Growing conditions for crops such as coffee and wine grapes are shifting to track climate change. Research on these crop responses has focused principally on impacts to food production impacts, but ...evidence is emerging that they may have serious environmental consequences as well. Recent research has documented potential environmental impacts of shifting cropping patterns, including impacts on water, wildlife, pollinator interaction, carbon storage and nature conservation, on national to global scales. Multiple crops will be moving in response to shifting climatic suitability, and the cumulative environmental effects of these multi-crop shifts at global scales is not known. Here we model for the first time multiple major global commodity crop suitability changes due to climate change, to estimate the impacts of new crop suitability on water, biodiversity and carbon storage. Areas that become newly suitable for one or more crops are Climate-driven Agricultural Frontiers. These frontiers cover an area equivalent to over 30% of the current agricultural land on the planet and have major potential impacts on biodiversity in tropical mountains, on water resources downstream and on carbon storage in high latitude lands. Frontier soils contain up to 177 Gt of C, which might be subject to release, which is the equivalent of over a century of current United States CO2 emissions. Watersheds serving over 1.8 billion people would be impacted by the cultivation of the climate-driven frontiers. Frontiers intersect 19 global biodiversity hotspots and the habitat of 20% of all global restricted range birds. Sound planning and management of climate-driven agricultural frontiers can therefore help reduce globally significant impacts on people, ecosystems and the climate system.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The importance of ecosystems for supporting human well-being is increasingly recognized by both the conservation and development sectors. Our ability to conserve ecosystems that people rely on is ...often limited by a lack of spatially explicit data on the location and distribution of ecosystem services (ES), the benefits provided by nature to people. Thus there is a need to map ES to guide conservation investments, to ensure these co-benefits are maintained. To target conservation investments most effectively, ES assessments must be rigorous enough to support conservation planning, rapid enough to respond to decision-making timelines, and often must rely on existing data. We developed a framework for rapid spatial assessment of ES that relies on expert and stakeholder consultation, available data, and spatial analyses in order to rapidly identify sites providing multiple benefits. We applied the framework in Madagascar, a country with globally significant biodiversity and a high level of human dependence on ecosystems. Our objective was to identify the ES co-benefits of biodiversity priority areas in order to guide the investment strategy of a global conservation fund. We assessed key provisioning (fisheries, hunting and non-timber forest products, and water for domestic use, agriculture, and hydropower), regulating (climate mitigation, flood risk reduction and coastal protection), and cultural (nature tourism) ES. We also conducted multi-criteria analyses to identify sites providing multiple benefits. While our approach has limitations, including the reliance on proximity-based indicators for several ES, the results were useful for targeting conservation investments by the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF). Because our approach relies on available data, standardized methods for linking ES provision to ES use, and expert validation, it has the potential to quickly guide conservation planning and investment decisions in other data-poor regions.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The Guinean forests of West Africa have been identified as a global biodiversity hotspot due to its exceptional concentrations of endemic species and exceptional loss of habitats. The majority of ...what remains of the Guinean forests lies within Liberia, a country whose share of total wealth is nearly equally distributed into human and natural capital. The Liberian government seeks a more inclusive development agenda that forges a path for improved human capital while sustainably managing its natural capital wealth, which requires consistent data on land cover change and forest disturbance over time. To address this need, Landsat data were used to map and quantify land cover change and forest fragmentation in Liberia between 2000 and 2018. In addition, LiDAR data from the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) mission were applied to assess the integrity of forest remnants. Between 2000 and 2018, only 1% of all forest cover classes (i.e., dense/primary, open/secondary and sparse/degraded) were converted into non-forest classes, with the most observed change being between these three forest classes. During the study period, 27% of the dense/primary forest class transitioned to either the open/secondary or sparse/degraded canopy classes through consistent fragmentation along the edges of the last large remaining blocks of dense/primary forest located in the north-west and south-east of Liberia and more than 14% of dense/primary forest areas identified in previous studies as “essential natural capital” for either biodiversity, forest carbon storage or provision of freshwater ecosystem services were degraded. The 2018 GEDI-based measurements show that the overall average height of dense/primary forest decreases by 24% and 48%, and canopy closure decreases by 33% and 59%, when transitioned to the open/secondary and sparse/degraded classes, respectively. The information derived from this analysis will be critical for informing the development of new policies and actions, leading to more sustainable forest management in Liberia.
•We present an innovative combination of field measurements of ecosystem services and a land change model to evaluatePayments for hydrologic services (PHS) program policies.•Current PHS policies ...perform similarly to a targeting strategy based on prioritizing areas with highest groundwater recharge potential.•Targeting can result in lower ecosystem services values when deforestation risk is prioritized.•Differentiating between forest cover age classes is important, since they can exhibit wide differences in ecosystem services and deforestation risks.
Payments for hydrologic services (PHS) programs focus on protecting upstream forests that provide a range of ecosystem services. The goal of this work is to inform the design of PHS policies by modeling ecosystem services outcomes in watersheds in Veracruz, Mexico. An integrated, spatially explicit model for evaluating the performance of the existing PHS program is developed by combining results of field measurements of ecosystem services associated with forested and converted land covers with a land change model that simulates land cover patterns in response to PHS program coverage and targeting strategies. The results indicate that the current PHS targeting strategy performs slightly better than a proposed benefit targeting strategy based on prioritizing areas with highest groundwater recharge potential. We also find that targeting based on deforestation risk results in unintended consequences because land cover classes with poorer ecosystem service values are selected. The latter results suggest that differentiating between forest cover age classes is important since forests in our study area exhibit substantial differences in ecosystem service indicators and in the land cover transition rates across age classes. Overall, our findings caution against the assumption that implementing detailed spatial benefit targeting strategies will necessarily increase the additionality of ecosystem services in conservation programs.
Decision-makers need readily accessible tools to understand the potential impacts of alternative policies on forest cover and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and to develop effective policies to meet ...national and international targets for biodiversity conservation, sustainable development and climate change mitigation. Land change modelling can support policy decisions by demonstrating potential impacts of policies on future deforestation and GHG emissions. We modelled land change to explore the potential impacts of expert-informed scenarios on deforestation and GHG emissions, specifically CO2 emissions, in the Ankeniheny–Zahamena Corridor in eastern Madagascar. We considered four scenarios: business as usual; effective conservation of protected areas; investment in infrastructure; and agricultural intensification. Our results highlight that effective forest conservation could deliver substantial emissions reductions, while infrastructure development will likely cause forest loss in new areas. Agricultural intensification could prevent additional forest loss if it reduced the need to clear more land while improving food security. Our study demonstrates how available land change modelling tools and scenario analyses can inform land-use policies, helping countries reconcile economic development with forest conservation and climate change mitigation commitments.
•Protected areas are important for both biodiversity and ecosystem services (ES).•These benefits are even more critical in tropical developing countries.•We assessed representation of biodiversity, ...forests, and ES in five countries.•We found PAs represent biodiversity and forests relatively well, but less so for ES.•Other mechanisms might be necessary to maintain flows of ES in these countries.
In late 2020, governments will set the next decade of conservation targets under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. Setting new targets requires understanding how well national protected area (PA) networks are spatially representing important areas for biodiversity and ecosystem services. We analyzed the representation of biodiversity priority areas (BPAs), forests, forest carbon stocks, non-timber forest products (NTFPs), and freshwater ecosystem services (FES) within terrestrial PA systems in Cambodia, Guyana, Liberia, Madagascar, and Suriname in 2003 and 2017. Four of the countries (all except Suriname) expanded their terrestrial PA networks during the study period. In all five countries, we found that PAs represented BPAs, forests, and forest carbon stocks relatively well, based on their size. PAs did not represent NTFPs and FES particularly well, except in Cambodia where FES were well represented. Countries that expanded PA networks during the study period also increased representation of forests, BPAs, and ES; in Cambodia and Madagascar these increases were substantial. Representation could be improved across all five countries, however, indicating that additional efforts are needed to safeguard biodiversity and ecosystem benefits to people in these countries.
Summary
Decision-makers need readily accessible tools to understand the potential impacts of alternative policies on forest cover and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and to develop effective policies ...to meet national and international targets for biodiversity conservation, sustainable development and climate change mitigation. Land change modelling can support policy decisions by demonstrating potential impacts of policies on future deforestation and GHG emissions. We modelled land change to explore the potential impacts of expert-informed scenarios on deforestation and GHG emissions, specifically CO
2
emissions, in the Ankeniheny–Zahamena Corridor in eastern Madagascar. We considered four scenarios: business as usual; effective conservation of protected areas; investment in infrastructure; and agricultural intensification. Our results highlight that effective forest conservation could deliver substantial emissions reductions, while infrastructure development will likely cause forest loss in new areas. Agricultural intensification could prevent additional forest loss if it reduced the need to clear more land while improving food security. Our study demonstrates how available land change modelling tools and scenario analyses can inform land-use policies, helping countries reconcile economic development with forest conservation and climate change mitigation commitments.
Influential psychological theories hypothesize that people consume alcohol in response to the experience of both negative and positive emotions. Despite two decades of daily diary and ecological ...momentary assessment research, it remains unclear whether people consume more alcohol on days they experience higher negative and positive affects in everyday life. In this preregistered meta-analysis, we synthesized the evidence for these daily associations between affect and alcohol use. We included individual participant data from 69 studies (N = 12,394), which used daily and momentary surveys to assess the affect and the number of alcoholic drinks consumed. Results indicate that people are not more likely to drink on days they experience high negative affect but are more likely to drink and drink heavily on days high in positive affect. People self-reporting a motivational tendency to drink-to-cope and drink-to-enhance consumed more alcohol but not on days they experienced higher negative and positive affects. Results were robust across different operationalizations of affect, study designs, study populations, and individual characteristics. These findings challenge the long-held belief that people drink more alcohol following increase in negative affect. Integrating these findings under different theoretical models and limitations of this field of research, we collectively propose an agenda for future research to explore open questions surrounding affect and alcohol use.
Public Significance Statement
This study meta-analyzed individual participant data from 12,394 individuals across 69 studies in which participants reported their emotional state and alcohol use for multiple days. Contrary to theoretical models of alcohol use, the findings indicated that people are not more likely to drink and do not consume more alcohol on days that they report higher negative affect but are more likely to drink on days that they report higher positive affect.
Tuberculosis is a respiratory disease that is treatable with antibiotics. An increasing prevalence of resistance means that to ensure a good treatment outcome it is desirable to test the ...susceptibility of each infection to different antibiotics. Conventionally, this is done by culturing a clinical sample and then exposing aliquots to a panel of antibiotics, each being present at a pre-determined concentration, thereby determining if the sample isresistant or susceptible to each sample. The minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of a drug is the lowestconcentration that inhibits growth and is a more useful quantity but requires each sample to be tested at a range ofconcentrations for each drug. Using 96-well broth micro dilution plates with each well containing a lyophilised pre-determined amount of an antibiotic is a convenient and cost-effective way to measure the MICs of several drugs at once for a clinical sample. Although accurate, this is still an expensive and slow process that requires highly-skilled and experienced laboratory scientists. Here we show that, through the BashTheBug project hosted on the Zooniverse citizen science platform, a crowd of volunteers can reproducibly and accurately determine the MICs for 13 drugs and that simply taking the median or mode of 11-17 independent classifications is sufficient. There is therefore a potential role for crowds to support (but not supplant) the role of experts in antibiotic susceptibility testing.
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