Climate change 2014 - Synthesis Report

Agricultural ecosystems provide humans with food, forage, bioenergy and pharmaceuticals and are essential to human wellbeing. These systems rely on ecosystem services provided by natural ecosystems, including pollination, biological pest control, maintenance of soil structure and fertility, nutrient cycling and hydrological services. Preliminary assessments indicate that the value of these ecosystem services to agriculture is enormous and often underappreciated. Agroecosystems also produce a variety of ecosystem services, such as regulation of soil and water quality, carbon sequestration, support for biodiversity and cultural services. Depending on management practices, agriculture can also be the source of numerous disservices, including loss of wildlife habitat, nutrient runoff, sedimentation of waterways, greenhouse gas emissions, and pesticide poisoning of humans and non-target species. The tradeoffs that may occur between provisioning services and other ecosystem services and disservices should be evaluated in terms of spatial scale, temporal scale and reversibility. As more effective methods for valuing ecosystem services become available, the potential for ‘win–win’ scenarios increases. Under all scenarios, appropriate agricultural management practices are critical to realizing the benefits of ecosystem services and reducing disservices from agricultural activities.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rstb.2010.0143

Ecosystem services and agriculture: tradeoffs and synergies.

Understanding how landscape characteristics affect biodiversity patterns and ecological processes at local and landscape scales is critical for mitigating effects of global environmental change. In this review, we use knowledge gained from human-modified landscapes to suggest eight hypotheses, which we hope will encourage more systematic research on

/pdf/landscape-moderation-of-biodiversity-patterns-and-processes-pokn3pbbbx.pdf

Landscape moderation of biodiversity patterns and processes - eight hypotheses

https://ucanr.edu/sites/Jackson_Lab/files/155937.pdf

Global food security, biodiversity conservation and the future of agricultural intensification

. The System for Automated Geoscientific Analyses (SAGA) is an open source geographic information system (GIS), mainly licensed under the GNU General Public License. Since its first release in 2004, SAGA has rapidly developed from a specialized tool for digital terrain analysis to a comprehensive and globally established GIS platform for scientific analysis and modeling. SAGA is coded in C++ in an object oriented design and runs under several operating systems including Windows and Linux. Key functional features of the modular software architecture comprise an application programming interface for the development and implementation of new geoscientific methods, a user friendly graphical user interface with many visualization options, a command line interpreter, and interfaces to interpreted languages like R and Python. The current version 2.1.4 offers more than 600 tools, which are implemented in dynamically loadable libraries or shared objects and represent the broad scopes of SAGA in numerous fields of geoscientific endeavor and beyond. In this paper, we inform about the system's architecture, functionality, and its current state of development and implementation. Furthermore, we highlight the wide spectrum of scientific applications of SAGA in a review of published studies, with special emphasis on the core application areas digital terrain analysis, geomorphology, soil science, climatology and meteorology, as well as remote sensing.

/pdf/system-for-automated-geoscientific-analyses-saga-v-2-1-4-5c1e2q9p7x.pdf

System for Automated Geoscientific Analyses (SAGA) v. 2.1.4

Economic problems generate large secondary tropical forests due to crop abandonment; lianas (woody vines climbing upon trees) proliferate there. Lianas generally retard the growth and carbon capture of trees, potentially enhancing global change. It is not known whether all liana species play such a role and which land-use disturbances determined the cur rent species composition of liana communities. We surveyed all lianas >lcm diameter at ground level and all trees > 3.16 cm diameter at 1.3 m above ground in twelve plots 20 x 20-m each in semi-evergreen tropical forests in Northeastern Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, re-measuring the trees 15 mo later. Lianas were classified into two anatomic types: "hard" (typical stem with compact xylem masses) and "soft" (with much parenchyma and wide xylem vessels). History, archaeology, anthropol ogy, and remote sensing studies, as well as non-formal interviews were used to determine the land-use history of each stand. Increasing densities of the hard liana Dalbergia glabra (Leguminosae), but not of soft lianas ?Arrabidaea spp, Cydista sp, Melloa spp (Bignoniaceae) and Serjania sp (Sapindaceae), were related to more rapid relative growth rates of trees (Linear regression, R2 = 0.680, P = 0.001). Where D. glabra dominated, the trees hosting it grew more rapidly, but trees with large liana-tangles grew more slowly where soft lianas were dominant (Kruskall Wallis, P > 0.01 in both cases). The anatomy of soft lianas sug gests that they are less able to survive burn after slash during shifting cultivation than D. glabra the previous land use where D. glabra dominated. Soft-liana dominated stands were not burnt but subjected to liana-cut during logging and extraction of lianas, palm leaves and latex from Manilkara %apota trees. Our results suggest that some lianas enhance carbon capture mitigating global change, whereas others do not and that the dominance of one liana species is a legacy of previous land use, which is better understood by combining natural and social sciences.

Land-use history and the origins and effects of lianas on tree-communities. The case of secondary forests in Northeastern Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico.

Using precipitation measurements from 12 meteorological stations and rectified NDVI values from GIMMS (AVHRR), this study provides information about the connections between precipitation trends/variability and degradation in southern Río Negro (North Patagonia, Argentina), after analyzing the behaviour of these two components separately. For the period 1972-2005 a significant precipitation increase was detected in two meteorological stations in the eastern part of the province. The Subandean vegetation district also presents a significant precipitation increase for the period 1982-2003. Precipitation amounts in the study region show both high seasonal and interannual variability. The interannual variability shows a significant positive trend in some meteorological stations in the south and west. Many annual precipitation anomalies were detected, but they could not be connected with El Niño Southern Oscillation or La Niña Southern Oscillation. Most regions show a decrease of the maximal NDVI for the period 1982-2003. The negative trend caused a mean decrease of 2.7% of the maximal NDVI in 22 years and could be taken as an indicator of degradation increase. In the central and eastern part of the study area there are significant positive correlations between the annual precipitation amounts and the maximal NDVI, indicating that part of the interannual NDVI variation can be explained by a linear dependence to precipitation. However anomalies of both quantities seldom coincide. The negative NDVI trend in the western and southern part of the region might be related to the positive trend of the interannual precipitation variability. This study suggests that land use strategies (and specially sheep numbers per hectare) have to be managed in a flexible way, in order to be adapted to precipitation amounts every growing season and the increasing precipitation variability in the future.

Precipitation variability and landscape degradation in Río Negro (Argentina)

Regionalisierung der Abflußbildung über die Aggregierung homogener Flächen unter Verwendung des Geographischen Informationssystems ARC/INFO und der Digitalen Reliefanalyse (Programm SARA)

Stormflow influence on nutrient dynamics in micro-catchments under contrasting land use in the Cerrado and Amazon Biomes, Brazil

In Brazilian Amazonia over 750,000 km2 of forest has been cut down from 1970s until 2013 (NoGueira et al. 2015). During this period, Amazonian deforestation rates have always increased until 2003/2004 (INPE 2014; Nepstad et al. 2014), and after a considerable deceleration until 2013 (Boucher et al. 2013), the trend has returned to increase (schöNeNBerG et al. 2015). The conversion of rainforest and Cerrado into cattle pastures and agricultural land has various impacts on biodiversity, carbon stocks and carbon emissions, which are currently discussed in science, society and politics in the context of climate change (FearNside 2005; cox et al. 2000; Malhi et al. 2008). The massive land-use change occurring in the Amazon region attracts world-wide attention, as the Brazilian Amazon is of key importance for the (i) global and regional climate system, (ii) the global and regional water cycle, (iii) the planets genetic resources and (iv) the human cultural heritage. On top of this, the Brazilian Amazon is the world’s most prominent biomass carbon (C) pool, with 149 Mg C ha-1 being stored aboveand below-ground according to NoGueira et al. (2015) and the threat of losing all this carbon to the atmosphere is what explains a large part of the attention being currently paid to the fate of the Amazon rainforest. However, soares-Filho et al. (2006) predicted another 2.7 million km2 of deforestation until 2050 under “business-as-usual”-scenarios and another 0.5 million km2 was earlier expected for the Brazilian savannas (resck et al. 2000), which today presents a highly fragmented Cerrado landscape as a result. The Brazilian Government and international organizations have developed action programs with high priority on land use change, nature conservation, climate change mitigation and development of sustainable land management practices (e.g. related to the Kyoto-process, Brazilian ABC-program, National Climate Plan of Brazil, Amazon Fund; FearNside 2005; Nepstad et al. 2014; soares-Filho 2010; assuNcao et al. 2012; strassBurG et al. 2014). Officially, Brazil aims at reducing deforestation by 80 % for the Amazon by 2020 (soares-Filho et al. 2010). Since August 2014, deforestation soars again after clear-cutting of mature forest had declined from 19,500 km2 a–1 to 5,843 km2 in 2013 as a result of public policy and frontier governance (PPCDAm: Plan for the Protection and Control of Deforestation in the Amazon; Soy Moratorium; Cattle Moratorium, Arco Verde+, Critical Counties program, Amazon Region Protected Areas Program; FearNside 2015; Nepstad et al. 2014; tolleFsoN 2015). Up until today, deforestation concentrated in the “arc of deforestation” along the eastern and southern edges of the Amazon (see Fig. 2 in BarNi et al. 2015). Impact of land-use change (LUC) on various separate ecosystem services (ESS), including C sequestration and climate system stability, has been studied and presented in numerous research articles for the Amazon region. However, a more holistic examination which considers multiple ESSs in the context of local drivers and actors has not yet been sufficiently advanced. In fact, for many ESS touched by LUC in the Amazon region (FearNside 2005), contrasting – partly contradictory – patterns and processes have been reported (Tab. 1). This underlines the demand for an interdisciplinary, if not transdisciplinary approach to investigate, how the region at the Southern Amazon land-use frontier will develop in future and which consequences will likely arise for the local and global climate, biodiversity and society.

Gerhard Gerold

Papers

Land-use history and the origins and effects of lianas on tree-communities. The case of secondary forests in Northeastern Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico.

Precipitation variability and landscape degradation in Río Negro (Argentina)

Regionalisierung der Abflußbildung über die Aggregierung homogener Flächen unter Verwendung des Geographischen Informationssystems ARC/INFO und der Digitalen Reliefanalyse (Programm SARA)

Stormflow influence on nutrient dynamics in micro-catchments under contrasting land use in the Cerrado and Amazon Biomes, Brazil

Impacts of carbon-optimised land use management in Southern Amazonia – multi-disciplinary perspectives: An Introduction