Environmental Issues
Environmental Issues
Filter Total Items: 23
Scaling tropical wetland methane fluxes regionally and globally
Wetlands purify water and absorb carbon dioxide but release large amounts of methane. Tropical wetlands are also one of the least understood ecosystems on earth. This knowledge gap is unfortunate because science projects tropical methane emissions to rise. Determining if and when they do will require a baseline—a global synthesis of tropical emissions and their predictors.
A Global Synthesis of Flood Impacts: Understanding the Country-level Vulnerability and Causes
The escalating flood impacts on natural resources, built infrastructure, and human society have become a pressing global concern in the 21st century.
Defining subsidy–stress gradients for metals and relevance for US surface waters
Metals like iron, copper, and zinc are naturally occurring in soils and water, and they are important essential nutrients for animals and plants.
Are we experiencing a riverine silicon surge? Implications for the global carbon cycle
The amounts of silicon (Si), nitrogen (N), and phosphorus (P) in rivers are crucial for determining which types of algae grow.
Markov decision processes in non-autonomous socio-ecological systems
Our ability to effectively manage natural resources is founded in an understanding of how our actions and the environment influence populations, communities, and ecosystems. Current practices use monitoring data from the past to determine key ecological relationships and make predictions about the future with the assumption that those relationships will remain constant. However, many...
Using a multi-scale approach to synthesize measurements and models of C4 photosynthesis
Plants convert carbon dioxide into sugars for food during photosynthesis, and this provides food for all animal life. However, photosynthesis is inhibited when a plant’s enzymes use oxygen instead of carbon dioxide. To avoid this use of oxygen, some plants developed a photosynthetic adaptation – called C4 photosynthesis – to concentrate carbon dioxide around the enzymes. While less than...
Ecological Forecasting Workshop
Natural resource managers are coping with rapid changes in both environmental conditions and ecosystems. Enabled by recent advances in data collection and assimilation, short-term ecological forecasting may be a powerful tool to help resource managers anticipate impending changes in ecosystem dynamics (that is, the approaching near-term changes in ecosystems). Managers may use the...
Novel multi‐scale synthesis of nitrogen fixation rates and drivers across the terrestrial biosphere
Biological nitrogen fixation (BNF) is a critical biogeochemical process that converts inert atmospheric N2 gas into biologically usable forms of the essential nutrient nitrogen. A variety of free-living and symbiotic organisms carry out BNF, and in most regions worldwide, BNF is the largest source of nitrogen that fuels terrestrial ecosystems. As a result, BNF has far reaching effects on...
A global synthesis of land-surface fluxes under natural and human-altered watersheds using the Budyko framework
Global hydroclimatic conditions have been significantly altered, over the past century, by anthropogenic influences that arise from warming global climate and also from local/regional anthropogenic disturbances. There has been never been an effort that has systematically analyzed how the spatio-temporal variability of land-surface fluxes vary in natural and human-altered watersheds...
Linking environmental and public health data to evaluate health effects of arsenic exposure from domestic and public supply wells
Everyone needs clean drinking water in order to thrive. The US EPA and public water purveyors in the US work together in adherence with the Safe Drinking Water Act to make water safe for public consumption. The recent media coverage of lead in public drinking water supplies in Flint, Michigan, and schools in many cities with aging infrastructure throughout the US has raised public...
Global Evaluation of the Impacts of Storms on freshwater Habitat and Structure of phytoplankton Assemblages (GEISHA)
Climate change is expected to cause more intense and frequent extreme weather events, but we only have a basic understanding of how these events might alter freshwater systems. Storms are likely to impact lake systems through delivery of sediments from watersheds and mixing of the water column, both of which could have important consequences for phytoplankton. Phytoplankton are the base...
Local-scale ecosystem resilience amid global-scale ocean change: the coral reef example
Coral reefs are massive, wave resistant structures found throughout the tropics, where they have long attracted attention for their beauty, ecological importance, and rich biological diversity. However, in recent years attention to these systems has focused on their downturn in health and the potential that they effectively could disappear within a century. Yet while many coral reefs...