Download or read book The Impacts of Climate Change and Human Activities on the Structure and Function of Wetland Grassland Ecosystems written by Zhongqing Yan and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2023-10-31 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wetlands and grassland are important components of natural ecosystems, which have rich values in maintaining ecological balance, regional economy and human development. Wetlands can provide freshwater resources and food sources for human beings, purify the water environment and mitigate climate change. The grassland ecosystem has such ecological functions as windbreak, sand fixation, soil preservation, climate regulation, air purification, water conservation and so on, which are closely related to human survival and well-being. In recent years, climate change and human activities have caused a profound impact on the structure and function of wetland and grassland ecosystems, and the problems of decline in size and function have attracted extensive attention from researchers globally. However, there are still many uncertainties about the variety of wetland and grassland ecosystem composition, structure and dynamics, as well as how they respond and adapt to climate change and human activities.

Download or read book Impacts of Climate Change on Alpine Grassland Ecosystems Responses in Structure and Function written by Samuel Schmid and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Wetland Ecosystems written by William J. Mitsch and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2009-04-13 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New focused text introduces readers to wetland ecosystems and systems approaches to studying wetlands With its comprehensive coverage of wetland science, management, and restoration, Mitsch and Gosselink's Wetlands has been the premier reference on wetlands for more than two decades. Now, the coverage of specific wetland ecosystem types from earlier editions of this acclaimed work has been updated, revised, and supplemented with additional content in order to create this new text focusing exclusively on wetland ecosystems. This book now complements Wetlands, Fourth Edition. Following an introduction to ecosystems in general and wetland ecosystems in particular, Wetland Ecosystems examines the major types of wetlands found throughout the world: coastal wetlands, freshwater marshes and forested swamps, and peatlands. The final chapter reviews three fundamental systems approaches to studying wetlands: mesocosms, full-scale experimental ecosystems, and mathematical modeling. This new text features: Updated descriptions of the hydrology, biogeochemistry, and biology of the main types of wetlands found in the world New content introducing general ecosystems, wetland ecosystems, whole ecosystem and mesocosm experiments with wetlands, and systems ecology and modeling A detailed description of the ecosystem services provided by wetlands A broad international scope, including many examples of wetlands located outside North America Two new coauthors offering new perspectives and additional insights into the latest ecosystem and modeling techniques An abundance of illustrations helps readers understand how different biological communities and the abiotic environment in wetland ecosystems interact and function. Tables and text boxes provide at-a-glance summaries of key information. Lastly, each chapter concludes with a list of recommended readings. This text has been designed as an introduction for students and professionals in wetland ecology and management, general ecology, environmental science, and natural resource management.

Download or read book Abrupt Climate Change written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2002-04-23 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The climate record for the past 100,000 years clearly indicates that the climate system has undergone periodic-and often extreme-shifts, sometimes in as little as a decade or less. The causes of abrupt climate changes have not been clearly established, but the triggering of events is likely to be the result of multiple natural processes. Abrupt climate changes of the magnitude seen in the past would have far-reaching implications for human society and ecosystems, including major impacts on energy consumption and water supply demands. Could such a change happen again? Are human activities exacerbating the likelihood of abrupt climate change? What are the potential societal consequences of such a change? Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises looks at the current scientific evidence and theoretical understanding to describe what is currently known about abrupt climate change, including patterns and magnitudes, mechanisms, and probability of occurrence. It identifies critical knowledge gaps concerning the potential for future abrupt changes, including those aspects of change most important to society and economies, and outlines a research strategy to close those gaps. Based on the best and most current research available, this book surveys the history of climate change and makes a series of specific recommendations for the future.

Download or read book The effects of climate change and anthropogenic activities on patterns structures and functions of terrestrial ecosystems written by Guoqi Wen and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2023-10-31 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Climatic and Environmental Significance of Wetlands Case Studies from Eurasia and North Africa written by Ben Salem, Abdelkrim and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2022-12-27 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wetlands provide a key service in an ecosystem such as providing resilience against drought and diverse habitats that support biodiversity. Because of their ephemeral character and their small size, however, these vulnerable ecosystems are declining rapidly as climate change continues to surge and human activities expand. Rational management of wet ecosystems need accompanying actions covering research, systematic observation, and more. Climatic and Environmental Significance of Wetlands: Case Studies from Eurasia and North Africa produces innovative concepts, methodologies, tools, and applications for ecosystem service valuation, wetland biodiversity conservation, fresh water supply, agricultural production, food security, wetland management, and its impact on biodiversity. It assesses the cumulative risk posed to wetland habitats and species by human activities and explores the consequences for the delivery of ecosystem services and biodiversity at local, regional, and global scales, as well as the impacts of climate change on wetland ecosystems and water resources. Covering topics such as geochemistry, invasive species, and sedimentary change, this premier reference source is an indispensable resource for government officials, engineers, environmental managers, environmentalists, students and educators of higher education, researchers, and academicians.

Download or read book The Study of Seasonal Composition and Dynamics of Wetland Ecosystems and Wintering Bird Habitat at Poyang Lake PR China Using Object based Image Analysis and Field Observations written by Iryna Dronova and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wetlands are among the most productive ecosystems in the world which support critical ecological services and high biological diversity yet are vulnerable to climate change and human activities. Despite their tremendous economic and ecological value, substantial uncertainty still exists about wetland ecosystem function, habitats and response to natural and anthropogenic stressors worldwide. This uncertainty is further aggravated by constrained field access and surface heterogeneity which limit the accuracy of wetland analyses from remote sensing images. In this thesis, I investigated the capabilities of satellite remote sensing with medium spatial resolution and object-based image analysis (OBIA) methods to elucidate seasonal composition and dynamics of wetland ecosystems and indicators of habitat for wintering waterbirds in a large conservation hotspot of Poyang Lake, PR China. I first examined changes in major wetland cover types during the low water period when Poyang Lake provides habitat to large numbers of migratory birds from the East Asian pathway. I used OBIA to map and analyze the transitions among water, vegetation, mudflat and sand classes from four 32-m Beijing-1 microsatellite images between late fall 2007 and early spring 2008. This analysis revealed that, while transitions among wetland classes were strongly associated with precipitation and flood-driven hydrological variation, the overall dynamics were a more complex interplay of vegetation phenology, disturbance and post-flood exposure. Remote sensing signals of environmental processes were more effectively captured by changes in fuzzy memberships to each class per location than by changes in spatial extents of the best-matching classes alone. The highest uncertainty in the image analysis corresponded to transitional wetland states at the end of the major flood recession in November and to heterogeneous mudflat areas at the land-water interface during the whole study period. Results suggest seasonally exposed mudflat features as important targets for future research due to heterogeneity and uncertainty of their composition, variable spatial distribution and sensitivity to hydrological dynamics. I further explored the potential of OBIA to overcome the limitations of the traditional pixel-based image classification methods in characterizing Poyang Lake plant functional types (PFTs) from the medium-resolution Landsat satellite data. I assessed the sensitivity in PFT classification accuracy to image object scale, machine-learning classification method and hierarchical level of vegetation classes determined from ecological functional traits of the locally dominant plant species. Both the overall and class-specific accuracy values were higher at coarser object scales compared to near-pixel levels, regardless of the machine-learning algorithm, with the overall accuracy exceeding 85-90%. However, more narrowly defined PFT classes differed in their highest-accuracy object scale values due to their unique patch structure, ecology of the dominant species and disturbance agents. To improve classification agreement between different levels of vegetation type hierarchy and reduce the uncertainty, future analyses should integrate spectral and geometric properties of vegetation patches with species' functional ecological traits. In periodically flooded wetlands such as Poyang Lake, rapid short-term surface dynamics and frequent inundation may constrain detection of directional long-term effects of climate change, succession or alien species invasions. To address this challenge, I proposed to classify Poyang Lake wetlands into "dynamic cover types" (DCTs) representing short-term ecological regimes shaped by phenology, disturbance and inundation, instead of static classes. I defined and mapped Poyang Lake DCTs for one flood cycle (late summer 2007-late spring 2008) from combined time series of medium-resolution multi-spectral and radar imagery. I further assessed sensitivity of DCTs to hydrological and climatic variation by comparing results with a hypothetical change scenario of a warmer wetter spring simulated by substituting spring 2008 input images with 2007 ones. This analysis identified the major steps in seasonal wetland change driven by flooding and vegetation phenology and spatial differences in change schedules across the heterogeneous study area. Comparison of DCTs from the actual flood season with the hypothetical scenario revealed both directional class shifts away from expanding permanent water and more complex location-specific redistributions of vegetation types and mudflats. These outcomes imply that changes in flooding may have non-uniform effects on different ecosystems and habitats and call for a thorough investigation of the future change scenarios for this landscape. The possibility to disentangle short-term ecological "regimes" from longer-term landscape changes via DCT framework suggests a promising research strategy for landscape ecosystem modeling, conservation and ecosystem management. Following the assessments of Poyang Lake dynamics in the low water season, I further examined which landscape characteristics of the permanent sub-lakes and their 500-m neighborhoods extracted from 30-m Landsat satellite imagery could explain non-uniform spatial distribution of waterbird diversity and abundance in the ground bird survey of December 2006. I hypothesized that the indicators of habitat size, spectral greenness, spectral and geometric patch heterogeneity would be positively associated with bird diversity and abundance, while the proportions of cover types approximating human disturbance would be negatively related to response variables. In the best-fit regression models selected using the Akaike Information Criterion, on average higher bird diversity and abundance were associated with larger sub-lake size, higher spectral greenness of emergent grassland and lower spectral greenness of mudflat as well as lower proportion of flooded/aquatic vegetation. At the same time, predictive performance of the best-fit models was penalized by large amounts of unexplained variation and inconsistencies among bird survey and remote sensing data from another year. Significant spatial autocorrelation in linear regression models raised concerns about missing predictor variables and the utility of sub-lakes as spatial units for diversity analysis, but it also suggested new hypotheses on spatial ecological interactions in bird community variables and habitat characteristics among sub-lakes. Research challenges identified in this study suggest that future monitoring programs should take more rigorous steps to standardize the protocols of bird surveys and improve spatial and temporal frequency of both bird and habitat observations. Rapid short-term surface variation and problematic field access will likely continue to limit remote sensing-based analyses of Poyang Lake wetlands and their habitats by traditional, static-class approaches. Using "dynamic" classes representing characteristic wetland transitions and disturbance regimes may provide more ecologically informative targets for management, conservation and modeling of ecosystem change. Object-based image analysis is a potentially powerful and promising approach to enhance classification accuracy of remote sensing data and ecologically informative interpretations of complex, heterogeneous wetland surfaces such as the study area. However, this methodology should be developed further to allow for more automated optimization of landscape object properties to capture vegetation patch structure and quantitatively assess propagation of the uncertainty among different spatial scales of the analysis. Finally, future studies should explore new ways of overcoming the limitations of problematic field access and frequent cloudiness obstructing the view of remote sensors by more rigorous utilization of in situ wireless sensors to record environmental conditions and surface composition and by introducing airborne lake-wide imaging programs for periods of prolonged cloudiness.

Download or read book Ecology conservation and restoration of grazing ecosystems in the anthropocene written by Steve Monfort and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2023-06-06 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Interior Environment and Related Agencies Appropriations for 2007 Justification of the budget estimates U S Geological Survey Minerals Management Service written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Appropriations. Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 2204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Grasslands on the Third Pole of the World written by Shikui Dong and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-10-09 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book comprehensively covers the topics of origin and distribution, evolution and types, regional and global importance, biodiversity conservation, plant-soil interfaces, ecosystem functions and services, social-ecological systems, climate change adaptations, land degradation and restoration, grazing management and pastoral production, and sustainable future of the grasslands on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP), which is a globally unique eco-region called the "Roof of the World" because of its high elevation, “Third Pole on Earth" because of its alpine environment and the "Water Tower in Asia" because of its headwater location. The grassland ecosystem covers above 60% of QTP, which is about 2.5 million km2, 1/4 of Chinese total territorial lands. The grassland ecosystem of the QTP (the Third Pole) is an important part of the palaearctic region, which features alpine cover and low oxygen. The Third Pole's grasslands not only provide important ecosystem functions such as biodiversity conservation, carbon storage, water resource regulation, climate control, and natural disaster mitigation at a global scale, but also provide critical ecosystem services such as pastoral production, cultural inheritance, and tourism and recreation at local and regional scales. The purposes of this monograph are to address the following questions: (1) What are the special features of the Third Pole's grasslands? (2) How have climate changes and human activities changed the structures and functions of the Third Pole's grasslands? (3) How can we cope with land degradation and climate change through innovative restoration and protective actions for Third Pole's grasslands? And (4) How can we promote the sustainable development of social-ecological systems of the Third Pole's grasslands through best management practices including grazing? The goal of this book is to attract the attention of international audiences to realize the importance of the Third Pole’s grasslands, and to call for the actions of global communities to effectively protect and sustainably use the Third Pole's grasslands. This book can be served as textbooks, teaching materials and documentaries for different audiences. The target audiences include students, teachers, researchers, policy makers, planners, government officials, and NGOs in agricultural, environmental and natural resources sectors.

Download or read book Grassland Productivity and Ecosystem Services written by Gilles Lemaire and published by CABI. This book was released on 2011 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grassland ecosystems are deeply affected by human activities and need appropriate management to optimise trade-offs between ecosystem functions and services. Until now they have mainly been analysed as agro-ecosystems for animal production but this book looks beyond the role of grassland as a feeding ground, and evaluates other important processes such as carbon sequestration in soils, greenhouse gas regulation and biodiversity protection. This authoritative volume expertly highlights the need for an immediate balance between agriculture and ecological management for sustainability in the futu.

Download or read book Wetlands Ecosystem Services Restoration and Wise Use written by Shuqing An and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-07-04 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores major wetland ecosystem services, such as climate cooling and water quality improvement, and discusses the recent wetland conservation and restoration activities in China and neighboring countries. The role of wetlands in either cooling or warming the climate is analyzed as the net balance between carbon sequestration and emissions of methane and nitrous oxide. Wetlands start off having a net warming effect on the climate but in time switch to net cooling. Further, they remove 40% of the N and P from run-off and groundwater flow in agricultural areas, but wetlands need to amount to 10% of the total catchment area to make a difference. Reflecting on the recent large investment in wetland ecological studies in China and neighboring countries, the book addresses invasive species in coastal wetlands as well as the protection and wise use of tidal flats around the Yellow Sea. It also presents promising regional case studies on wetland restoration. The book is intended for academics, students and practitioners in the field of wetland ecology, management and restoration, as well as consultants and professionals working in conservation, wise use and environmental policy.

Download or read book Climate Change and the Microbiome written by D. K. Choudhary and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-10-13 with total page 737 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book highlights the impact of climate change on the soil microbiome and its subsequent effects on plant health, soil-plant dynamics, and the ecosphere. It also discusses emerging ideas to counteract these effects, e.g., through agricultural applications of functional microbes, to ensure a sustainable ecosystem. Climate change is altering the soil microbiome distributions and thus the interactions in microbiome and plant‐soil microorganism. Improvement of our understanding of microbe-microbe and plant-microbe interaction under changing climatic conditions is essential, because the overall impact of these interactions under varying adverse environmental conditions is lacking. This book has been designed to understand the impact of climate change, i.e., mainly salt and drought stress, on the soil microbiome and its impact on plant, yield, and the ecosphere. The book is organized into four parts: The first part reviews the impact of climate change on the diversity and richness of the soil microbiome. The second part addresses effects of climate change on plant health. The third part discusses effects on soil-plant dynamics and functionality, e.g., soil productivity. The final part deals with the effects of climate change on ecosystem functioning and also discusses potential solutions. The book will appeal to students and researchers working in the area of soil science, agriculture, molecular biology, plant physiology, and biotechnology.

Download or read book Interior Environment and Related Agencies Appropriations For 2007 Part 2 109 2 Hearings written by and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 2204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Biodiversity Conservation and Ecological Function Restoration in Freshwater Ecosystems written by Min Zhang and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2023-03-13 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Department of the Interior and Related Agencies Appropriations for written by United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Appropriations and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 2204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Department of the Interior and Related Agencies Appropriations for Fiscal Year 2007 written by United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Appropriations. Subcommittee on the Department of the Interior and Related Agencies and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 2202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: