Search results for "ABILITY"
showing 10 items of 18559 documents
Effects of climate change and land use intensification on regional biological soil crust cover and composition in southern Africa
2022
Biological soil crusts (biocrusts) form a regular and relevant feature in drylands, as they stabilize the soil, fix nutrients, and influence water cycling. However, biocrust forming organisms have been shown to be dramatically vulnerable to climate and land use change occurring in these regions. In this study, we used Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data of biocrust-dominated pixels (NDVIbiocrust) obtained from hyperspectral and LANDSAT-7 data to analyse biocrust development over time and to forecast future NDVIbiocrust development under different climate change and livestock density scenarios in southern Africa. We validated these results by analysing the occurrence and compo…
Modelling nitrous oxide emissions from cropland at the regional scale
2006
Arable soils are a large source of nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions, making up half of the biogenic emissions worldwide. Estimating their source strength requires methods capable of capturing the spatial and temporal variability of N2O emissions, along with the effects of crop management. Here, we applied a process-based model, CERES, with geo-referenced input data on soils, weather, and land use to map N2O emissions from wheat-cropped soils in three agriculturally intensive regions in France. Emissions were mostly controlled by soil type and local climate conditions, and only to a minor extent by the doses of fertilizer nitrogen applied. As a result, the direct emission factors calculated at …
The Synergistic Impacts of Anthropogenic Stressors and COVID-19 on Aquaculture: A Current Global Perspective
2021
13 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables.-- This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License
Fluid storage and migration properties of sheared Neptunian dykes
2019
Abstract Neptunian dykes are widely reported along the Tethyan carbonate platforms and are commonly considered as subsurface baffles or barriers to fluid flow. However, the fluid storage and migration properties of sheared Neptunian dykes are poorly known. For this reason, we investigate the inner structure and fluid flow properties of two Neptunian dykes, which can be characterized by different architectures if involved or not in brittle shearing processes. The dykes strike ca. WNW-ESE and crosscutting the tight Jurassic limestones exposed at Maranfusa Mt., NW Sicily, Italy. The unsheared and sheared Neptunian dykes are almost sub-vertical and at high-angle with respect to the horizontal p…
Climate change policies and agendas: facing implementation challenges and guiding responses
2020
Climate policies are essential to mitigate climate change and to develop successful adaptation processes. However, there is a paucity of international studies that analyse the status of climate change policies. This paper reports on research undertaken in a sample of 13 highly diverse countries, in regards to their geography, socioeconomic development, vulnerability elements, adaptation, and climate-risks. The results draw attention to the global spread and standardisation of climate change policies, namely through the adoption of comprehensive National Adaptation Plans/Strategies (NAPs/NASs) that include mitigation measures and evaluation mechanisms. Although NAPs tend to take into account…
A Participatory Agrobiodiversity Conservation Approach in the Oases: Community Actions for the Promotion of Sustainable Development in Fragile Areas
2021
Rural development policies today include significant directions towards ecological transition and sustainability. Biodiversity plays a fundamental role, especially in fragile environments. The North African oases, for example, are socio-ecological structures with delicate balances in terms of natural resources, where the activation of participatory conservation approaches appears today to be very useful, aiming at long-lasting results. This type of approach was applied in the oasis of El Hamma, in Tunisia. The socio-ecological analysis was carried out through semi-structured interviews with different stakeholders of the oasis. The results were used to activate focus groups and to identify, …
A review of mental health and wellbeing under climate change in small island developing states (SIDS)
2021
AbstractSmall island developing states (SIDS) are often at the forefront of climate change impacts, including those related to health, but information on mental health and wellbeing is typically underreported. To help address this research lacuna, this paper reviews research about mental health and wellbeing under climate change in SIDS. Due to major differences in the literature’s methodologies, results, and analyses, the method is an overview and qualitative evidence synthesis of peer-reviewed publications. The findings show that mental health and wellbeing in the context of climate change have yet to feature prominently and systematically in research covering SIDS. It seems likely that m…
Potential-vorticity dynamics of troughs and ridges within Rossby wave packets during a 40-year reanalysis period
2020
Rossby wave packets (RWPs) are fundamental to midlatitude dynamics and govern weather systems from their individual life cycles to their climatological distributions. Renewed interest in RWPs as precursors to high-impact weather events and in the context of atmospheric predictability motivates this study to revisit the dynamics of RWPs. A quantitative potential vorticity (PV) framework is employed. Based on the well established PV-thinking of midlatitude dynamics, the processes governing RWP amplitude evolution comprise group propagation of Rossby waves, baroclinic interaction, the impact of upper-tropospheric divergent flow, and direct diabatic PV modification by nonconservative processes.…
Modified climate with long term memory in tree ring proxies
2015
ABSTRACT : A contribution to the PAGES Asia2k Working Group. ABSTRACT: Long term memory (LTM) scaling behavior in worldwide tree ring proxies and subsequent climate reconstructions is analyzed for and compared with the memory structure inherent to instrumental temperature and precipitation data. Detrended fluctuation analysis is employed to detect LTM and its scaling exponent a is used to evaluate LTM. The results show that temperature and precipitation reconstructions based on ring width measurements (mean \alpha =0.8) contain more memory than records based on maximum latewood density (mean \alpha =0.7). Both exceed the memory inherent to regional instrumental data (\alpha =0.6 for tempera…
2016
The spatial context is criticalwhen assessing present-day climate anomalies, attributing them to potential forcings and making statements regarding their frequency and severity in a long-term perspective. Recent international initiatives have expanded the number of high-quality proxy-records and developed new statistical reconstruction methods. These advances allow more rigorous regional past temperature reconstructions and, in turn, the possibility of evaluating climate models on policy-relevant, spatiotemporal scales. Here we provide a new proxy-based, annually-resolved, spatial reconstruction of the European summer (June-August) temperature fields back to 755 CE based on Bayesian hierarc…