Global habitat suitability of deep-water Antipatharia

Antipatharia are a diverse group of corals with many species found in deep water. Many Antipatharia are habitat for associates, have extreme longevity and some species can occur beyond 8500 m depth. As they are major constituents of 'coral gardens', which are Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems (VMEs), knowledge of their distribution and environmental requirements is an important pre-requisite for informed conservation planning particularly where the expense and difficulty of deep-sea sampling prohibits comprehensive surveys. This study uses a global database of Antipatharia distribution data to perform habitat suitability modelling using the Maxent methodology to estimate the global extent of black coral habitat suitability. The model of habitat suitability is driven by temperature but there is notable influence from other variables of topography, surface productivity and oxygen levels. This model can be used to predict areas of suitable habitat, which can be useful for conservation planning. The global distribution of Antipatharia habitat suitability shows a marked contrast with the distribution of specimen observations, indicating that many potentially suitable areas have not been sampled, and that sampling effort has been disproportionate to shallow, accessible areas inside marine protected areas (MPAs). Although 25% of Antipatharia observations are located in MPAs, only 7-8% of predicted suitable habitat is protected, which is short of the Convention on Biological Diversity target to protect 10% of ocean habitats by 2020.

Spatially explicit methane inventory for Switzerland with 500 m x 500 m resolution for 2011 (NetCDF 25 MB)

We present the first high-resolution (500 m × 500 m) gridded methane (CH4) emission inventory for Switzerland, which integrates the national emission totals reported to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and recent CH4 flux studies conducted by research groups across Switzerland. In addition to anthropogenic emissions, we also include natural and semi-natural CH4 fluxes, i.e., emissions from lakes and reservoirs, wetlands, wild animals as well as uptake by forest soils. National CH4 emissions were disaggregated using detailed geostatistical information on source locations and their spatial extent and process- or area-specific emission factors. In Switzerland, the highest CH4 emissions in 2011 originated from the agricultural sector (150 Gg CH4/yr), mainly produced by ruminants and manure management, followed by emissions from waste management (15 Gg CH4/yr) mainly from landfills and the energy sector (12 Gg CH4/yr), which was dominated by emissions from natural gas distribution. Compared to the anthropogenic sources, emissions from natural and semi-natural sources were relatively small (6 Gg CH4/yr), making up only 3 % of the total emissions in Switzerland. CH4 fluxes from agricultural soils were estimated to be not significantly different from zero (between -1.5 and 0 Gg CH4/yr), while forest soils are a CH4 sink (approx. -2.8 Gg CH4/yr), partially offsetting other natural emissions. Estimates of uncertainties are provided for the different sources, including an estimate of spatial disaggregation errors deduced from a comparison with a global (EDGAR v4.2) and a European CH4 inventory (TNO/MACC). This new spatially-explicit emission inventory for Switzerland will provide valuable input for regional scale atmospheric modeling and inverse source estimation.