Global change and the intensification of agriculture in the tropics

Bridging understanding of local environmental change with regional and global patterns of land-use and land-cover change (LUCC) remains a key goal and challenge for our understanding of global environmental change. This meta-analysis attempts to bridge local and regional scales of LUCC by demonstrating the ways in which previously published case studies can be compared and used for a broader regional synthesis in the tropics. In addition to providing results from a meta-analysis, this paper suggests ways to make future case studies more widely comparable.     

Building comparable global change vulnerability assessments: The vulnerability scoping diagram

Advancing vulnerability science depends in part on identifying common themes from multiple, independent vulnerability assessments. Such insights are difficult to produce when the assessments use dissimilar, often qualitative, measures. The Vulnerability Scoping Diagram is presented to facilitate the comparison of assessments with dissimilar measures. The diagram is illustrated with recent research on drought vulnerabilities, showing that common insights into vulnerability may emerge if independent research teams use a common structure for organizing information about exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity—even if the underlying measures differ between assessments. Broadly adopting this technique, which is grounded in the “Eight Steps” methodological protocol [Schröter, D., Polsky, C., Patt, A., 2005. Assessing vulnerabilities to the effects of global change: an eight step approach. Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change 10(4), 573–595], will enable a vulnerability meta-analysis, the lessons from which may permit places to identify helpful adaptation or mitigation options without first having to conduct their own vulnerability assessments.     

Evaluating the economic damage of climate change on global coral reefs

This paper evaluates the global economic damage arising from the effects of climate change and associated carbon dioxide concentrations on the loss of coral reefs. We do this by first estimating the effects of sea surface temperature and carbon dioxide concentrations on coral cover. We develop a statistical relationship between coral coverage and sea surface temperature that indicates that the effects are dependent on the temperature range. For example, we find that increasing sea surface temperature causes coral coverage to decrease when sea surface temperature is higher than 26.85 °C, with the estimated reduction being 2.3% when sea surface temperature increases by 1%. In addition, we find that a 1% carbon dioxide increase induces a 0.6% reduction in global coral coverage. We also estimate the resultant loss in economic value based on a meta-analysis of the recreational and commercial value of reef coverage and a crude proportional approach for other value factors. The meta-analysis shows that the coral reef value decreases by 3.8% when coral cover falls by 1%. By combining these two steps we find that the lost value in terms of the global coral reef value under climate change scenarios ranges from US$3.95 to US$23.78 billion annually.     

双源CT对冠脉搭桥术后桥血管评价的Meta分析

目的:利用循证医学方法,对双源CT评价冠状动脉搭桥术(CABG)后桥血管狭窄程度的价值进行Meta分析。方法:检索CNKI、万方、维普数据库以及Cochrance Library、PubMed、OVID、Embase等外文数据库,搜索双源CT诊断桥血管狭窄程度的诊断性试验。对纳入资料使用Meta-disc1.4软件进行分析计算,计算合并敏感度、特异度和诊断比值比。结果:最终入选5篇文献,其合并敏感度、特异度和诊断比值比分别为99%、99%、4984,受试者工作特征曲线下面积为99.84%。结论:双源CT对于CABG后桥血管的评价具有很高的诊断效能和临床意义。      

Meta分析在深部找矿预测中的应用——以铜陵铜山铜矿为例

为了深入研究找矿技术方法的优选和集成,引入了"有效性"的概念来衡量某种探测技术方法的找矿预测效果.Meta分析是一种起源于医学领域,对具备特定条件的、同类研究主题的大量研究结果进行综合后统计的超常规综合统计方法.文中对引入Meta分析的思路和可行性充分分析论证后,以铜山铜矿为例,首次应用Meta分析方法对CSAMT,TEM,EH4三种物探方法所获得的二维反演剖面进行了三种方法找矿预测的有效性定量对比研究.结果表明,在铜山铜矿前山南测区,CSAMT法与EH4法的找矿预测有效性比TEM法明显要高;而CSAMT法和EH4法的找矿预测有效性没有明显差异.     

Classifying knowledge on climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability in Europe for informing adaptation research and decision-making: A conceptual meta-analysis

Knowledge on climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability is fragmented, because it is found in disparate case studies which use inconsistent terminology and focus on distinct aspects relevant to adaptation. While large-scale syntheses such as the Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change provide a high level overview and are useful for international decision-making, there is a need for systematic and flexible access to this research-based knowledge in order to aid future adaptation research and decision-making. Against this background, we present a ‘conceptual’ meta-analysis, a novel approach to meta-analyse studies on climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability in Europe. The meta-analysis results in a classification scheme for relating the diverse studies. This scheme consists of (i) a classification of studies according to the type of adaptation-relevant results they produce and (ii) a hierarchical classification of the regional and thematic context of studies. The implementation of this scheme, for example in the form of a database, overcomes some of the identified gaps of current adaptation knowledge representation. We furthermore present a quantitative analysis of the classified studies that exemplifies how the developed classification scheme can be applied to get a systematic and quantitative overview of the knowledge they contain. Thus, the conceptual meta-analysis and the classification scheme represent a first step towards a systematisation of knowledge on climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability and may be seen as a useful complement to qualitative literature reviews.     

Sustainable livelihoods in the global land rush? Archetypes of livelihood vulnerability and sustainability potentials

Large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) have become a major concern for land use sustainability at a global scale. A considerable body of case studies has shown that the livelihood outcomes of LSLAs vary, but the understanding of factors and processes that generate these livelihood outcomes remains controversial and fragmented in terms of cases, contexts, and normative orientations. Therefore, this study presents a meta-analysis of case studies and applies the archetypes approach developed in global change research to analyse the configurations of factors and processes that generate different livelihood outcomes in LSLA situations. The analysis is based on 44 systematically selected studies covering 66 cases in 21 countries in Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe. The results show that LSLAs affect rural livelihoods through a small set of archetypical configurations. Adverse livelihood outcomes arise most frequently from processes of (1) enclosure of livelihood assets, (2) elite capture, (3) selective marginalisation of people already living in difficult conditions, and (4) polarisation of development discourses, and less frequently from (5) competitive exclusion, (6) agribusiness failure, and (7) transient jobs. The processes are activated in specific configurations of social-ecological factors. Moving beyond diagnosis, the paper identifies archetypical potentials for safeguarding or enhancing sustainable livelihoods in LSLA target regions at multiple levels of decision-making. Finally, we analyse how contextual factors modify these general insights. This paper helps to advance the archetypes methodology for use in global change research that aims at integral analysis of recurrent patterns expressed in local manifestations. The results can be used to better link local case studies with regional and global inventories of the global land rush.     

湿地价值评估尺度转换方法——Meta分析研究概述

湿地价值评估中的尺度转换是通过一个已经有的、与被估算生态系统相似的另一生态系统的价值来估算该湿地生态系统的价值量的过程。Meta分析(Meta-Analysis)是一种定量其他评价效应的大小,并进行综合分析评价的方法,是分析的分析,综合的综合,具有较高的统计效率及验证其他假设的功能,是一种较为精确的价值转移方法。阐述了Meta分析的定义,介绍了Meta分析的步骤及函数表达式,陈述了国内外学者对Meta分析的应用及研究进展,并对其未来的应用前景进行了展望。     

Social influence approaches to encourage resource conservation: A meta-analysis

Would somebody be more willing to start recycling if they knew that their friends were all recycling? Social influence refers to the ways in which our behaviour is affected by what other people do, or by what other people think. Various insights from theories of social influence have been applied as part of interventions to encourage resource conservation, such as the use of social norms, social learning, and social comparison processes. The question arises: Is social influence as effective as is sometimes assumed? This review compares the effectiveness of different social influence approaches to encourage resource conservation via a meta-analysis and outlines what remains to be learned about the mechanisms linking social influence to behaviour change. A random-effects meta-analysis with a sample of 29 studies revealed that social influence approaches were effective when compared to a control group. They were also more effective when compared to another intervention, although in this case the effect size was small. The effectiveness was different for different social influence approaches and for different target groups. These findings raise a number of important questions, which form the basis of a research agenda for better understanding the processes through which social influence approaches encourage resource conservation.