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Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Our future in the Anthropocene biosphere
    (Dordrecht : Springer Netherlands, 2021) Folke, Carl; Polasky, Stephen; Rockström, Johan; Galaz, Victor; Westley, Frances; Lamont, Michèle; Scheffer, Marten; Österblom, Henrik; Carpenter, Stephen R.; Chapin, F. Stuart; Seto, Karen C.; Weber, Elke U.; Crona, Beatrice I.; Daily, Gretchen C.; Dasgupta, Partha; Gaffney, Owen; Gordon, Line J.; Hoff, Holger; Levin, Simon A.; Lubchenco, Jane; Steffen, Will; Walker, Brian H.
    The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed an interconnected and tightly coupled globalized world in rapid change. This article sets the scientific stage for understanding and responding to such change for global sustainability and resilient societies. We provide a systemic overview of the current situation where people and nature are dynamically intertwined and embedded in the biosphere, placing shocks and extreme events as part of this dynamic; humanity has become the major force in shaping the future of the Earth system as a whole; and the scale and pace of the human dimension have caused climate change, rapid loss of biodiversity, growing inequalities, and loss of resilience to deal with uncertainty and surprise. Taken together, human actions are challenging the biosphere foundation for a prosperous development of civilizations. The Anthropocene reality—of rising system-wide turbulence—calls for transformative change towards sustainable futures. Emerging technologies, social innovations, broader shifts in cultural repertoires, as well as a diverse portfolio of active stewardship of human actions in support of a resilient biosphere are highlighted as essential parts of such transformations. © 2021, The Author(s).
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    Incorporating Biodiversity into Biogeochemistry Models to Improve Prediction of Ecosystem Services in Temperate Grasslands: Review and Roadmap
    (Basel : MDPI, 2020) Van Oijen, Marcel; Barcza, Zoltán; Confalonieri, Roberto; Korhonen, Panu; Kröel-Dulay, György; Lellei-Kovács, Eszter; Louarn, Gaëtan; Louault, Frédérique; Martin, Raphaël; Moulin, Thibault; Movedi, Ermes; Picon-Cochard, Catherine; Rolinski, Susanne; Viovy, Nicolas; Wirth, Stephen Björn; Bellocchi, Gianni
    Multi-species grasslands are reservoirs of biodiversity and provide multiple ecosystem services, including fodder production and carbon sequestration. The provision of these services depends on the control exerted on the biogeochemistry and plant diversity of the system by the interplay of biotic and abiotic factors, e.g., grazing or mowing intensity. Biogeochemical models incorporate a mechanistic view of the functioning of grasslands and provide a sound basis for studying the underlying processes. However, in these models, the simulation of biogeochemical cycles is generally not coupled to simulation of plant species dynamics, which leads to considerable uncertainty about the quality of predictions. Ecological models, on the other hand, do account for biodiversity with approaches adopted from plant demography, but without linking the dynamics of plant species to the biogeochemical processes occurring at the community level, and this hampers the models’ capacity to assess resilience against abiotic stresses such as drought and nutrient limitation. While setting out the state-of-the-art developments of biogeochemical and ecological modelling, we explore and highlight the role of plant diversity in the regulation of the ecosystem processes underlying the ecosystems services provided by multi-species grasslands. An extensive literature and model survey was carried out with an emphasis on technically advanced models reconciling biogeochemistry and biodiversity, which are readily applicable to managed grasslands in temperate latitudes. We propose a roadmap of promising developments in modelling.
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    Transforming the study of organisms: Phenomic data models and knowledge bases
    (San Francisco, Calif. : Public Library of Science, 2020) Thessen, Anne E.; Walls, Ramona L.; Vogt, Lars; Singer, Jessica; Warren, Robert; Buttigieg, Pier Luigi; Balhoff, James P.; Mungall, Christopher J.; McGuinness, Deborah L.; Stucky, Brian J.; Yoder, Matthew J.; Haendel, Melissa A.
    The rapidly decreasing cost of gene sequencing has resulted in a deluge of genomic data from across the tree of life; however, outside a few model organism databases, genomic data are limited in their scientific impact because they are not accompanied by computable phenomic data. The majority of phenomic data are contained in countless small, heterogeneous phenotypic data sets that are very difficult or impossible to integrate at scale because of variable formats, lack of digitization, and linguistic problems. One powerful solution is to represent phenotypic data using data models with precise, computable semantics, but adoption of semantic standards for representing phenotypic data has been slow, especially in biodiversity and ecology. Some phenotypic and trait data are available in a semantic language from knowledge bases, but these are often not interoperable. In this review, we will compare and contrast existing ontology and data models, focusing on nonhuman phenotypes and traits. We discuss barriers to integration of phenotypic data and make recommendations for developing an operationally useful, semantically interoperable phenotypic data ecosystem.
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    Resolving ecological feedbacks on the ocean carbon sink in Earth system models
    (Göttingen : Copernicus Publ., 2021) Armstrong McKay, David I.; Cornell, Sarah E.; Richardson, Katherine; Rockström, Johan
    The Earth's oceans are one of the largest sinks in the Earth system for anthropogenic CO2 emissions, acting as a negative feedback on climate change. Earth system models project that climate change will lead to a weakening ocean carbon uptake rate as warm water holds less dissolved CO2 and as biological productivity declines. However, most Earth system models do not incorporate the impact of warming on bacterial remineralisation and rely on simplified representations of plankton ecology that do not resolve the potential impact of climate change on ecosystem structure or elemental stoichiometry. Here, we use a recently developed extension of the cGEnIE (carbon-centric Grid Enabled Integrated Earth system model), ecoGEnIE, featuring a trait-based scheme for plankton ecology (ECOGEM), and also incorporate cGEnIE's temperature-dependent remineralisation (TDR) scheme. This enables evaluation of the impact of both ecological dynamics and temperature-dependent remineralisation on particulate organic carbon (POC) export in response to climate change. We find that including TDR increases cumulative POC export relative to default runs due to increased nutrient recycling (+∼1.3 %), whereas ECOGEM decreases cumulative POC export by enabling a shift to smaller plankton classes (−∼0.9 %). However, interactions with carbonate chemistry cause opposite sign responses for the carbon sink in both cases: TDR leads to a smaller sink relative to default runs (−∼1.0 %), whereas ECOGEM leads to a larger sink (+∼0.2 %). Combining TDR and ECOGEM results in a net strengthening of POC export (+∼0.1 %) and a net reduction in carbon sink (−∼0.7 %) relative to default. These results illustrate the degree to which ecological dynamics and biodiversity modulate the strength of the biological pump, and demonstrate that Earth system models need to incorporate ecological complexity in order to resolve non-linear climate–biosphere feedbacks.
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    Challenges in producing policy-relevant global scenarios of biodiversity and ecosystem services
    (Amsterdam : Elsevier, 2020) Rosa, Isabel M.D.; Purvis, Andy; Alkemade, Rob; Chaplin-Kramer, Rebecca; Ferrier, Simon; Guerra, Carlos A.; Hurtt, George; Kim, HyeJin; Leadley, Paul; Martins, Inês S.; Popp, Alexander; Schipper, Aafke M.; van Vuuren, Detlef; Pereira, Henrique M.
    Scenario-based modelling is a powerful tool to describe relationships between plausible trajectories of drivers, possible policy interventions, and impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Model inter-comparisons are key in quantifying uncertainties and identifying avenues for model improvement but have been missing among the global biodiversity and ecosystem services modelling communities. The biodiversity and ecosystem services scenario-based inter-model comparison (BES-SIM) aims to fill this gap. We used global land-use and climate projections to simulate possible future impacts on terrestrial biodiversity and ecosystem services using a variety of models and a range of harmonized metrics. The goal of this paper is to reflect on the steps taken in BES-SIM, identify remaining methodological challenges, and suggest pathways for improvement. We identified five major groups of challenges; the need to: 1) better account for the role of nature in future human development storylines; 2) improve the representation of drivers in the scenarios by increasing the resolution (temporal, spatial and thematic) of land-use as key driver of biodiversity change and including additional relevant drivers; 3) explicitly integrate species- and trait-level biodiversity in ecosystem services models; 4) expand the coverage of the multiple dimensions of biodiversity and ecosystem services; and finally, 5) incorporate time-series or one-off historical data in the calibration and validation of biodiversity and ecosystem services models. Addressing these challenges would allow the development of more integrated global projections of biodiversity and ecosystem services, thereby improving their policy relevance in supporting the interlinked international conservation and sustainable development agendas. © 2019 The Authors
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    Global data on earthworm abundance, biomass, diversity and corresponding environmental properties
    (London : Nature Publ. Group, 2021) Phillips, Helen R. P.; Bach, Elizabeth M.; Bartz, Marie L. C.; Bennett, Joanne M.; Beugnon, Rémy; Briones, Maria J. I.; Brown, George G.; Ferlian, Olga; Gongalsky, Konstantin B.; Guerra, Carlos A.; König-Ries, Birgitta; López-Hernández, Danilo; Loss, Scott R.; Marichal, Raphael; Matula, Radim; Minamiya, Yukio; Moos, Jan Hendrik; Moreno, Gerardo; Morón-Ríos, Alejandro; Motohiro, Hasegawa; Muys, Bart; Krebs, Julia J.; Neirynck, Johan; Norgrove, Lindsey; Novo, Marta; Nuutinen, Visa; Nuzzo, Victoria; Mujeeb Rahman, P.; Pansu, Johan; Paudel, Shishir; Pérès, Guénola; Pérez-Camacho, Lorenzo; Orgiazzi, Alberto; Ponge, Jean-François; Prietzel, Jörg; Rapoport, Irina B.; Rashid, Muhammad Imtiaz; Rebollo, Salvador; Rodríguez, Miguel Á.; Roth, Alexander M.; Rousseau, Guillaume X.; Rozen, Anna; Sayad, Ehsan; Ramirez, Kelly S.; van Schaik, Loes; Scharenbroch, Bryant; Schirrmann, Michael; Schmidt, Olaf; Schröder, Boris; Seeber, Julia; Shashkov, Maxim P.; Singh, Jaswinder; Smith, Sandy M.; Steinwandter, Michael; Russell, David J.; Szlavecz, Katalin; Talavera, José Antonio; Trigo, Dolores; Tsukamoto, Jiro; Uribe-López, Sheila; de Valença, Anne W.; Virto, Iñigo; Wackett, Adrian A.; Warren, Matthew W.; Webster, Emily R.; Schwarz, Benjamin; Wehr, Nathaniel H.; Whalen, Joann K.; Wironen, Michael B.; Wolters, Volkmar; Wu, Pengfei; Zenkova, Irina V.; Zhang, Weixin; Cameron, Erin K.; Eisenhauer, Nico; Wall, Diana H.; Brose, Ulrich; Decaëns, Thibaud; Lavelle, Patrick; Loreau, Michel; Mathieu, Jérôme; Mulder, Christian; van der Putten, Wim H.; Rillig, Matthias C.; Thakur, Madhav P.; de Vries, Franciska T.; Wardle, David A.; Ammer, Christian; Ammer, Sabine; Arai, Miwa; Ayuke, Fredrick O.; Baker, Geoff H.; Baretta, Dilmar; Barkusky, Dietmar; Beauséjour, Robin; Bedano, Jose C.; Birkhofer, Klaus; Blanchart, Eric; Blossey, Bernd; Bolger, Thomas; Bradley, Robert L.; Brossard, Michel; Burtis, James C.; Capowiez, Yvan; Cavagnaro, Timothy R.; Choi, Amy; Clause, Julia; Cluzeau, Daniel; Coors, Anja; Crotty, Felicity V.; Crumsey, Jasmine M.; Dávalos, Andrea; Cosín, Darío J. Díaz; Dobson, Annise M.; Domínguez, Anahí; Duhour, Andrés Esteban; van Eekeren, Nick; Emmerling, Christoph; Falco, Liliana B.; Fernández, Rosa; Fonte, Steven J.; Fragoso, Carlos; Franco, André L. C.; Fusilero, Abegail; Geraskina, Anna P.; Gholami, Shaieste; González, Grizelle; Gundale, Michael J.; López, Mónica Gutiérrez; Hackenberger, Branimir K.; Hackenberger, Davorka K.; Hernández, Luis M.; Hirth, Jeff R.; Hishi, Takuo; Holdsworth, Andrew R.; Holmstrup, Martin; Hopfensperger, Kristine N.; Lwanga, Esperanza Huerta; Huhta, Veikko; Hurisso, Tunsisa T.; Iannone, Basil V.; Iordache, Madalina; Irmler, Ulrich; Ivask, Mari; Jesús, Juan B.; Johnson-Maynard, Jodi L.; Joschko, Monika; Kaneko, Nobuhiro; Kanianska, Radoslava; Keith, Aidan M.; Kernecker, Maria L.; Koné, Armand W.; Kooch, Yahya; Kukkonen, Sanna T.; Lalthanzara, H.; Lammel, Daniel R.; Lebedev, Iurii M.; Le Cadre, Edith; Lincoln, Noa K.
    Earthworms are an important soil taxon as ecosystem engineers, providing a variety of crucial ecosystem functions and services. Little is known about their diversity and distribution at large spatial scales, despite the availability of considerable amounts of local-scale data. Earthworm diversity data, obtained from the primary literature or provided directly by authors, were collated with information on site locations, including coordinates, habitat cover, and soil properties. Datasets were required, at a minimum, to include abundance or biomass of earthworms at a site. Where possible, site-level species lists were included, as well as the abundance and biomass of individual species and ecological groups. This global dataset contains 10,840 sites, with 184 species, from 60 countries and all continents except Antarctica. The data were obtained from 182 published articles, published between 1973 and 2017, and 17 unpublished datasets. Amalgamating data into a single global database will assist researchers in investigating and answering a wide variety of pressing questions, for example, jointly assessing aboveground and belowground biodiversity distributions and drivers of biodiversity change.