Biogeochemical cycles and biodiversity as key drivers of ecosystem services provided by soils

Soils play a pivotal role in major global biogeochemical cycles (carbon, nutrient, and water), while hosting the largest diversity of organisms on land. Because of this, soils deliver fundamental ecosystem services, and management to change a soil process in support of one ecosystem service can either provide co-benefits to other services or result in trade-offs. In this critical review, we report the state-of-the-art understanding concerning the biogeochemical cycles and biodiversity in soil, and relate these to the provisioning, regulating, supporting, and cultural ecosystem services which they underpin. We then outline key knowledge gaps and research challenges, before providing recommendations for management activities to support the continued delivery of ecosystem services from soils. We conclude that, although soils are complex, there are still knowledge gaps, and fundamental research is still needed to better understand the relationships between different facets of soils and the array of ecosystem services they underpin, enough is known to implement best practices now. There is a tendency among soil scientists to dwell on the complexity and knowledge gaps rather than to focus on what we do know and how this knowledge can be put to use to improve the delivery of ecosystem services. A significant challenge is to find effective ways to share knowledge with soil managers and policy makers so that best management can be implemented. A key element of this knowledge exchange must be to raise awareness of the ecosystems services underpinned by soils and thus the natural capital they provide. We know enough to start moving in the right direction while we conduct research to fill in our knowledge gaps. The lasting legacy of the International Year of Soils in 2015 should be for soil scientists to work together with policy makers and land managers to put soils at the centre of environmental policy making and land management decisions.

Biodiversity and resilience of ecosystem functions

Accelerating rates of environmental change and the continued loss of global biodiversity threaten functions and services delivered by ecosystems. Much ecosystem monitoring and management is focused on the provision of ecosystem functions and services under current environmental conditions, yet this could lead to inappropriate management guidance and undervaluation of the importance of biodiversity. The maintenance of ecosystem functions and services under substantial predicted future environmental change (i.e., their ‘resilience’) is crucial. Here we identify a range of mechanisms underpinning the resilience of ecosystem functions across three ecological scales. Although potentially less important in the short term, biodiversity, encompassing variation from within species to across landscapes, may be crucial for the longer-term resilience of ecosystem functions and the services that they underpin.

Big Data and ecosystem research programmes

The size and complexity of data sets generated within ecosystem-level programmes merits their capture, curation, storage and analysis, synthesis and visualisation using Big Data approaches. This review looks at previous attempts to organise and analyse such data through the International Biological Programme and draws on the mistakes made and the lessons learned for effective Big Data approaches to current Research Councils United Kingdom (RCUK) ecosystem-level programmes, using Biodiversity and Ecosystem Service Sustainability (BESS) and Environmental Virtual Observatory Pilot (EVOp) as exemplars. The challenges raised by such data are identified, explored and suggestions are made for the two major issues of extending analyses across different spatio-temporal scales and for the effective integration of quantitative and qualitative data.

Declining resilience of ecosystem functions under biodiversity loss

The composition of species communities is changing rapidly through drivers such as habitat loss and climate change, with potentially serious consequences for the resilience of ecosystem functions on which humans depend. To assess such changes in resilience, we analyse trends in the frequency of species in Great Britain that provide key ecosystem functions-specifically decomposition, carbon sequestration, pollination, pest control and cultural values. For 4,424 species over four decades, there have been significant net declines among animal species that provide pollination, pest control and cultural values. Groups providing decomposition and carbon sequestration remain relatively stable, as fewer species are in decline and these are offset by large numbers of new arrivals into Great Britain. While there is general concern about degradation of a wide range of ecosystem functions, our results suggest actions should focus on particular functions for which there is evidence of substantial erosion of their resilience.

Functional identity and diversity of animals predict ecosystem functioning better than species-based indices

Drastic biodiversity declines have raised concerns about the deterioration of ecosystem functions and have motivated much recent research on the relationship between species diversity and ecosystem functioning. A functional trait framework has been proposed to improve the mechanistic understanding of this relationship, but this has rarely been tested for organisms other than plants. We analysed eight datasets, including five animal groups, to examine how well a trait-based approach, compared with a more traditional taxonomic approach, predicts seven ecosystem functions below- and above-ground. Trait-based indices consistently provided greater explanatory power than species richness or abundance. The frequency distributions of single or multiple traits in the community were the best predictors of ecosystem functioning. This implies that the ecosystem functions we investigated were underpinned by the combination of trait identities (i.e. single-trait indices) and trait complementarity (i.e. multi-trait indices) in the communities. Our study provides new insights into the general mechanisms that link biodiversity to ecosystem functioning in natural animal communities and suggests that the observed responses were due to the identity and dominance patterns of the trait composition rather than the number or abundance of species per se.

Interacting effects of change in climate, human population, land use, and water use on biodiversity and ecosystem services

Human population growth and resource use, mediated by changes in climate, land use, and water use, increasingly impact biodiversity and ecosystem services provision. However, impacts of these drivers on biodiversity and ecosystem services are rarely analyzed simultaneously and remain largely unknown. An emerging question is how science can improve the understanding of change in biodiversity and ecosystem service delivery and of potential feedback mechanisms of adaptive governance. We analyzed past and future change in drivers in south-central Sweden. We used the analysis to identify main research challenges and outline important research tasks. Since the 19th century, our study area has experienced substantial and interlinked changes; a 1.6°C temperature increase, rapid population growth, urbanization, and massive changes in land use and water use. Considerable future changes are also projected until the mid-21st century. However, little is known about the impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services so far, and this in turn hampers future projections of such effects. Therefore, we urge scientists to explore interdisciplinary approaches designed to investigate change in multiple drivers, underlying mechanisms, and interactions over time, including assessment and analysis of matching-scale data from several disciplines. Such a perspective is needed for science to contribute to adaptive governance by constantly improving the understanding of linked change complexities and their impacts.

Spatial patterns and environmental constraints on ecosystem services at a catchment scale

Improved understanding and prediction of the fundamental environmental controls on ecosystem service supply across the landscape will help to inform decisions made by policy makers and land-water managers. To evaluate this issue for a local catchment case study, we explored metrics and spatial patterns of service supply for water quality regulation, agriculture production, carbon storage, and biodiversity for the Macronutrient Conwy catchment. Methods included using ecosystem models such as LUCI and JULES, integration of national scale field survey datasets, earth observation products and plant trait databases, to produce finely resolved maps of species richness and primary production. Analyses were done with both 1x1 km gridded and subcatchment data. A common single gradient characterised catchment scale ecosystem services supply with agricultural production and carbon storage at opposing ends of the gradient as reported for a national-scale assessment. Species diversity was positively related to production due to the below national average productivity levels in the Conwy combined with the unimodal relationship between biodiversity and productivity at the national scale. In contrast to the national scale assessment, a strong reduction in water quality as production increased was observed in these low productive systems. Various soil variables were tested for their predictive power of ecosystem service supply. Soil carbon, nitrogen, their ratio and soil pH all had double the power of rainfall and altitude, each explaining around 45% of variation but soil pH is proposed as a potential metric for ecosystem service supply potential as it is a simple and practical metric which can be carried out in the field with crowd-sourcing technologies now available. The study emphasises the importance of considering multiple ecosystem services together due to the complexity of covariation at local and national scales, and the benefits of exploiting a wide range of metrics for each service to enhance data robustness.

Railway promotion in Victorian Britain: engineering triumph or waste of capital?

A key issue in UK railway history is whether the railway system was an efficient response to the traffic requirements of the economy. The UK railway system was constructed entirely by private enterprise with minimal state subsidies. This chapter considers whether the railway system was 'over-built' because the government ignored the advice of the Railway Committee of the Board of Trade. The chapter suggests that the system was over-built by about 35 per cent. The causes of this over-building are investigated and are found to be mainly social and political failures arising from distrust between MPs and civil servants and public pressure on local MPs to ensure that their constituencies were well served by railways.

A possible reconceptualization of food engineering discipline

Food industry is critical to any nation’s health and well-being; it is also critical to the economic health of a nation, since it can typically constitute over a fifth of the nation’s manufacturing GDP. Food Engineering is a discipline that ought to be at the heart of the food industry. Unfortunately, this discipline is not playing its rightful role today: engineering has been relegated to play the role of a service provider to the food industry, instead of it being a strategic driver for the very growth of the industry. This paper hypothesises that food engineering discipline, today, seems to be continuing the way it was in the last century, and has not risen to the challenges that it really faces. This paper therefore categorises the challenges as those being posed by: 1. Business dynamics, 2. Market forces, 3. Manufacturing environment and 4. Environmental Considerations, and finds the current scope and subject-knowledge competencies of food engineering to be inadequate in meeting these challenges. The paper identifies: a) health, b) environment and c) security as the three key drivers of the discipline, and proposes a new definition of food engineering. This definition requires food engineering to have a broader science base which includes biophysical, biochemical and health sciences, in addition to engineering sciences. This definition, in turn, leads to the discipline acquiring a new set of subject-knowledge competencies that is fit-for-purpose for this day and age, and hopefully for the foreseeable future. The possibility of this approach leading to the development of a higher education program in food engineering is demonstrated by adopting a theme based curriculum development with five core themes, supplemented by appropriate enabling and knowledge integrating courses. At the heart of this theme based approach is an attempt to combine engineering of process and product in a purposeful way, termed here as Food Product Realisation Engineering. Finally, the paper also recommends future development of two possible niche specialisation programs in Nutrition and Functional Food Engineering and Gastronomic Engineering. It is hoped that this reconceptualization of the discipline will not only make it more purposeful for the food industry, but it will also make the subject more intellectually challenging and attract bright young minds to the discipline.

Green infrastructure and ecosystem services - is the devil in the detail?

Background - Green infrastructure is a strategic network of green spaces designed to deliver ecosystem services to human communities. Green infrastructure is a convenient concept for urban policy makers, but the term is used too-generically and with limited understanding of the relative values or benefits of different types of green space and how these complement one another. At a finer scale/more practical level– little consideration is given to the composition of the plant-communities, yet this is what ultimately defines extent of service provision. This paper calls for greater attention to be paid to urban plantings with respect to ecosystem service delivery and for plant science to engage more-fully in identifying those plants that promote various services. Scope - Many urban plantings are designed based on aesthetics alone, with limited thought on how plant choice/composition provides other ecosystem services. Research is beginning to demonstrate, however, that landscape plants provide a range of important services, such as helping mitigate floods and alleviating heat islands, but that not all species are equally effective. The paper reviews a number of important services and demonstrates how genotype choice radically affects service delivery. Conclusions – Although research is in its infancy, data is being generated that relates plant traits to specific services; thereby helping identify genotypes that optimise service delivery. The urban environment, however, will become exceedingly bland if future planting is simply restricted to monocultures of a few ‘functional’ genotypes. Therefore, further information is required on how to design plant communities where the plants identified:- a/ provide more than a single benefit (multi-functionality) b/ complement each other in maximising the range of benefits that can be delivered in one location and c/ continue to maintain public acceptance through diversity. The identification/development of functional landscape plants is an exciting and potentially high impact arena for plant science.

MODELLING OF HIGH-PRESSURE PHASE EQUILIBRIUM IN SYSTEMS OF INTEREST IN THE FOOD ENGINEERING FIELD USING THE PENG-ROBINSON EQUATION OF STATE WITH TWO DIFFERENT MIXING RULES

In this work, thermodynamic models for fitting the phase equilibrium of binary systems were applied, aiming to predict the high pressure phase equilibrium of multicomponent systems of interest in the food engineering field, comparing the results generated by the models with new experimental data and with those from the literature. Two mixing rules were used with the Peng-Robinson equation of state, one with the mixing rule of van der Waals and the other with the composition-dependent mixing rule of Mathias et al. The systems chosen are of fundamental importance in food industries, such as the binary systems CO(2)-limonene, CO(2)-citral and CO(2)-linalool, and the ternary systems CO(2)-Limonene-Citral and CO(2)-Limonene-Linalool, where high pressure phase equilibrium knowledge is important to extract and fractionate citrus fruit essential oils. For the CO(2)-limonene system, some experimental data were also measured in this work. The results showed the high capability of the model using the composition-dependent mixing rule to model the phase equilibrium behavior of these systems.

The energy and water balance of a Eucalyptus plantation in southeast Brazil

The eddy covariance method was used to measure energy and water balance of a plantation of Eucalyptus (grandis x urophylla) hybrids over a 2 year period. The average daily evaporation rates were 5.4 (+/- 2.0) mm day(-1) in summer, but fell to 1.2 (+/- 0.3) mm day(-1) in winter. In contrast, the sensible heat flux was relatively low in summer but dominated the energy balance in winter. Evaporation accounted for 80% and 26% of the available energy, in summer and winter respectively. The annual evaporation was 82% (1124 mm) and 96% (1235 mm) of the annual rainfall recorded during the first and second year, respectively. Daily average canopy and aerodynamic conductance to water vapour were in the summer 51.9 (+/- 38.4) mm s(-1) 84.1 (+/- 25.6) mm s(-1), respectively; and in the winter 6.0 (+/- 10.5) mm s(-1) and 111.6 (+/- 24.6) mm s(-1), respectively. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Document engineering approaches toward scalable and structured multimedia, web and printable documents

Document engineering is the computer science discipline that investigates systems for documents in any form and in all media. As with the relationship between software engineering and software, document engineering is concerned with principles, tools and processes that improve our ability to create, manage, and maintain documents (http://www.documentengineering.org). The ACM Symposium on Document Engineering is an annual meeting of researchers active in document engineering: it is sponsored by ACM by means of the ACM SIGWEB Special Interest Group. In this editorial, we first point to work carried out in the context of document engineering, which are directly related to multimedia tools and applications. We conclude with a summary of the papers presented in this special issue.

An aspect-oriented reference architecture for Software Engineering Environments

Reusable and evolvable Software Engineering Environments (SEES) are essential to software production and have increasingly become a need. In another perspective, software architectures and reference architectures have played a significant role in determining the success of software systems. In this paper we present a reference architecture for SEEs, named RefASSET, which is based on concepts coming from the aspect-oriented approach. This architecture is specialized to the software testing domain and the development of tools for that domain is discussed. This and other case studies have pointed out that the use of aspects in RefASSET provides a better Separation of Concerns, resulting in reusable and evolvable SEEs. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Crystal engineering using functionalized adamantane

We performed a first-principles investigation on the structural, electronic and optical properties of crystals made of chemically functionalized adamantane molecules. Several molecular building blocks, formed by boron and nitrogen substitutional functionalizations, were considered to build zinc blende and wurtzite crystals, and the resulting structures presented large bulk moduli and cohesive energies, wide and direct bandgaps, and low dielectric constants (low-kappa materials). Those properties provide stability for such structures up to room temperature, superior to those of typical molecular crystals. This indicates a possible road map for crystal engineering using functionalized diamondoids, with potential applications ranging from space filling between conducting wires in nanodevices to nano-electromechanical systems.