Boston's Chinatown is an urban community surrounded by businesses, a university, a large medical centre, and an area zoned for “adult entertainment” called the Combat Zone. The overall goal of this exploratory study was to examine the temporal and geographic distribution of street crime in Boston's Chinatown using police crime reports from the years 1988 to 2004. Crime patterns were most notably associated with the presence of the adult entertainment area, known as the Combat Zone. However, despite the decline of adult businesses over the study period, we saw small limited reduction in property and violent crimes, suggesting that the decline of these businesses did not lead to large-scale short-term (<5 years) reductions in crime. 相似文献
Environmental Geochemistry and Health - Bottled natural mineral waters from an andesitic aquifer in Slovenia are enriched in magnesium (1.1 g/l), sulphate (2.2 g/l) and dissolved... 相似文献
Animals disperse in space through different movement behaviors, resulting in different displacement distances. This is often described with a displacement kernel where the long-distance dispersers are within the tail of the kernel. A displacement with a large proportion of long-distance dispersers may have impact on different aspects of spatial ecology such as invasion speed, population persistence, and distribution. It is, however, unclear whether the kurtosis of the kernel plays a major role since a fatter tail also influences the variance of the kernel. We modeled displacement in landscapes with different amounts and configurations of habitats and handled kurtosis and variance separately to study how these affected population distribution and transition time. We conclude that kurtosis is not important for any of these aspects of spatial ecology. The variance of the kernel, on the other hand, was of great importance to both population distribution and transition time. We argue that separating variance and kurtosis can cast new light on the way in which long-distance dispersers are important in ecological processes. Consequences for empirical studies are discussed. 相似文献
Most natural local systems exchange organisms with a regional pool of species through migration and dispersal. Such metacommunity processes of interconnected multispecies assemblages are likely to affect local dynamics of both species and processes. We present results from an artificial marine outdoor rock pool system in which we investigated the factors of (1) local grazer richness and composition, and (2) connectivity of local patches to a regional species pool, and their effects on algal biomass. Local species richness of six grazers was manipulated in both open and closed pools, which were embedded in a regional species pool containing all six grazers. Grazer richness showed significant net biodiversity effects on grazing in the closed, but not in the open, system. Grazer composition, on the other hand, showed significant effects on grazing in both open and closed systems, depending on which species were initially present. The two most efficient grazers were able to compensate for less efficient grazers in species mixtures, hence ensuring the function of grazing. The efficiency of top-down control of algal biomass in open systems thus depends on which particular species are lost. Further, differences in grazing between the open and closed system changed over time due to temporal dynamics in grazer composition. The results emphasize the importance of including system connectivity in experimental designs to allow an extrapolation of biodiversity ecosystem-functioning relationships to natural systems. 相似文献
Understanding the origin of disease resistance in social insects is difficult due to the lack of well-established phylogenies
of presocial and eusocial species and the absence of extant basal and intermediate forms. Moreover, comprehensive accounts
of infection-control traits in social insect lineages are not available. Therefore, to explore the evolution of pathogen control
in social insects we used cellular automata models to analyze the efficacy of immunity and nest hygiene, which we assumed
were basal traits, and allogrooming, which likely followed the transition to eusociality, and their interactions with colony
demography and patterns of worker spatial distribution. Models showed that nest hygiene provided an immediate survival benefit
and that immunity lowered overall disease susceptibility under both constant and periodic exposure scenarios. Allogrooming
increased survivorship in chronically challenged colonies but also increased pathogen transmission rates under conditions
of periodic exposure. Colonies having demographies biased towards young or old individuals had slightly higher mortality than
those with heterogeneous demographies. The distribution of older individuals relative to the nest center had no significant
effect on susceptibility and provided only a minor survival advantage. Models indicated that nest hygiene and immunity function
on different temporal scales and can interact with demography to lower disease risks. Our results suggest how infection control
systems in social insects could have been built upon the inducible immune defenses and nest hygienic behaviors of solitary
and presocial ancestors and served as important preadaptations to manage disease exposure and transmission in colonies of
eusocial species. 相似文献
Human-induced urban growth and sprawl have implications for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that may not be included in conventional GHG accounting methods. Improved understanding of this issue requires use of interactive, spatial-explicit social–ecological systems modeling. This paper develops a comprehensive approach to modeling GHG emissions from urban developments, considering Stockholm County, Sweden as a case study. GHG projections to 2040 with a social–ecological system model yield overall greater emissions than simple extrapolations in official climate action planning. The most pronounced difference in emissions (39% higher) from energy use single-residence buildings resulting from urban sprawl. And this difference is not accounted for in the simple extrapolations. Scenario results indicate that a zoning policy, restricting urban development in certain areas, can mitigate 72% of the total emission effects of the model-projected urban sprawl. The study outcomes include a decision support interface for communicating results and policy implications with policymakers.
The development of ecologically sound water allocation strategies that account for the needs of riverine ecosystems is a pressing
issue, especially in semiarid river basins. In the Aral Sea Basin, a search for strategies to mitigate ecological and socioeconomic
deterioration has been in process since the early 1990s. The Geographic Information System–based simulation tool TUGAI has
been developed to support the policy determination process by providing a simple, problem-oriented method to assess ecological
effects of alternative water management strategies for the Amudarya River. It combines a multiobjective water allocation model
with simple, spatially explicit statistical and rule-based models of landscape dynamics. Changes in environmental conditions
are evaluated by a fuzzy habitat suitability index for Populus euphratica, which is the dominant species of the characteristic riverine Tugai forests. Water management scenarios can be developed
by altering spatiotemporal water distribution in the delta area or the amount of water inflow into the delta. Outcomes of
scenario analysis are qualitative comparisons of the ecological effects of different options for a time period of up to 28
years. The given approach utilizes different types of knowledge, from quantitative hydrological data to qualitative local
expert knowledge. The main purpose of the tool is to integrate the knowledge in a comprehensive way to make it available for
discussions on alternative policies in moderated workshops with stakeholders. In this article, the modules of the tool, their
integration, and three hypothetical scenarios are presented. Based on the experience gained when developing the TUGAI tool,
we propose that the general framework can be transferred to other areas where tradeoffs in water allocation between the environment
and other water users are of major concern. The potential for a simulation tool to structure and inform a complex resource
management situation by involving local experts and stakeholders in the development of possible future scenarios will become
increasingly valuable for transparent and participatory resource management. 相似文献
Land use is known to alter the nature of land–water interactions, but the potential effects of widespread forest management on headwaters in boreal regions remain poorly understood. We evaluated the importance of catchment land use, land cover, and local stream variables for macroinvertebrate community and functional trait diversity in 18 boreal headwater streams. Variation in macroinvertebrate metrics was often best explained by in-stream variables, primarily water chemistry (e.g. pH). However, variation in stream variables was, in turn, significantly associated with catchment-scale forestry land use. More specifically, streams running through catchments that were dominated by young (11–50 years) forests had higher pH, greater organic matter standing stock, higher abundance of aquatic moss, and the highest macroinvertebrate diversity, compared to streams running through recently clear-cut and old forests. This indicates that catchment-scale forest management can modify in-stream habitat conditions with effects on stream macroinvertebrate communities and that characteristics of younger forests may promote conditions that benefit headwater biodiversity. 相似文献
In northeastern Austria, marshlands have been turned into the most productive arable land of the country. As a result, most headwater streams show structurally degraded channels, lacking riparian buffer zones, which are heavily loaded with nutrients from the surrounding crop fields. The present study examines whether longitudinally restricted riparian forest buffers can enhance the in-stream nutrient retention in nutrient-enriched headwater streams. We estimated nutrient uptake from pairwise, short-term addition experiments with NH, NH, PO, and NaCl within reaches with riparian forest buffers (RFB) and degraded reaches (DEG) of the same streams. Riparian forest buffers originated from the conservation of the pristine vegetation or from restoration measures. Hydrologic retention was calculated with the model OTIS-P on the basis of conductivity break-through curves from the salt injections. A significant increase in surface transient storage was revealed in pristine and restored RFB reaches compared with DEG reaches due to the longitudinal step-pool pattern and the frequent occurrence of woody debris on the channel bed. Ammonium uptake lengths were significantly shorter in RFB reaches than in DEG reaches, resulting from the higher hydrologic retention. Uptake velocities did not differ significantly between RFB and DEG reaches, indicating that riparian forest buffers did not affect the biochemical nutrient demand. Uptake of NH was mainly driven by autotrophs. Net PO uptake was not affected by riparian forest buffers. The study shows that the physical and biogeochemical effects of riparian forest buffers on the in-stream nutrient retention are limited in the case of highly eutrophic streams. 相似文献