Measured daily precipitation sums over Central Sulawesi for the period 1981-1999

Data compiled within the IMPENSO project. The Impact of ENSO on Sustainable Water Management and the Decision-Making Community at a Rainforest Margin in Indonesia (IMPENSO), http://www.gwdg.de/~impenso, was a German-Indonesian research project (2003-2007) that has studied the impact of ENSO (El Nino-Southern Oscillation) on the water resources and the agricultural production in the PALU RIVER watershed in Central Sulawesi. ENSO is a climate variability that causes serious droughts in Indonesia and other countries of South-East Asia. The last ENSO event occurred in 1997. As in other regions, many farmers in Central Sulawesi suffered from reduced crop yields and lost their livestock. A better prediction of ENSO and the development of coping strategies would help local communities mitigate the impact of ENSO on rural livelihoods and food security. The IMPENSO project deals with the impact of the climate variability ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation) on water resource management and the local communities in the Palu River watershed of Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. The project consists of three interrelated sub-projects, which study the local and regional manifestation of ENSO using the Regional Climate Models REMO and GESIMA (Sub-project A), quantify the impact of ENSO on the availability of water for agriculture and other uses, using the distributed hydrological model WaSiM-ETH (Sub-project B), and analyze the socio-economic impact and the policy implications of ENSO on the basis of a production function analysis, a household vulnerability analysis, and a linear programming model (Sub-project C). The models used in the three sub-projects will be integrated to simulate joint scenarios that are defined in collaboration with local stakeholders and are relevant for the design of coping strategies.

Negative effects of ocean acidification on two crustose coralline species using genetically homogeneous samples

We evaluated acidification effects on two crustose coralline algal species common to Pacific coral reefs, Lithophyllum kotschyanum and Hydrolithon samoense. We used genetically homogeneous samples of both species to eliminate misidentification of species. The growth rates and percent calcification of the walls of the epithallial cells (thallus surface cells) of both species decreased with increasing pCO2. However, elevated pCO2 more strongly inhibited the growth of L. kotschyanum versus H. samoense. The trend of decreasing percent calcification of the cell wall did not differ between these species, although intercellular calcification of the epithallial cells in L. kotschyanum was apparently reduced at elevated pCO2, a result that might indicate that there are differences in the solubility or density of the calcite skeletons of these two species. These results can provide knowledge fundamental to future studies of the physiological and genetic mechanisms that underlie the response of crustose coralline algae to environmental stresses.