Search results for "S.E.M."
showing 10 items of 5492 documents
Assessing environmental conditions of Antarctic footpaths to support management decisions.
2016
Thousands of tourists visit certain Antarctic sites each year, generating a wide variety of environmental impacts. Scientific knowledge of human activities and their impacts can help in the effective design of management measures and impact mitigation. We present a case study from Barrientos Island in which a management measure was originally put in place with the goal of minimizing environmental impacts but resulted in new undesired impacts. Two alternative footpaths used by tourist groups were compared. Both affected extensive moss carpets that cover the middle part of the island and that are very vulnerable to trampling. The first path has been used by tourists and scientists since over …
Effects of changing climate on European stream invertebrate communities : A long-term data analysis
2018
Long-term observations on riverine benthic invertebrate communities enable assessments of the potential impacts of global change on stream ecosystems. Besides increasing average temperatures, many studies predict greater temperature extremes and intense precipitation events as a consequence of climate change. In this study we examined long-term observation data (10-32years) of 26 streams and rivers from four ecoregions in the European Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) network, to investigate invertebrate community responses to changing climatic conditions. We used functional trait and multi-taxonomic analyses and combined examinations of general long-term changes in communities with deta…
Optimal conservation resource allocation under variable economic and ecological time discounting rates in boreal forest
2016
Resource allocation to multiple alternative conservation actions is a complex task. A common trade-off occurs between protection of smaller, expensive, high-quality areas versus larger, cheaper, partially degraded areas. We investigate optimal allocation into three actions in boreal forest: current standard forest management rules, setting aside of mature stands, or setting aside of clear-cuts. We first estimated how habitat availability for focal indicator species and economic returns from timber harvesting develop through time as a function of forest type and action chosen. We then developed an optimal resource allocation by accounting for budget size and habitat availability of indicator…
A multidisciplinary analytical framework to delineate spawning areas and quantify larval dispersal in coastal fish
2019
International audience; Assessing larval dispersal is essential to understand the structure and dynamics of marine populations. However, knowledge about early-life dispersal is sparse, and so is our understanding of the spawning process, perhaps the most obscure component of biphasic life cycles. Indeed, the poorly known species-specific spawning modality and early-life traits, along with the high spatio-temporal variability of the oceanic circulation experienced during larval drift, hamper our ability to properly appraise the realized connectivity of coastal fishes. Here, we propose an analytical framework which combines Lagrangian modeling, network theory, otolith analyses and biogeograph…
Cost-efficiency assessments of marine monitoring methods lack rigor—a systematic mapping of literature and an end-user view on optimal cost-efficienc…
2021
Global deterioration of marine ecosystems, together with increasing pressure to use them, has created a demand for new, more efficient and cost-efficient monitoring tools that enable assessing changes in the status of marine ecosystems. However, demonstrating the cost-efficiency of a monitoring method is not straightforward as there are no generally applicable guidelines. Our study provides a systematic literature mapping of methods and criteria that have been proposed or used since the year 2000 to evaluate the cost-efficiency of marine monitoring methods. We aimed to investigate these methods but discovered that examples of actual cost-efficiency assessments in literature were rare, contr…
The Importance of Phytoplankton Biomolecule Availability for Secondary Production
2017
The growth and reproduction of animals is affected by their access to resources. In aquatic ecosystems, the availability of essential biomolecules for filter-feeding zooplankton depends greatly on phytoplankton. Here, we analyzed the biochemical composition, i.e., the fatty acid, sterol and amino acid profiles and concentrations as well as protein, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus content of 17 phytoplankton monocultures representing the seven most abundant phytoplankton classes in boreal and sub-arctic lakes. To examine how the differences in the biochemical composition between phytoplankton classes affect their nutritional quality for consumers, we assessed the performance of Daphnia, on …
Decision support systems (DSS) for wastewater treatment plants - A review of the state of the art.
2019
The use of decision support systems (DSS) allows integrating all the issues related with sustainable development in view of providing a useful support to solve multi-scenario problems. In this work an extensive review on the DSSs applied to wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) is presented. The main aim of the work is to provide an updated compendium on DSSs in view of supporting researchers and engineers on the selection of the most suitable method to address their management/operation/design problems. Results showed that DSSs were mostly used as a comprehensive tool that is capable of integrating several data and a multi-criteria perspective in order to provide more reliable results. Only …
The Lower Danube River-Danube Delta-North West Black Sea: A pivotal area of major interest for the past, present and future of its fish fauna--A shor…
2015
The complex Danube-Black Sea geoecosystem, created by a unique combination of integrated biotopes and biocoenoses related forces and counter-forces in time and space, forms a rich "ichthyosystem". The equilibrium among the fish species captured in the Danube Delta reveals its structural and functional roles in the connectivity of the Danube and Black Sea. The key role of the delta is evidenced by the fact that 57.26% of the Lower Danube-Danube Delta-North West Black Sea fish species use two or three of the subsystems in terms of habitats. Therefore, this convergence area can be considered to be a dynamic and rich "ichthyosystem", with three subsystems. All three evolved interdependently, wh…
Spatio‐temporal patterns of tree growth as related to carbon isotope fractionation in European forests under changing climate
2019
Aim The aim was to decipher Europe‐wide spatio‐temporal patterns of forest growth dynamics and their associations with carbon isotope fractionation processes inferred from tree rings as modulated by climate warming. Location Europe and North Africa (30‒70° N, 10° W‒35° E). Time period 1901‒2003. Major taxa studied Temperate and Euro‐Siberian trees. Methods We characterize changes in the relationship between tree growth and carbon isotope fractionation over the 20th century using a European network consisting of 20 site chronologies. Using indexed tree‐ring widths (TRWi), we assess shifts in the temporal coherence of radial growth across sites (synchrony) for five forest ecosystems (Atlantic…
Mitigating forest biodiversity and ecosystem service losses in the era of bio-based economy
2018
Abstract Forests play a crucial role in the transition towards a bioeconomy by providing biomass to substitute for fossil-based materials and energy. However, a policy-policy conflict exists between the desire to increase the utilization of bio based renewable resources and the desire to protect and conserve biodiversity. Increasing forest harvest levels to meet the needs of the bioeconomy may conflict with biodiversity protection and ecosystem services provided by forests. Through an optimization framework, we examined trade-offs between increasing the extraction of timber resources, and the impacts on biodiversity and non-wood ecosystem services, and investigated possibilities to reconcil…