Evaluation of the ecological status with benthic indices in the coastal system： the case of Bohai Bay （China）

Based on biologic and environmental materials collected from coastal areas of Bohai Bay （China） in April, 2008, three biotic indices （AZTI＇s Marine Biotic Index （AMBI）, Shannon-Wiener Index and W-statistic） were applied together to evaluate the ecological status of the sampling area. The results showed a clear spatial gradient from a worse ecological status in the near-shore areas （especially around Haihe and Jiyun River Estuaries） to a better status in the offshore areas. While all the three indices could assist decision makers in visualizing spatial changes of organic pollutants in Bohai Bay, two indices, i. e., AMBI and Shannon-Wiener index, were effective in distinguishing sites from Haihe River Estuary, Jiyun River Estuary and other area. However, W-statistic can＇t tell the differences between estuaries and other area. It would be explained that organic pollutants and/or other environ- mental stresses in Bohai Bay were not strong enough to reduce the size ofmacrozoobenthos, which may cause both of the abundance and biomass curves crossed. To our knowledge, this is the first time that several benthic indices were used to assess the benthic ecological status in Bohai Bay, which gave the similar results. Furthermore, there is indication that the ecological status is related to excess input of wastewater along main rivers and outlets. In a word, AMBI, Shannon-Wiener Index and W-statistic could be able to assess the benthic ecological status of Bohai Bay under the organic pollutants pressure.     

Justice in sustainability indicators and indexes

At least since the Brundtland Report, technical assessments of what can be sustained and values about what is desirable to sustain, for whom, and for how long have been intertwined. This intersection is particularly evident in the assumption that justice among people living today and between present and future generations is a key part of sustainability. In official international policy documents and academic studies of sustainability, this justice may include the equitable distribution of environmental benefits and burdens, distributive justice, or the ability of people to meaningfully contribute to decisions that affect their lives, participatory justice. Yet, the process of developing indicators and indexes to track movement toward or away from sustainability has been dominated by technical, economic, and environmental assessments. This raises questions about whether or not indexes align with and thus will monitor and encourage progress toward sustainability in a technically possible and desirable way. To begin to answer this question, this paper identifies definitions of justice used in sustainability discourse and evaluates the degree to which sustainability indicators and indexes align with these concepts. The 2010 Environmental Performance Index, Eurostat's Sustainable Development Indicators, and a group of local indicators and indexes are examined. It is found that the indicators embody various aspects of justice, though they are still significantly limited by the available data, especially as they generally cannot monitor inequities between subpopulations and have a limited capacity to monitor progress toward participatory justice.     

Instream and offstream environmental conditions and stream biotic integrity: Importance of scale and site similarities for learning and prediction

Two different methods to predict biotic integrity were tested and compared in the present paper. The first one tries to predict the fish indices of biotic integrity (IBI) at the state or regional scale based on the most similar observations to a specific target site of interest using the simple to implement k-nearest neighbors (or kNN) method. Two different distance functions were considered to find the k-nearest neighbors: the Euclidean and the Mahalanobis. The second method was applied on the same datasets and consisted of a step-wise multiple regression. The two modeling approaches yielded similar results but kNN proved to be more time-efficient and very fast computationally for the given dataset sizes, which allowed applying a leave-one-out cross validation.In an attempt to reveal the importance of scale in the prediction of IBI, regression models were constructed at the state (or regional) scale and at the more refined cluster of sampling sites scale. Clusters of sites were extracted using Kohonen's self-organizing maps (SOM) followed by k-means clustering of the SOM neurons. Cluster-level regression models, constructed after site patterning, performed better in IBI prediction than global regression models constructed without any previous site patterning. The importance of identifying groups of sites with similar environmental characteristics affecting the IBI was revealed. The combined use of site patterning and regression modeling for IBI prediction also helped identifying important variables acting at the local scale which remain latent at the global scale.     

绿色水资源利用效率的测度和收敛性分析

为实现水资源的高效利用和生态环境价值,必须把非合意产出纳入水资源利用效率的研究范畴。使用2003-2013年中国30个省市的面板数据,选取Malmquist-Luenberger生产率指数测算了考虑环境污染的绿色水资源利用效率,在此基础上,进行了各地区水资源利用效率的收敛性检验,研究结果表明：1）针对全国而言,环境约束下的动态绿色水资源利用效率低于无环境约束得到的水资源利用效率,即忽视非合意产出时水资源利用效率被高估,这也表明传统的水资源利用效率数值的“虚高”是以水生态破坏为代价的。2）全国绿色水资源利用效率增长3.3%,其中,技术进步对水资源利用效率增长起到了正向作用,但技术效率却对改善水资源利用效率起了阻碍作用。3）全国、东部和中部区域绿色水资源利用效率增长率趋向于稳态,但西部区域的增长率虽存在条件β收敛,但不存在绝对β收敛。最后根据研究结果,提出高度重视水资源的经济价值和生态环境功能;紧扣自主创新和产业结构调整主线,通过技术进步大幅提升绿色水资源利用效率及建立节水减排的内在动力机制,缩小绿色水资源利用率的地区差距等建议。     

呼伦贝尔典型草原区植物生长旺季地上干物质量估算的地面光谱模型

为促进地面高光谱遥感在草地估产方面的应用,采用美国ASD公司生产的Fieldspec 3光谱仪,于2009年7月下旬在呼伦贝尔典型草原区进行了高光谱遥感地面观测试验. 运用单变量线性、非线性和逐步回归分析方法,建立植物生长旺季归一化植被指数(NDVI)与地上干物质量(ANPP)间的地面光谱模型. 结果表明,基于判定系数(R2)判断,线性函数和指数函数拟合较理想,R2分别达到0.729 5和0.720 3. 误差分析表明,标准误差(SE)最大的是对数函数,其SE为24.82 g/m2;最小的是幂函数,其SE为22.63 g/m2. 平均误差系数(MEC)最大的是对数函数,其MEC为0.249 7;指数函数最小,其MEC为0.193 2. 综合分析后,选用一元线性回归方程作为呼伦贝尔典型草原区的植物生长旺季最优地面光谱模型:ANPP406.08NDVI-101.64,其R2为0.729 5,SE为23.61 g/m2,MEC为0.220　9,P<0.001.      

国家公园效果评价体系研究

建立国家公园是保护生物多样性和促进地方发展的重要途径之一,开展国家公园效果评价是了解国家公园功能发挥的有效途径。通过查阅大量文献及德尔菲法（Delphi）,确定了与国家公园效果相关的28个评价指标,同时以功能为主导,将评价指标归纳为5个功能指标群：保护功能指标群（7个评价指标）、科研功能指标群（6个评价指标）、游憩功能指标群（7个评价指标）、教育功能指标群（4个评价指标）和经济发展功能指标群（4个评价指标）,通过对评价指标的赋分（5分制原则）和计算权重,从而达到国家公园效果评价的量化,实现对国家公园建设效果的评价。     

矿井风险评价基本模型研究与探讨

提出风险的绝对值和相对值的概念,探讨了如何合成事故发生可能性和事故后果严重程度这两个指标,如何确定多个评价单元的评价对象的风险等级划分等问题。     

Achieving a real-time online monitoring system for conservation culturomics

Environmental monitoring is increasingly shifting toward a set of systems that describe changes in real time. In ecology specifically, a series of challenges have prevented the rollout of real-time monitoring for features such as biodiversity change or ecosystem service provision. Conservation culturomics, a field concerned with interactions between people and nature, is well placed to demonstrate how monitoring might move toward a network of real-time platforms, given its existence exclusively in the digital realm. We examined a set of considerations associated with the development of real-time monitoring platforms for conservation culturomics and introduce a near real-time platform for the Species Awareness Index, a global index of changing biodiversity awareness derived from the rate of change in page views for species on Wikipedia. This platform will update automatically each month, operating in near real time ( https://joemillard.shinyapps.io/Real_time_SAI/ ). There are plans to make the underlying data queryable via an application programing interface independent of the platform. The real-time Species Awareness Index will represent the first real-time and entirely automated conservation culturomic platform and one of the first real-time platforms in the discipline of ecology. Real-time monitoring for culturomics can provide insight into human–nature interactions as they play out in the physical realm and provide a framework for the development of real-time monitoring in ecology. Real-time monitoring metrics can be processed on private virtual machines and hosted on publicly available cloud services. Conservation now needs an online, real-time observatory that can evolve with the structure of the web.     

Development of a Bird Integrity Index: Measuring Avian Response to Disturbance in the Blue Mountains of Oregon, USA

The Bird Integrity Index (BII) presented here uses bird assemblage information to assess human impacts to 28 stream reaches in the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon. Eighty-one candidate metrics were extracted from bird survey data for testing. The metrics represented aspects of bird taxonomic richness, tolerance or intolerance to human disturbance, dietary preferences, foraging techniques, and nesting strategies that were expected to be positively or negatively affected by human activities in the region. To evaluate the responsiveness of each metric, it was plotted against an index of reach and watershed disturbance that included attributes of land use/land cover, road density, riparian cover, mining impacts, and percent area in clearcut and partial-cut logging. Nine of the 81 candidate bird metrics remained after eliminating unresponsive and highly correlated metrics. Individual metric scores ranged from 0 to 10, and BII scores varied between 0 and 100. BII scores varied from 78.6 for a minimally disturbed, reference stream reach to 30.4 for the most highly disturbed stream reach. The BII responded clearly to varying riparian conditions and to the cumulative effects of disturbances, such as logging, grazing, and mining, which are common in the mountains of eastern Oregon. This BII for eastern Oregon was compared to an earlier BII developed for the agricultural and urban disturbance regime of the Willamette Valley in western Oregon. The BII presented here was sensitive enough to distinguish differences in condition among stream riparian zones with disturbances that were not as obvious or irreversible as those in the agricultural/urban conditions of western Oregon.     

运用主成分分析法评价北京市代表性河流的水质与毒性状况

以北京市3条具有不同功能的代表性河流(清河:纳污排洪;京密引水渠:供水水源;小月河:景观用水)作为研究对象,分析测定了33个水质指标,采用内梅罗指数法与大型蚤急性毒性测试法对3条河流的水质与毒性状况进行了评价,同时运用主成分分析法对毒性产生的原因和影响水质的因素进行了初步探讨.结果表明,1)3条河流已受到不同程度的污染,水质和毒性状况均不容乐观.作为纳污排洪的清河大部分采样点水质较差,生物毒性极高;作为景观用水的小月河水质一般,具有一定的生物毒性;作为供水水源的京密引水渠水质一般,但毒性较低.2)水样生物毒性与Cl-、Ca、K、Li、Mn、Na、Cr、Ni等指标有关;内梅罗水质指数与NO2-、Cl-、K、Na、Ni等指标有关.3)某些指标(如NO2-)超标会对水质分级产生较大影响,但对生物毒性贡献不大,而低浓度的重金属,不会对水质分级产生贡献,却会对生物的生理活动产生影响,综合化学指标和毒性指标共同评价水质更为合理.