floodplain areas that river‐habitat restorations often aim to create, and in this case their increases in abundance indicated successful restoration. Our results suggest that a greater consideration of species’ traits may enhance the causal understanding of community processes and the coupling of restoration to functional ecology. Trait‐based assessments of restoration outcomes would furthermore allow for easier transfer of knowledge across biogeographic borders than studies based on taxonomy.     

Assessment of instream foam formation and quantification of foam in effluents

Although the foam formation on surface waters nowadays is not comparable with the foam “mountains” in the 1970s, it still is an issue of water quality concern. A drawback in the discussion is the lack of methods to assess instream foam formation and foam emitted by point sources. Foam formation on a transboundary river in Austria led to an intensive study resulting in two parameters to quantify instream and emitted foam. Foam potential is introduced as emission parameter that is defined as flow rate of river water, which can foam due to an effluent’s discharge. The foam index (FI) represents a parameter to assess the foam on the river and allows a semi-quantitative differentiation between the varying foaming conditions. This publication will present the developed methods and show some results to prove their accuracy and applicability.     

Turning wastewater into energy: challenges of reconfiguring regional infrastructures in the Berlin–Brandenburg region

Issues of connectivity between different infrastructure sectors have received surprisingly little attention in recent research. Despite huge interest in issues of sectoral integration surrounding the water–energy nexus, researchers have rarely considered what this might mean for the coupling of infrastructure systems for water/wastewater and energy services. Consequently, the implications of greater connectivity for the governance and socio-spatial constitution of infrastructures are largely unexplored. This paper addresses this research gap with a case study of an attempt to use treated wastewater to produce biomass for energy on degraded land in the Berlin–Brandenburg region of Germany. It takes water reuse for energy crop production as an exemplar of work at the water–energy nexus in order to explore the institutional, spatial and physical dimensions involved in connecting two infrastructure systems to this end. It argues that cross-sectoral integration reaches far beyond issues of technological compatibility, revealing often hidden but crucial differences in the institutional and spatial configuration of energy and wastewater systems. The paper draws conclusions on the broader implications of the case for understanding institutional challenges of cross-sectoral connectivity on the one hand and prospects for reconfiguring infrastructural relations between cities and rural areas on the other.     

Evaluating forest transition based on a multi-scale approach: forest area dynamics in Switzerland 1850–2000

Regional Environmental Change - A trend of forest area expansion after decades of decline is taking place in many countries around the globe. In Switzerland, forest cover has been expanding since...