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"land‐use change"
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Investigating the Effects of Climate and Land Use Changes on Rawal Dam Reservoir Operations and Hydrological Behavior
In order to assess the effects of climate change and land use change on Rawal Dam, a major supply of water for Rawalpindi and Islamabad, this study uses hydrological modeling at the watershed scale. The HEC-HMS model was used to simulate the hydrological response in the Rawal Dam catchment to historical precipitation. The calibrated model was then used to determine how changes in land use and climate had an impact on reservoir inflows. The model divided the Rawal Dam watershed into six sub-basins, each with unique features, and covered the entire reservoir’s catchment area using data from three climatic stations (Murree, Islamabad Zero Point and Rawal Dam). For the time spans of 2003–2005 and 2006–2007, the model was calibrated and verified, respectively. An excellent fit between the observed and predicted flows was provided by the model. The GCM (MPI-ESM1-2-HR) produced estimates of temperature and precipitation under two Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP2 and SSP5) after statistical downscaling with the CMhyd model. To evaluate potential effects of climate change and land use change on Rawal Dam, these projections, along with future circumstances for land use and land cover, were fed to the calibrated model. The analysis was carried out on a seasonal basis over the baseline period (1990–2015) and over future time horizon (2016–2100), which covers the present century. The findings point to a rise in precipitation for both SSPs, which is anticipated to result in an increase in inflows throughout the year. SSP2 projected a 15% increase in precipitation across the Rawal Dam catchment region until the end of the twenty-first century, while SSP5 forecasted a 17% increase. It was determined that higher flows are to be anticipated in the future. The calibrated model can also be utilized successfully for future hydrological impact assessments on the reservoir, it was discovered.
Journal Article
Disrupted landscapes : state, peasants and the politics of land in postsocialist Romania
\"The fall of the Soviet Union was a transformative event for the national political economies of Eastern Europe, leading not only to new regimes of ownership and development but to dramatic changes in the natural world itself. This painstakingly researched volume focuses on the emblematic case of postsocialist Romania, in which the transition from collectivization to privatization profoundly reshaped the nation's forests, farmlands, and rivers. From bureaucrats abetting illegal deforestation to peasants opposing government agricultural policies, it reveals the social and political mechanisms by which neoliberalism was introduced into the Romanian landscape; 'This is clearly the best study on the environmental history of Romania published to date. It is a paragon of vivid, illustrative, and intimate local history combined with an international outlook'--Joachim Radkau, Universitèat Bielefeld; 'Meticulously researched and beautifully written, Disrupted Landscapes takes a broad view of the transformations taking place in rural Romania in the second part of the 2000s. It presents one of the most finely granulated pictures of the workings of power in rural settings'--Diana Mincyte, The City University of New York-New York City College of Technology\"--Publisher's website.
Book
Ecological traits affect the sensitivity of bees to land‐use pressures in European agricultural landscapes
Bees are a functionally important and economically valuable group, but are threatened by land‐use conversion and intensification. Such pressures are not expected to affect all species identically; rather, they are likely to be mediated by the species' ecological traits. Understanding which types of species are most vulnerable under which land uses is an important step towards effective conservation planning. We collated occurrence and abundance data for 257 bee species at 1584 European sites from surveys reported in 30 published papers (70 056 records) and combined them with species‐level ecological trait data. We used mixed‐effects models to assess the importance of land use (land‐use class, agricultural use‐intensity and a remotely‐sensed measure of vegetation), traits and trait × land‐use interactions, in explaining species occurrence and abundance. Species' sensitivity to land use was most strongly influenced by flight season duration and foraging range, but also by niche breadth, reproductive strategy and phenology, with effects that differed among cropland, pastoral and urban habitats. Synthesis and applications. Rather than targeting particular species or settings, conservation actions may be more effective if focused on mitigating situations where species' traits strongly and negatively interact with land‐use pressures. We find evidence that low‐intensity agriculture can maintain relatively diverse bee communities; in more intensive settings, added floral resources may be beneficial, but will require careful placement with respect to foraging ranges of smaller bee species. Protection of semi‐natural habitats is essential, however; in particular, conversion to urban environments could have severe effects on bee diversity and pollination services. Our results highlight the importance of exploring how ecological traits mediate species responses to human impacts, but further research is needed to enhance the predictive ability of such analyses.
Journal Article
Environment, modernization and development in East Asia : perspectives from environmental history
\"Environment, Modernization and Development in East Asia critically examines modernization's long-term environmental history. Using local-level studies and the idea of co-production, it suggests new frameworks for understanding as inter-related processes environmental, social, and economic change across China and Japan. Through its focus on inter-related material and intellectual aspects of environmental change it also opens up new points of comparison and exchange within East Asia and among East Asia, Europe, and North America. Environment, Modernization and Development in East Asia adds significant new perspectives to Chinese, Japanese, and global environmental history, as well as world history and development studies\"--From publisher's website.
Book
Local climatic changes affect biodiversity responses to land use
Aim
Climate and land‐use change, the greatest pressures on biodiversity, can directly influence each other. One key case is the impact land‐use change has on local climatic conditions: human‐altered areas are often warmer and drier than natural habitats. This can have multiple impacts on biodiversity and is a rapidly developing field of research. Here, we summarize the current state of understanding on the impact that local climatic changes have on biodiversity responses to land‐use change, in particular looking at whether human‐altered land uses favour species with certain climatic niches.
Location
Global.
Methods
We review studies that have identified links between species' climatic niches and the habitats/land‐use types they inhabit. We also critically discuss the methods used to explore this topic (such as the estimation of fundamental vs. realized climatic niches), identify key knowledge gaps by reference to related macroecological literature and make suggestions for further work.
Results
Assemblages of vertebrate and invertebrate species in numerous human‐dominated land uses have been found to have higher proportions of individuals affiliated with higher temperatures and lower precipitation levels than assemblages within natural habitats. However, uncertainty surrounds the mechanisms that underlie these observed differences between communities across land‐use types, and it remains unexplored as to whether these trends differ geographically or taxonomically.
Main conclusion
Shifts are being observed within human‐altered land uses to communities with, on average, warmer and drier climatic niches. A better understanding of the effects of local climatic changes associated with land‐use change will enhance our ability to predict future impacts on biodiversity, identify the species most at risk from interactions between climate and land‐use change and set up suitable management and conservation plans.
Journal Article
Impacts of global change on species distributions: obstacles and solutions to integrate climate and land use
Aim: The impact of multiple Stressors on biodiversity is one of the most pressing questions in ecology and biodiversity conservation. Here we critically assess how often and efficiently two main drivers of global change have been simultaneously integrated into research, with the aim of providing practical solutions for better integration in the future. We focus on the integration of climate change (CC) and land-use change (LUC) when studying changes in species distributions. Location: Global. Methods: We analysed the peer-reviewed literature on the effects of CC and LUC on observed changes in species distributions, i.e. including species range and abundance, between 2000 and 2014. Results: Studies integrating CC and LUC remain extremely scarce, which hampers our ability to develop appropriate conservation strategies. The lack of CC-LUC integration is likely to be a result of insufficient recognition of the co-occurrence of CC and LUC at all scales, covariation and interactions between CC and LUC, as well as correlations between species thermal and habitat requirements. Practical guidelines for the study of these interactive effects include considering multiple drivers and processes when designing studies, using available long-term datasets on multiple drivers, revisiting singledriver studies with additional drivers or conducting comparative studies and meta-analyses. Combining various methodological approaches, including time lags and adaptation processes, represent further avenues to improve global change science. Main conclusions: Despite repeated claims for a better integration of multiple drivers, the effects of CC and LUC on species distributions and abundances have been mostly studied in isolation, which calls for a shift of standards towards more integrative global change science. The guidelines proposed here will encourage study designs that account for multiple drivers and improve our understanding of synergies or antagonisms among drivers.
Journal Article
Functional losses in ground spider communities due to habitat structure degradation under tropical land-use change
Deforestation and land-use change in tropical regions result in habitat loss and extinction of species that are unable to adapt to the conditions in agricultural landscapes. If the associated loss of functional diversity is not compensated by species colonizing the converted habitats, extinctions might be followed by a reduction or loss of ecosystem functions including biological control. To date, little is known about how land-use change in the tropics alters the functional diversity of invertebrate predators and which key environmental factors may mitigate the decline in functional diversity and predation in litter and soil communities. We applied litter sieving and heat extraction to study ground spider communities and assessed structural characteristics of vegetation and parameters of litter in rainforest and agricultural land-use systems (jungle rubber, rubber, and oil palm monocultures) in a Southeast Asian hotspot of rainforest conversion: Sumatra, Indonesia. We found that (1) spider density, species richness, functional diversity, and community predation (energy flux to spiders) were reduced by 57–98% from rainforest to oil palm monoculture; (2) jungle rubber and rubber monoculture sustained relatively high diversity and predation in ground spiders, but small cryptic spider species strongly declined; (3) high species turnover compensated losses of some functional trait combinations, but did not compensate for the overall loss of functional diversity and predation per unit area; (4) spider diversity was related to habitat structure such as amount of litter, understory density, and understory height, while spider predation was better explained by plant diversity. Management practices that increase habitat-structural complexity and plant diversity such as mulching, reduced weeding, and intercropping monocultures with other plants may contribute to maintaining functional diversity of and predation services provided by ground invertebrate communities in plantations.
Journal Article
Investigating the consequences of climate change under different land‐use regimes: a novel experimental infrastructure
Climate change and land‐use change are considered as the most important threats to ecosystems. Both factors can be expected to have interacting influences on ecosystem functions directly and indirectly via changes in biodiversity. Knowledge about these interactions is limited due to a lack of experiments which investigate climate change effects under different land‐use scenarios. Among the processes involved in ecosystem responses to global change, in particular, those occurring in soils or related to biotic interactions and microevolution were underinvestigated in previous experiments. Examinations of these relationships require spatial and temporal scales which go beyond those realized in the majority of ecological field experiments. We introduce a new research facility, the Global Change Experimental Facility (GCEF), which was designed to investigate the consequences of a future climate scenario for ecosystem functioning in different land‐use types on large field plots (400 m2). Climate manipulation is based on projections for the period of 2070–2100 with an increased temperature and a changed precipitation pattern consisting of reduced precipitation in summer and increased precipitation in spring and autumn. We subject five different land‐use types (two farming systems, three grasslands), differing in land‐use intensity, to ambient and future climatic conditions. The use of automated roofs and side panels to passively increase night temperatures results in an average increase in daily mean temperature by 0.55°C accompanied by a stronger increase in minimum temperatures (up to 1.14°C in average) with longer frost‐free periods and an increase in growing degree days by 5.2%. The combined use of mobile roofs and irrigation systems allows the reduction (in summer by ~20%) and increase in rainfall (in spring and autumn by ~10%) according to future scenarios superimposed on the ambient variation in precipitation. The large plot size and the technical configuration allow the establishment of realistic land‐use scenarios and long‐term observations of responses of ecosystem functions and community dynamics on relevant temporal and spatial scales. Thus, the GCEF provides a well‐suited platform for the interdisciplinary research on the consequences of climate change under different land‐use scenarios.
Journal Article
Projecting Global Biodiversity Indicators under Future Development Scenarios
To address the ongoing global biodiversity crisis, governments have set strategic objectives and have adopted indicators to monitor progress toward their achievement. Projecting the likely impacts on biodiversity of different policy decisions allows decision makers to understand if and how these targets can be met. We projected trends in two widely used indicators of population abundance Geometric Mean Abundance, equivalent to the Living Planet Index and extinction risk (the Red List Index) under different climate and land‐use change scenarios. Testing these on terrestrial carnivore and ungulate species, we found that both indicators decline steadily, and by 2050, under a Business‐as‐usual (BAU) scenario, geometric mean population abundance declines by 18–35% while extinction risk increases for 8–23% of the species, depending on assumptions about species responses to climate change. BAU will therefore fail Convention on Biological Diversity target 12 of improving the conservation status of known threatened species. An alternative sustainable development scenario reduces both extinction risk and population losses compared with BAU and could lead to population increases. Our approach to model species responses to global changes brings the focus of scenarios directly to the species level, thus taking into account an additional dimension of biodiversity and paving the way for including stronger ecological foundations into future biodiversity scenario assessments.
Journal Article