Search results for "ECOSYSTEM"
showing 10 items of 1752 documents
When Climate Turns Nasty, What Are Recent and Future Implications? Ecological and Human Health Review of Climate Change Impacts
2020
Purpose of Review: The impacts of climate change on biodiversity in the last three decades have increasingly assumed from significant to threatening proportions and this causes major global concerns. This study aims at examining the recent and future impacts of global climate change on both ecological resources and human well-being. This review study is based on the general concept of ecological resilience: that coping with climate change stresses and disturbances depends on social resilience, political and environmental strategies accessible in a community. The study assessed over 300 peer-reviewed publications, both articles and books, which linked climate change impacts on ecosystems to …
Thermal sensation and cell adaptability
2013
Whole person adaptive comfort is discussed with reference to recent findings in molecular scale systems biology. The observations are upscaled to hypotheses relating to less traditional interpretations of thermal processes, which have new implications for indoor climate management and design. Arguments are presented for a revision of current focus, model and paradigm. The issue is seen as a problem of integrating theoretical development, conceptual modeling and as an investigation of the extent to which environments and acclimatization can be used to achieve individual fitness and health, not only at the subjective comfort level, as hitherto promoted. It is argued that there are many questi…
Environmentally-conditioned human rights: a good idea?
2021
The emergence of the rights of nature is a clear response to the current environmental crisis. But such trend is not to walk alone: it is to be espoused to the many still remaining human rights issues, otherwise the power and credibility of both are at danger. This chapter focuses on one of the many possible points of encounter between the rights of nature and human rights. It explores how they may be combined within biocultural rights—the basket of rights of indigenous peoples and local communities necessary to maintain their role as ecosystem stewards—and tries to understand what the consequences of combining nature and human interests as their foundations may be. In particula…
Response of the PCB-contaminated soil bacterial community to applied bioremediation treatments
2011
For full field implementation of the bioremediation as a strategy for cleaning PCB-contaminated soils, the impact of the applied treatment on the microbial community needs to be clarified. An ideal bioremediation should have positive effects on PCB-removal but should pose no treats to the health of the soil ecosystem. Microbes, playing an essential role in maintenance of the soil ecosystem, are the first indicators of a negative impact of soil manipulation to ecosystem. A small-scale bioremediation experiment was conducted in order to get insight into behavior of the microbial community during bioremediation of PCB-contaminated soil, targeting both functional PCB-degrading community (by bph…
Large Blooms of
2018
ABSTRACT Biological soil crusts (biocrusts) account for a substantial portion of primary production in dryland ecosystems. They successionally mature to deliver a suite of ecosystem services, such as carbon sequestration, water retention and nutrient cycling, and climate regulation. Biocrust assemblages are extremely well adapted to survive desiccation and to rapidly take advantage of the periodic precipitation events typical of arid ecosystems. Here we focus on the wetting response of incipient cyanobacterial crusts as they mature from “light” to “dark.” We sampled a cyanobacterial biocrust chronosequence before (dry) and temporally following a controlled wetting event and used high-throug…
Amino polyphosphonates - chemical features and practical uses, environmental durability and biodegradation
2012
Growing concerns about the quality of the environment led to the introduction of complex system of safety assessment of synthetically manufactured and commonly applied chemicals. Sometimes, however, our knowledge of consequences that result from the usage of these substances, appears far later, than at the beginning of their application. Such situation is observed in the case of aminopolyphosphonates being an important subgroup of organophosphorus compounds. The increasing industrial and household applications, led to introduce thousand tons of polyphosphonates every year into the environment. These substances are difficult to determine in environmental samples because of lack of appropriat…
Bacteriophage richness reduces bacterial niche overlap in experimental microcosms
2015
Antagonistic interactions such as competition and predation shape the structure and dynamics of ecological communities. Their combined effects can affect the species richness within a particular trophic level. Despite theory linking the complementarity of interactions across trophic levels and ecosystem functioning, there is a shortage of empirical tests of such predictions. We present an experimental investigation of these combined effects within a bacteria-phage interaction network. We measured the biomass yield of combinations of bacterial strains under increasing levels of bacteriophage richness. Our results show an increasing impact of phage on bacteria with increasing phage diversity.…
Baltic Sea in Estonian and Finnish media : discussed topics and stakeholders
2016
In this paper the stakeholders and most discussed topics of Baltic Sea in the media are examined. Baltic Sea is a fragile ecosystem that provides variety of services to the locals. Not only the locals hold the stake, but also industries and governments. This paper aims to present the complexity of stakeholder network and contradicting interests. Altogether 104 newspaper articles from Estonian and Finnish media on Baltic Sea were used as the data source and the concerning topics, themes and stakeholders were surveyed. The qualitative data was inserted to the textual analysis software QDA Miner 4 Lite. Three main topics were named according to the concept of three pillars of sustainability- e…
Complementary methods assessing short and long-term prey of a marine top predator ‒ Application to the grey seal-fishery conflict in the Baltic Sea.
2019
The growing grey seal (Halichoerus grypus) population in the Baltic Sea has created conflicts with local fisheries, comparable to similar emerging problems worldwide. Adequate information on the foraging habits is a requirement for responsible management of the seal population. We investigated the applicability of available dietary assessment methods by comparing morphological analysis and DNA metabarcoding of gut contents (short-term diet; n = 129/125 seals, respectively), and tissue chemical markers i.e. fatty acid (FA) profiles of blubber and stable isotopes (SIs) of liver and muscle (mid- or long-term diet; n = 108 seals for the FA and SI markers). The methods provided complementary inf…
Baseline port surveys for invasive marine species in the Northeastern Baltic
2006
Marine ecosystems around the world are being transformed and degraded by non-indigenous species, which affect the structure and function of the ecosystem, causing major ecological and economic implications. Ships have been recognized as a major vector for the introduction of non-indigenous harmful organisms, carrying them in ballast water tanks and sediments. Activities to prevent and mitigate the impact of invasive alien species have to be based on cooperation. Financed by Phare Cross Border Co-operation Programme in the Baltic Sea Region (2005–2006) Latvia together with Estonia will focus on baseline port surveys for non-indigenous species in the north-eastern part of the Baltic Sea.