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Terrestrial water fluxes dominated by transpiration
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Renewable fresh water over continents has input from precipitation and losses to the atmosphere through evaporation and transpiration .... The dominance of transpiration water fluxes in continental evapotranspiration suggests that, from the point of view of water resource forecasting, climate model development should prioritize improvements in simulations of biological fluxes rather than physical (evaporation) fluxes.
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Land use efficiency: anticipating future demand for land-sector greenhouse gas emissions abatement and managing trade-offs with agriculture, water, and biodiversity
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Competition for land is increasing, and policy needs to ensure the efficient supply of multiple ecosystem services from land systems. We modelled the spatially explicit potential future supply of ecosystem services in Australia’s intensive agricultural land in response to carbon markets under four global outlooks from 2013 to 2050. We assessed the productive efficiency of greenhouse gas emissions abatement, agricultural production, water resources, and biodiversity services and compared these to production possibility frontiers (PPFs). While interacting commodity markets and carbon markets produced efficient outcomes for agricultural production and emissions abatement, more efficient outcomes were possible for water resources and biodiversity services due to weak price signals. However, when only two objectives were considered as per typical efficiency assessments, efficiency improvements involved significant unintended trade-offs for the other objectives and incurred substantial opportunity costs. Considering multiple objectives simultaneously enabled the identification of land use arrangements that were efficient over multiple ecosystem services. Efficient land use arrangements could be selected that meet society’s preferences for ecosystem service provision from land by adjusting the metric used to combine multiple services. To effectively manage competition for land via land use efficiency, market incentives are needed that effectively price multiple ecosystem services.
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Transforming Consumption: From Decoupling, to Behavior Change, to System Changes for Sustainable Consumption
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Consumption, although often considered an individual choice, is deeply ingrained in behaviors, cultures, and institutions, and is driven and supported by corporate and government practices. Consumption is also at the heart of many of our most critical ecological, health, and social problems. What is referred to broadly as sustainable consumption has primarily focused on making consumption more efficient and gradually decoupling it from energy and resource use. We argue for the need to focus sustainable consumption initiatives on the key impact areas of consumption—transport, housing, energy use, and food—and at deeper levels of system change. To meet the scale of the sustainability challenges we face, interventions and policies must move from relative decoupling via technological improvements, to strategies to change the behavior of individual consumers, to broader initiatives to change systems of production and consumption. We seek to connect these emerging literatures on behavior change, structural interventions, and sustainability transitions to arrive at integrated frameworks for learning, iteration, and scaling of sustainability innovations. We sketch the outlines of research and practice that offer potentials for system changes for truly sustainable consumption.
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Livestock and the Environment: What Have We Learned in the Past Decade?
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The livestock and environment nexus has been the subject of considerable research in the past decade. With a more prosperous and urbanized population projected to grow significantly in the coming decades comes a
gargantuan appetite for livestock products. There is growing concern about how to accommodate this increase in demand with a low environmental footprint and without eroding the economic, social, and cultural benefits that livestock provide. Most of the effort has focused on sustainably intensifying livestock systems. Two things have characterized the research on livestock and the environment in the past decade: the development of increasingly disaggregated and sophisticated methods for assessing different types of environmental impacts (climate, water, nutrient cycles, biodiversity, land degradation, deforestation, etc.) and a focus on examining the technical potential of many options for reducing the environmental footprint of livestock systems. However, the economic or sociocultural feasibility of these options is seldom considered. Now is the time to move this agenda from knowledge to action, toward realizable goals. This will require a better understanding of incentives and constraints for farmers to adopt new practices and the design of novel policies to support transformative changes in the livestock sector. It will also require novel forms of engagement, interaction, and consensus building among stakeholders with enormously diverse objectives. Additionally, we have come to realize that managing the demand trajectories of livestock products must be part of the solution space, and this is an increasingly important research area for simultaneously achieving positive health and environmental outcomes.
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Landscape perspectives on agricultural intensification and biodiversity – ecosystem service management
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Understanding the negative and positive effects of agricultural land use for the conservation of biodiversity, and its relation to ecosystem services, needs a landscape perspective. Agriculture can contribute to the conservation of high-diversity systems, which may provide important ecosystem services such as pollination and biological control via complementarity and sampling effects. Land-use management is often focused on few species and local processes, but in dynamic, agricultural landscapes, only a diversity of insurance species may guarantee resilience (the capacity to reorganize after disturbance). Interacting species experience their surrounding landscape at different spatial scales, which influences trophic interactions. Structurally complex landscapes enhance local diversity in agroecosystems, which may compensate for local high- intensity management. Organisms with high-dispersal abilities appear to drive these biodiversity patterns and ecosystem services, because of their recolonization ability and larger resources experienced. Agri-environment schemes (incentives for farmers to benefit the environment) need to broaden their perspective and to take the different responses to schemes in simple (high impact) and complex (low impact) agricultural landscapes into account. In simple landscapes, local allocation of habitat is more important than in complex landscapes, which are in total at risk. However, little knowledge of the relative importance of local and landscape management for biodiversity and its relation to ecosystem services make reliable recommendations difficult.
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Wildlife-friendly farming increases crop yield: evidence for ecological intensification
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Ecological intensification has been promoted as a means to achieve environmentally sustainable increases in crop yields by enhancing ecosystem functions that regulate and support production. There is, however, little direct evidence of yield benefits from ecological intensification on commercial farms growing globally important foodstuffs (grains, oilseeds and pulses). We replicated two treatments removing 3 or 8% of land at the field edge from production to create wildlife habitat in 50–60 ha patches over a 900 ha commercial arable farm in central England, and compared these to a business as usual control (no land removed). In the control fields, crop yields were reduced by as much as 38% at the field edge. Habitat creation in these lower yielding areas led to increased yield in the cropped areas of the fields, and this positive effect became more pronounced over 6 years. As a consequence, yields at the field scale were maintained—and, indeed, enhanced for some crops—despite the loss of cropland for habitat creation. These results suggested that over a 5-year crop rotation, there would be no adverse impact on overall yield in terms of monetary value or nutritional energy. This study provides a clear demonstration that wildlife-friendly management which supports ecosystem services is compatible with, and can even increase, crop yields.
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Long-term census data reveal abundant wildlife populations at Chernobyl
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Relative abundances of elk, roe deer, red deer and wild boar within the Chernobyl exclusion zone are similar to those in four (uncontaminated) nature reserves in the region and wolf abundance is more than 7 times higher. Additionally, our earlier helicopter survey data show rising trends in elk, roe deer and wild boar abundances from one to ten years post-accident. These results demonstrate for the first time that, regardless of potential radiation effects on individual animals, the Chernobyl exclusion zone supports an abundant mammal community after nearly three decades of chronic radiation exposures.
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Life history influences rates of climatic niche evolution in flowering plants
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Across angiosperms, variable rates of molecular substitution are linked with life-history attributes associ- ated with woody and herbaceous growth forms. As the number of generations per unit time is correlated with molecular substitution rates, it is expected that rates of phenotypic evolution would also be influenced by differences in generation times. Here, we make the first broad-scale comparison of growth-form-dependent rates of niche evolution. We examined the climatic niches of species on large time-calibrated phylogenies of five angiosperm clades and found that woody lineages have accumulated fewer changes per million years in climatic niche space than related herbaceous lineages. Also, climate space explored by woody lineages is consistently smaller than sister lineages composed mainly of herbaceous taxa. This pattern is probably linked to differences in the rate of climatic niche evolution. These results have implications for niche conservatism; in particular, the role of niche conservatism in the distribution of plant biodiversity. The consistent differences in the rate of climatic niche evolution also emphasize the need to incorporate models of phenotypic evolution that allow for rate heterogeneity when examining large datasets.
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Wild Pollinators Enhance Fruit Set of Crops Regardless of Honey Bee Abundance
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The diversity and abundance of wild insect pollinators have declined in many agricultural landscapes. Whether such declines reduce crop yields, or are mitigated by managed pollinators such as honey bees, is unclear. We found universally positive associations of fruit set with flower visitation by wild insects in 41 crop systems worldwide. In contrast, fruit set increased significantly with flower visitation by honey bees in only 14% of the systems surveyed. Overall, wild insects pollinated crops more effectively; an increase in wild insect visitation enhanced fruit set by twice as much as an equivalent increase in honey bee visitation. Visitation by wild insects and honey bees promoted fruit set independently, so pollination by managed honey bees supplemented, rather than substituted for, pollination by wild insects. Our results suggest that new practices for integrated management of both honey bees and diverse wild insect assemblages will enhance global crop yields.
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Forests of the Past: A Window to Future Changes
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he study of past forest change provides a necessary historical context for evaluating the outcome of human-induced climate change and biological invasions. Retrospective analyses based on fossil and genetic data greatly advance our understanding of tree colonization, adaptation, and extinction in response to past climatic change. For instance, these analyses reveal cryptic refugia near or north of continental ice sheets, leading to reevaluation of postglacial tree migration rates. Species extinctions appear to have occurred primarily during periods of high climatic variability. Transoceanic dispersal and colonization in the tropics were widespread at geological time scales, inconsistent with the idea that tropical forests are particularly resistant to biological invasions.
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