The monitoring of ecological quality and the classification of standing waters in temperate regions: a review and proposal based on a worked scheme for British waters

This paper reviews the ways that quality can be assessed in standing waters, a subject that has hitherto attracted little attention but which is now a legal requirement in Europe. It describes a scheme for the assessment and monitoring of water and ecological quality in standing waters greater than about I ha in area in England & Wales although it is generally relevant to North-west Europe. Thirteen hydrological, chemical and biological variables are used to characterise the standing water body in any current sampling. These are lake volume, maximum depth, onductivity, Secchi disc transparency, pH, total alkalinity, calcium ion concentration, total N concentration,winter total oxidised inorganic nitrogen (effectively nitrate) concentration, total P concentration, potential maximum chlorophyll a concentration, a score based on the nature of the submerged and emergent plant community, and the presence or absence of a fish community. Inter alia these variables are key indicators of the state of eutrophication, acidification, salinisation and infilling of a water body.

Community-based climate change adaptation strategies for integrated prawn-fish-rice farming in Bangladesh to promote social-ecological resilience

Farming freshwater prawns with fish in rice fields is widespread in coastal regions of southwest Bangladesh because of favourable resources and ecological conditions. This article provides an overview of an ecosystem-based approach to integrated prawn-fish-rice farming in southwest Bangladesh. The practice of prawn and fish farming in rice fields is a form of integrated aquaculture-agriculture, which provides a wide range of social, economic and environmental benefits. Integrated prawn-fish-rice farming plays an important role in the economy of Bangladesh, earning foreign exchange and increasing food production. However, this unique farming system in coastal Bangladesh is particularly vulnerable to climatechange. We suggest that community-based adaptation strategies must be developed to cope with the challenges. We propose that integrated prawn-fish-rice farming could be relocated from the coastal region to less vulnerable upland areas, but caution that this will require appropriate adaptation strategies and an enabling institutional environment.

Ecological intensification: harnessing ecosystem services for food security

Rising demands for agricultural products will increase pressure to further intensify crop production, while negative environmental impacts have to be minimized. Ecological intensification entails the environmentally friendly replacement of anthropogenic inputs and/or enhancement of crop productivity, by including regulating and supporting ecosystem services management in agricultural practices. Effective ecological intensification requires an understanding of the relations between land use at different scales and the community composition of ecosystem service-providing organisms above and below ground, and the flow, stability, contribution to yield, and management costs of the multiple services delivered by these organisms. Research efforts and investments are particularly needed to reduce existing yield gaps by integrating context-appropriate bundles of ecosystem services into crop production systems.

A complex system perspective on the emergence and spread of infectious diseases: integrating economic and ecological aspects

The emergence and spread of infectious diseases reflects the interaction of ecological and economic factors within an adaptive complex system. We review studies that address the role of economic factors in the emergence and spread of infectious diseases and identify three broad themes. First, the process of macro-economic growth leads to environmental encroaching, which is related to the emergence of infectious diseases. Second, there are a number of mutually reinforcing processes associated with the emergence/spread of infectious diseases. For example, the emergence and spread of infectious diseases can cause significant economic damages, which in turn may create the conditions for further disease spread. Also, the existence of a mutually reinforcing relationship between global trade and macroeconomic growth amplifies the emergence/spread of infectious diseases. Third, microeconomic approaches to infectious disease point to the adaptivity of human behavior, which simultaneously shapes the course of epidemics and responds to it. Most of the applied research has been focused on the first two aspects, and to a lesser extent on the third aspect. With respect to the latter, there is a lack of empirical research aimed at characterizing the behavioral component following a disease outbreak. Future research should seek to fill this gap and develop hierarchical econometric models capable of integrating both macro and micro-economic processes into disease ecology.

Assessing continental-scale risks for generalist and specialist pollinating bee species under climate change

Increased risks of extinction to populations of animals and plants under changing climate have now been demonstrated for many taxa. This study assesses the extinction risks to species within an important genus of pollinating bees (Colletes: Apidae) by estimating the expected changes in the area and isolation of suitable habitat under predicted climatic condition for 2050. Suitable habitat was defined on the basis of the presence of known forage plants as well as climatic suitability. To investigate whether ecological specialisation was linked to extinction risk we compared three species which were generalist pollen foragers on several plant families with three species which specialised on pollen from a single plant species. Both specialist and generalist species showed an increased risk of extinction with shifting climate, and this was particularly high for the most specialised species (Colletes anchusae and C. wolfi). The forage generalist C. impunctatus, which is associated with Boreo-Alpine environments, is potentially threatened through significant reduction in available climatic niche space. Including the distribution of the principal or sole pollen forage plant, when modelling the distribution of monolectic or narrowly oligolectic species, did not improve the predictive accuracy of our models as the plant species were considerably more widespread than the specialised bees associated with them.

A method for under-sampled ecological network data analysis: plant-pollination as case study

In this paper, we develop a method, termed the Interaction Distribution (ID) method, for analysis of quantitative ecological network data. In many cases, quantitative network data sets are under-sampled, i.e. many interactions are poorly sampled or remain unobserved. Hence, the output of statistical analyses may fail to differentiate between patterns that are statistical artefacts and those which are real characteristics of ecological networks. The ID method can support assessment and inference of under-sampled ecological network data. In the current paper, we illustrate and discuss the ID method based on the properties of plant-animal pollination data sets of flower visitation frequencies. However, the ID method may be applied to other types of ecological networks. The method can supplement existing network analyses based on two definitions of the underlying probabilities for each combination of pollinator and plant species: (1), pi,j: the probability for a visit made by the i’th pollinator species to take place on the j’th plant species; (2), qi,j: the probability for a visit received by the j’th plant species to be made by the i’th pollinator. The method applies the Dirichlet distribution to estimate these two probabilities, based on a given empirical data set. The estimated mean values for pi,j and qi,j reflect the relative differences between recorded numbers of visits for different pollinator and plant species, and the estimated uncertainty of pi,j and qi,j decreases with higher numbers of recorded visits.

Convergent structure of multitrophic communities over three continents

Ecological theory predicts that communities using the same resources should have similar structure, but evolutionary constraints on colonization and niche shifts may hamper such convergence. Multitrophic communities of wasps exploiting fig fruits, which first evolved about 75MYA, do not show long-term “inheritance” of taxonomic (lineage) composition or species diversity. However, communities on three continents have converged ecologically in the presence and relative abundance of five insect guilds that we define. Some taxa fill the same niches in each community (phylogenetic niche conservatism). However, we show that overall convergence in ecological community structure depends also on a combination of niche shifts by resident lineages and local colonizations of figs by other insect lineages. Our study explores new ground, and develops new heuristic tools, in combining ecology and phylogeny to address patterns in the complex multitrophic communities of insect on plants, which comprise a large part of terrestrial biodiversity.

Building the niche through time: using 13,000 years of data to predict the effects of climate change on three tree species in Europe

Aim  Species distribution models (SDMs) based on current species ranges underestimate the potential distribution when projected in time and/or space. A multi-temporal model calibration approach has been suggested as an alternative, and we evaluate this using 13,000 years of data. Location  Europe. Methods  We used fossil-based records of presence for Picea abies, Abies alba and Fagus sylvatica and six climatic variables for the period 13,000 to 1000 yr bp. To measure the contribution of each 1000-year time step to the total niche of each species (the niche measured by pooling all the data), we employed a principal components analysis (PCA) calibrated with data over the entire range of possible climates. Then we projected both the total niche and the partial niches from single time frames into the PCA space, and tested if the partial niches were more similar to the total niche than random. Using an ensemble forecasting approach, we calibrated SDMs for each time frame and for the pooled database. We projected each model to current climate and evaluated the results against current pollen data. We also projected all models into the future. Results  Niche similarity between the partial and the total-SDMs was almost always statistically significant and increased through time. SDMs calibrated from single time frames gave different results when projected to current climate, providing evidence of a change in the species realized niches through time. Moreover, they predicted limited climate suitability when compared with the total-SDMs. The same results were obtained when projected to future climates. Main conclusions  The realized climatic niche of species differed for current and future climates when SDMs were calibrated considering different past climates. Building the niche as an ensemble through time represents a way forward to a better understanding of a species' range and its ecology in a changing climate.

Good and bad increases in ecological awareness: environmental differentiation revisited

We analyze a vertically differentiated market, assuming that conventional and green firms' products have different impacts on the environment. Heterogeneous consumers choose to be supplied by a conventional or a green firm, depending on their extra willingness to pay for a green product and the relative prices of the products in the market. We show that environmental awareness campaigns may have a negative impact on total welfare. This possibility is shown to exist without consumer misperceptions about the quality of green products and ruling out changes in the coverage and the structure of the market. Surprisingly, both conventional and green firms may benefit from heterogeneity-enhancing awareness campaigns, while social welfare is more likely to be enhanced by heterogeneity-reducing ones.

Environmental and ecological economics in the 21st century: an age adjusted citation analysis of the influential articles, journals, authors and institutions

We investigate the influence of articles, authors, journals and institutions in the field of environmental and ecological economics. We depart from studies that investigated the literature until 2001 and include a time period that has witnessed an enormous increase of importance in the field. We adjust for the age effect given the huge impact of the year of an article's publication on its influence and we show that this adjustment does make a substantial difference — especially for disaggregated units of analysis with diverse age characteristics such as articles or authors. We analyse 6597 studies on environmental and ecological economics published between 2000 and 2009. We provide rankings of the influential articles, authors, journals and institutions and find that Ecological Economics, Energy Economics and the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management have the most influential articles, they publish very influential authors and their articles are cited most. The University of Maryland, Resources for the Future, the University of East Anglia and the World Bank appear to be the most influential institutions in the field of environmental and ecological economics.

Oxidized alginate hydrogels as niche environments for corneal epithelial cells

Chemical and biochemical modification of hydrogels is one strategy to create physiological constructs that maintain cell function. The aim of this study was to apply oxidised alginate hydrogels as a basis for development of a biomimetic niche for limbal epithelial stem cells that may be applied to treating corneal dysfunction. The stem phenotype of bovine limbal epithelial cells (LEC) and the viability of corneal epithelial cells (CEC) were examined in oxidised alginate gels containing collagen IV over a 3-day culture period. Oxidation increased cell viability (P

Parameterising ecological validity and integrating individual differences within second-person neuroscience

This commentary situates the second person account within a broader framework of ecological validity for experimental paradigms in social cognitive neuroscience. It then considers how individual differences at psychological and genetic levels can be integrated within the proposed framework.