The impacts of agricultural payments on groundwater quality: Spatial analysis on the case of Slovenia

The European Common Agricultural Policy still follows its primary goals, i.e. quality food at affordable prices and a decent standard of living for farmers, fifty years after its adoption. Moreover, this policy adapts to the changing needs of society and the new challenges, mostly preservation of the environment, nature and biodiversity in rural areas. Although the Common Agricultural Policy receives the largest share of European budget, the funds are decreasing over time, especially direct payments, which aim to provide basic income support to farmers in the European Union. On the other hand, agri-environmental payments are gaining importance. Policy decision-makers should be interested in the question of impacts of growing eco-conditionality of agricultural spending. New insights would help them to be successful in achieving the goals of sustainable agriculture. The purpose of this paper is to estimate the impacts of production support payments and rural development payments on the quality of groundwater. We use the small EU country Slovenia as an example. The baseline indicators are the level of nitrates and pesticides in groundwater, while the impacts were estimated using spatial error model. The results show that direct payments, coupled subsidies and investment grants raise the level of pesticides in groundwater, but do not have any statistically significant impact on the level of nitrates in groundwater. Furthermore, we did not find any statistically significant effects of agri-environmental payments on decrease of groundwater pollution with nitrates. However, our findings revealed that agri-environmental payments are effective in reducing pesticides in groundwater, although only to a limited extent. These results imply a problem of insufficient targeting of agri-environmental measures on the one hand, and suggest that greening of direct payments is necessary and entirely justified.     

Climate change and alpine stream biology: progress,challenges, and opportunities for the future

In alpine regions worldwide, climate change is dramatically altering ecosystems and affecting biodiversity in many ways. For streams, receding alpine glaciers and snowfields, paired with altered precipitation regimes, are driving shifts in hydrology, species distributions, basal resources, and threatening the very existence of some habitats and biota. Alpine streams harbour substantial species and genetic diversity due to significant habitat insularity and environmental heterogeneity. Climate change is expected to affect alpine stream biodiversity across many levels of biological resolution from micro‐ to macroscopic organisms and genes to communities. Herein, we describe the current state of alpine stream biology from an organism‐focused perspective. We begin by reviewing seven standard and emerging approaches that combine to form the current state of the discipline. We follow with a call for increased synthesis across existing approaches to improve understanding of how these imperiled ecosystems are responding to rapid environmental change. We then take a forward‐looking viewpoint on how alpine stream biologists can make better use of existing data sets through temporal comparisons, integrate remote sensing and geographic information system (GIS) technologies, and apply genomic tools to refine knowledge of underlying evolutionary processes. We conclude with comments about the future of biodiversity conservation in alpine streams to confront the daunting challenge of mitigating the effects of rapid environmental change in these sentinel ecosystems.     

Analyses of landuse change impacts on catchment runoff using different time indicators based on SWAT model

Previous researches mainly focused on the runoff responses to landuse change based on annual, seasonal or monthly time scales, there are few studies based on daily scale. We conducted a comprehensive investigation into runoff responses on the daily scale as well as annual and monthly time scales using SWAT, and compared the impacts of time scales with different time indicators quantitatively. Jinjiang, a coastal catchment of southeast China with a humid sub-tropical climate, was used for simulations. A calibrated SWAT model produced satisfactory reproduction of annual, monthly and daily runoff processes over a nine-year (2002–2010) period at three gauging stations. Runoff was then simulated and compared using the same meteorological input but two different landuse scenarios (1985 and 2006, with reduced forest and increased cropland and urbanized area). The results showed varying change in runoff among three time scales and three catchments. The annual runoff had the smallest increase between two scenarios, monthly runoffs had medium rates (increasing in all months except October–November), and daily runoff had the largest rates with the increase in flood peaks but decrease in drought flows, because of the variable influence on interception/evapotranspiration loss, percolation and antecedent soil water storage. Indicators of different time scales (annual runoff, monthly runoff, maximum 1-day and 5-day flood runoff, minimum 1-day and 7-day runoff) proved appropriate for analysing landuse change impacts.     

Challenges in the design of indicators for assessing the impact of the Scotland Rural Development Programme 2007–2013 on climate change mitigation

This paper addresses the use of impact indicators with respect to climate change in the 2007–2013 Rural Development Programme (RDP) of the European Union, with particular reference to the Scotland Rural Development Programme (SRDP). It concludes that the policy context has highlighted the need for the rural land use sector to respond to climate change but that the associated Common Monitoring and Evaluation Framework (CMEF) did not develop suitable indicators to assess the impact of SDRP measures on GHG emission mitigation. It suggests improved impact indicators based on the relationship between rural land use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions: first, an indicator based on net GHG emissions per holding; and a second based on net GHG emissions per unit volume of output. The paper points out the challenges in measuring land-based emissions accurately. It further proposes screening of RDP measures to ensure that climate change mitigation impacts are properly appraised. It is recognised that climate change policy in relation to rural land use is still at an early stage of development but greater sophistication of policy instrument design and evaluation will be required if the RDP is to contribute significantly to climate change policy objectives.     

中国西北干旱区蒸散发时空动态特征

利用MODIS ET数据集中2000—2014年的地表实际蒸散发量产品,运用变异系数、Theil-Sen median趋势分析与MannKendall检验和Hurst指数法,研究了中国西北干旱区蒸散发的空间格局、不同维度的空间异质性和时间变化特征及未来趋势预测。结果表明:(1)2000—2014年全区蒸散发量总体较小,蒸散发量小于200 mm的区域占总面积的38.329%。在空间上ET自山区向两侧平原减少,不同土地覆盖的ET大小为:林地农用地草地稀疏植被。受降水和土地覆盖的综合影响,ET的高值区(400 mm)主要在降水丰富的山区林地和草地,而低值区(200 mm)主要在降水较少的平原稀疏植被区和草地。(2)近15年全区蒸散发变异程度不明显,以相对较低的波动变化为主。各亚区内波动较低区域的比例为:北疆天山祁连山内蒙西部河西走廊南疆。(3)15年间全区年均蒸散发量呈波动变化,总体有微弱的减小趋势,变化率为-0.9348 mm/a。基于像元尺度的分析也表明全区ET以减小的变化趋势为主,但各亚区的减小程度各异:天山内蒙西部河西走廊北疆祁连山,仅南疆有增加趋势。(4)全区ET的Hurst指数均值为0.689,Hurst指数大于0.5的范围所占比例为80.033%,未来全区蒸散发的变化趋势以持续性减小为主。其中22.003%区域的变化趋势无法确定。未来各亚区ET的减少趋势为:内蒙西部天山河西走廊北疆祁连山南疆。     

Birth seasonality,photoperiod, and social change in the Central Canadian Arctic

Birth seasonally at high latitudes is a complex phenomenon which is undoubtedly affected by a subtle interaction between environmental rhythmicity (most notably in photoperiod and temperature) and cultural adaption. There is intriguing evidence that human gonadotrophic activity (and hence fertility) may be affected by seasonal fluctuations in light intensity and duration. Nevertheless, cultural factors are important insofar as they mediate between environmental rhythmicity and human fertility/birth patterns. This article examines the distribution of births over several decades in an Inuit community located 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Several shifts in birth seasonality are noted, the most significant of which is a dramatic shift from pronounced seasonality in the 1970s to non-seasonality in the 1980s. Longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork has allowed an examination of social and economic changes accounting for the rather sudden disappearance of birth seasonality. These include increasing reliance upon wage employment and social assistance, decreased dependence upon subsistence hunting and trapping, changing attitudes on the part of young people entering their prime reproductive years, and the introduction of television, radio, and southern-style recreational activities.     

Plant functional types and climatic change: Introduction

Abstract. Plant functional types are a necessary device for reducing the complex and often uncharted characteristics of species diversity in function and structure when attempting to project the nature and function of species assemblages into future environments. A workshop was held to review the current methods commonly used for defining plant functional types, either globally or for particular biomes, and to compare them with the field experiences of specialists for specific biomes of the world. The methods fall into either an objective and inductive approach or a subjective and deductive approach. When the different methods were tested, it was generally found that the classification for one site or environment was not wholly applicable to a different site or environment. However, the degree of change which is necessary for adjustment between environments may not prove to be a major limitation in the use of functional types.