Risk Assessment of Riparian Plant Invasions into Protected Areas

Abstract:  Protected areas are becoming increasingly isolated. River corridors represent crucial links to the surrounding landscape but are also major conduits for invasion of alien species. We developed a framework to assess the risk that alien plants in watersheds adjacent to a protected area will invade the protected area along rivers. The framework combines species- and landscape-level approaches and has five key components: (1) definition of the geographical area of interest, (2) delineation of the domain into ecologically meaningful zones, (3) identification of the appropriate landscape units, (4) categorization of alien species and mapping of their distribution and abundance, and (5) definition of management options. The framework guides the determination of species distribution and abundance through successive, easily followed steps, providing the means for the assessment of areas of concern. We applied the framework to Kruger National Park (KNP) in South Africa. We recorded 231 invasive alien plant species (of which 79 were major invaders) in the domain. The KNP is facing increasing pressure from alien species in the upper regions of the drainage areas of neighboring watersheds. On the basis of the climatic modeling, we showed that most major riparian invaders have the ability to spread across the KNP should they be transported down the rivers. With this information, KNP managers can identify areas for proactive intervention, monitoring, and resource allocation. Even for a very large protected area such as the KNP, sustainable management of biodiversity will depend heavily on the response of land managers upstream managing alien plants. We suggest that this framework is applicable to plants and other passively dispersed species that invade protected areas situated at the end of a drainage basin.     

Metapopulation Extinction Risk under Spatially Autocorrelated Disturbance

Abstract:  Recent extinction models generally show that spatial aggregation of habitat reduces overall extinction risk because sites emptied by local extinction are more rapidly recolonized. We extended such an investigation to include spatial structure in the disturbance regime. A spatially explicit metapopulation model was developed with a wide range of dispersal distances. The degree of aggregation of both habitat and disturbance pattern could be varied from a random distribution, through the intermediate case of a fractal distribution, all the way to complete aggregation (single block). Increasing spatial aggregation of disturbance generally increased extinction risk. The relative risk faced by populations in different landscapes varied greatly, depending on the disturbance regime. With random disturbance, the spatial aggregation of habitat reduced extinction risk, as in earlier studies. Where disturbance was spatially autocorrelated, however, this advantage was eliminated or reversed because populations in aggregated habitats are at risk of mass extinction from coarse-scale disturbance events. The effects of spatial patterns on extinction risk tended to be reduced by long-distance dispersal. Given the high levels of spatial correlation in natural and anthropogenic disturbance processes, population vulnerability may be greatly underestimated both by classical (nonspatial) models and by those that consider spatial structure in habitat alone.     

Air pollution effects on hospital admissions: a statistical analysis of parallel time series

A statistical model for longitudinal count data is used to examine the potential adverse health effects of ambient air pollution. Daily respiratory admissions to 164 acute care hospitals in Ontario are obtained for the period 1983 to 1988. Estimates of ozone levels in the vicinity of each hospital are determined from air pollution monitoring stations maintained by the Ontario Ministry of the Environment. Generalized estimating equation methods are used to make inferences about the regression and overdispersion parameters. The admission data display little evidence of serial correlation and extra Poisson variation. However, admission rates vary considerably among hospitals. This latter source of variation needs to be taken into account in examining the effects of air pollution on respiratory health status.     

Experimental verification for real-time environmental emergency response system: WSPEEDI by European tracer experiment

Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute has developed an emergency response system WSPEEDI to forecast long-range atmospheric dispersions of radionuclides discharged into the atmosphere. The latest version of WSPEEDI consists of an atmospheric dynamic model MM5 for calculating meteorological fields and a particle random-walk model for atmospheric dispersion. The performance of WSPEEDI was evaluated by data obtained from a field tracer experiment over Europe (ETEX) in this paper. The model validation was done with respect to the following points: (1) the dependence of model accuracy on the temporal and spatial resolutions of the meteorological fields and (2) the superiority of an atmospheric dynamic model over a mass-consistent wind model. Regarding (1), it was shown that the calculation accuracy of the new version with high temporal resolution was improved, especially at the edge of the plume. Moreover, although the increase in horizontal spatial resolution of the old version had no substantial effect on the model performance, increase in horizontal resolution of the new version contributed to the significant improvement of the calculation accuracy. These results showed that the dynamically calculated meteorological field with the spatial resolution of the meso-β–γ scale greatly improved calculation accuracy.     

基于集成全相关技术的水环境治理装备设计

针对现有水环境治理装备设计开发技术存在的不足，提出了一种融合全相关技术与CAD、CAE、CAM、CAPP技术的集成一体化装备系统设计开发方案，并给出了这种集成全相关技术的初步实现方法，而且进行了射流曝气器的设计应用。这种方法有望实现水环境治理装备系统完整、可靠的设计，并缩短了设计开发周期。     

Trends in summer sulphate in Europe

A trend analysis of the sulphate concentration in Europe in the summer half-year was performed. Data from various measuring networks were analysed, but only stations with quality assured sampling methods and a record of more than 10 years were included in the study. 1978 served as the reference year for the trend, because in that year most stations started operation. The relatively dense network in Belgium provided the most valuable data, as evidenced by the fact that two sites at a distance of only 10 km apart correlated better than 95% over a month. The two sites also show a correlation of better than 90% over a season with two other stations at distances of 45 and 95 km. The relative decrease in summer-sulphate at the four stations in Belgium, as analysed by linear regression, was 3.3% per year which corresponds to an absolute decrease of 0.42 μgm⁻³ per year. In the Netherlands the average yearly decrease in summer-sulphate at two stations was 3.5% (−0.34 μgm⁻³). In other countries stations were further apart or only a single site wits in use, which limits the representativeness of the data. In northwestern Germany, a region with several monitoring stations, a yearly averaged decrease of 3.0% occurred. The lower absolute decrease (0.25 μgm⁻³) per year compared to that in the two neighbouring countries reflects the lower summer-time sulphate concentrations. In the remainder of Germany the average decrease was 1.6%. In South-Scandinavia the yearly relative decrease at two sites was 2.6% (0.13 μgm⁻³ absolute). There was no significant trend in the U.K. Al the Polish station the levels increased, it decreased at the Hungarian and Austrian station and remained constant at the Czechoslovakian site. Reasons for omission of the data from France from the trend analysis are discussed.     

Space-time modeling for the Missouri Turkey Hunting Survey

The Missouri Turkey Hunting Survey (MTHS) is a postseason mail survey conducted by the Missouri Department of Conservation. The 1996 MTHS provides information concerning the number of turkeys harvested by hunters on each day and the total number of trips made to the counties by these hunters on each day of the hunting season. The success rates are then found from this information. Small sample sizes produce large standard errors for the estimates at the county level. We use a Bayesian hierarchical generalized linear model to estimate daily hunting success rates at the county level. The model includes an autoregressive process for the days of the hunting season and spatially correlated random geographic effects. The computations are performed using Gibbs sampling and adaptive rejection sampling techniques. Results show that there are significant spatial corelations between counties and correlations between days of the hunting season. The estimates are close to the frequency estimates at the state level and much more stable at the county level.     

Diversity pattern and spatial scale: a study of a tropical rain forest of Malaysia

Scale is emerging as one of the critical problems in ecology because our perception of most ecological variables and processes depends upon the scale at which the variables are measured. A conclusion obtained at one scale may not be valid at another scale without sufficient knowledge of the scaling effect, which is also a source of misinterpretation for many ecological problems, such as the design of reserves in conservation biology.This paper attempts to study empirically how scaling may affect the spatial patterns of diversity (tree density, richness and Shannon diversity) that we may perceive in tropical forests, using as a test-case a 50 ha forest plot in Malaysia. The effect of scale on measurements of diversity patterns, the occurrence of rare species, the fractal dimension of diversity patterns, the spatial structure and the nearest-neighbour autocorrelation of diversity are addressed. The response of a variable to scale depends on the way it is measured and the way it is distributed in space.We conclude that, in general, the effect of scaling on measures of biological diversity is non-linear; heterogeneity increases with the size of the sampling units, and fine-scale information is lost at a broad scale. Our results should lead to a better understanding of how ecological variables and processes change over scale.     

Wet and dry epoch durations of spatially averaged rain rate,their probability distributions and scaling properties

This article is concerned with the notion of duration of wet and dry epochs in stochastic processes of spatially averaged (instantaneous) rain rate over a given region. Gamma, Lognormal, and Inverse Gaussian parametric families of probability distributions have been considered as candidate models for the distribution of such durations. Goodness of these model's fit to data of dry and wet epoch durations obtained from real time series of spatially averaged rain rate, has been tested with Pearson's -test. The parameters of each of these models have been estimated by maximum likelihood and method of moments, based on TOGA-COARE measurements of tropical rainfall. The hypotheses of independence and identical distribution (i.i.d.) among durations of dry or wet epochs have also been tested using a certain version of the Wald-Wolfowitz test. Finally, the effect of spatial scale on the moments of dry and wet epoch durations has also been investigated, pointing to self-similarity of the underlying random structures over space. The main result of this study is that among the three candidate models, Inverse Gaussian is the one conforming most adequately with all the classical testing criteria implemented here, and also with the newly established scaling behavior of both dry and wet epoch duration processes over space. This is a remarkable finding, considering that the Inverse Gaussian family has recently been also justified from a theoretical viewpoint as a reasonable model for the probability distributions of dry and wet epoch durations.     

天津市郊农田土壤中有机氯农药残留的局地分异

在天津3处典型污灌与非污灌农田各采集了10个表土样品，测定了其中α-HCH，β-HCH，γ-HCH，δ－HCH、p,p'-DDE,p,p'-DDD,p,p'-DDT和p'-DDT等8种有机氯农药含量，籍以研究该地区有机氯农药在地块中的局部分异。结果表明，所研究地块中两类化合物含量均表现出显著的非均一特征。其中污灌土地中的（DDT）以及污灌农田中的HCH含量都具有与灌溉方向密切相关的空间分布特征。这样的规律性空间变异导致他们的空间波动幅度高于其他地块。鉴于上述趋势性和非趋势性空间分异，在开展相关时人有必要在目标地块中采集重复样或混合样。