Browse Items (128 total)
- Collection: Environmental Systems & Societies
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Agriculture: Increase water harvesting in Africa
Meeting global food needs requires strategies for storing rainwater and retaining soil moisture to bridge dry spells
Long-term decline of the Amazon carbon sink
The capacity of Amazonian forests to sequester carbon has weakened with potentially important implications for climate change.
Intensification and spatial homogenization of coastal upwelling under climate change
An ensemble of climate models shows that by the end of the twenty-first century the coastal upwelling season near the eastern boundaries of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans will start earlier, end later and become more intense at high latitudes, thus…
Seismic evidence of effects of water on melt transport in the Lau back-arc mantle
Tomographically derived seismic velocities are used to infer the distribution of partial melt below the Lau Basin, revealing an unexpected relationship between the amount of in situ melt and the water content of the magma, indicating that subducted…
The benefits of traditional knowledge
A study of two Balkan ethnic groups living in close proximity finds that traditional knowledge about local plant resources helps communities to cope with periods of famine, and can promote the conservation of biodiversity.
Drought impact on forest carbon dynamics and fluxes in Amazonia
Severe drought in a tropical forest ecosystem suppresses photosynthetic carbon uptake and plant maintenance respiration, but growth is maintained, suggesting that, overall, less carbon is available for tree tissue maintenance and defence, which may…
Defining the Anthropocene
Time is divided by geologists according to marked shifts in Earth’s state. Recent global environmental changes suggest that Earth may have entered a new human-dominated geological epoch, the Anthropocene. Here we review the historical genesis of the…
Decrease in CO2 efflux from northern hardwater lakes with increasing atmospheric warming
Boreal lakes are biogeochemical hotspots that alter carbon fluxes by sequestering particulate organic carbon in sediments1, 2 and by oxidizing terrestrial dissolved organic matter to carbon dioxide (CO2) or methane through microbial processes3, 4. At…
Increases in tropical rainfall driven by changes in frequency of organized deep convection
An increase in the frequency of organized deep convection—essentially a large aggregation of heavily precipitating and largely stratiform clouds—is behind most of the recent increases in tropical precipitation.
Global effects of land use on local terrestrial biodiversity
Analysis of a global data set of local biodiversity comparisons reveals an average 13.6% reduction in species richness and 10.7% reduction in abundance as a result of past human land use, and projections based on these data under a business-as-usual…
Climate change and the permafrost carbon feedback
A large amount of organic carbon stored in frozen Arctic soils (permafrost) could be released as carbon dioxide and methane in a warming climate, which would accelerate the pace of climate change; this review suggests that release of greenhouse gas…
Icebergs not the trigger for North Atlantic cold events
A delay between surface cooling and the arrival of ice-rafted debris at a site southwest of Iceland over the past four glacial cycles implies that icebergs typically arrived too late to have triggered cooling, although the freshwater derived from…
Recovery potential of the world's coral reef fishes
A study of the recovery potential of over 800 of the world's coral reefs shows that 83% of fished reefs are missing more than half their expected biomass, with severe consequences for key ecosystem functions; protection from fishing would allow full…
Precise interpolar phasing of abrupt climate change during the last ice age
A new ice core from West Antarctica shows that, during the last ice age, abrupt Northern Hemisphere climate variations were followed two centuries later by a response in Antarctica, suggesting an oceanic propagation of the climate signal to the…
Beauty varies with the light
Experimental work on guppies suggests that variation in light between microhabitats is what makes females prefer different male signal combinations, thus explaining the evolution and persistence of colour variation in males.
The formation and fate of internal waves in the South China Sea
Internal oceanic waves are subsurface gravity waves that can be enormous and travel thousands of kilometres before breaking but they are difficult to study; here observations of such waves in the South China Sea reveal their formation mechanism,…
