Biodiversity mediates relationships between anthropogenic drivers and ecosystem services across global mountain,island and delta systems

Global change increasingly threatens nature, endangering the ecosystem services human wellbeing depends upon. Biodiversity potentially mediates these impacts by providing resilience to ecosystems. While biodiversity has been linked to resilience and ecosystem service supply on smaller scales, we lack understanding of whether mediating interactions between biodiversity and anthropogenic drivers are global and ubiquitous, and how they might differ between systems. Here, we examine the potential for biodiversity to mediate anthropogenic driver-ecosystem service relationships using global datasets across three distinct systems: mountains, islands and deltas. We found that driver-ecosystem service relationships were stronger where biodiversity was more intact, and weaker at higher species richness, reflecting the negative correlation between intactness and richness. Mediation was most common in mountains, then islands, then deltas; reducing with anthropogenic impact. Such patterns were found across provisioning and regulating ecosystem services, and occurred most commonly with climate change and built infrastructure. Further, we investigated the contribution of biodiversity and abiotic and anthropogenic drivers to ecosystem services. Ecosystem service supply was associated with abiotic and anthropogenic drivers alongside biodiversity, but all drivers were important to different ecosystem services. Our results empirically show the importance of accounting for the different roles that biodiversity plays in mediating human relationships with nature, and reinforce the importance of maintaining intact biodiversity in ecosystem functioning.     

Thinking globally and siting locally – renewable energy and biodiversity in a rapidly warming world

Increasing greenhouse gas emissions are projected to raise global average surface temperatures by 3?–4 °C within this century, dramatically increasing the extinction risk for terrestrial and freshwater species and severely disrupting ecosystems across the globe. Limiting the magnitude of warming and its devastating impacts on biodiversity will require deep emissions reductions that include the rapid, large-scale deployment of low-carbon renewable energy. Concerns about potential adverse impacts to species and ecosystems from the expansion of renewable energy development will play an important role in determining the pace and scale of emissions reductions and hence, the impact of climate change on global biodiversity. Efforts are underway to reduce uncertainty regarding wildlife impacts from renewable energy development, but such uncertainty cannot be eliminated. We argue the need to accept some and perhaps substantial risk of impacts to wildlife from renewable energy development in order to limit the far greater risks to biodiversity loss owing to climate change. We propose a path forward for better reconciling expedited renewable energy development with wildlife conservation in a warming world.     

Eastern Himalayan alpine plant ecology,Tibetan ethnobotany,and climate change

Tibetan culture and livelihoods depend on native plants for medicine, food, grazing, wood, as well as cash from market sales. The Medicine Mountains (part of the Hengduan Mountains) of the eastern Himalayas, with tremendous plant diversity derived from steep gradients of both elevation and precipitation, have traditionally been an important source of Tibetan medicinal plants. We examine climate change in this area and vegetation patterns influenced by biogeography, precipitation and elevation (NMS and CCA ordinations of GLORIA plots). The Alpine environment has the highest plant diversity and most useful plants and is the most susceptible to climate change with impacts on traditional Tibetan culture and livelihoods—particularly Tibetan medicine and herding.     

A hard instrument goes soft: The implications of the Convention on Biological Diversity's current trajectory

The relentless loss of biological diversity, which will have a direct impact on human society and degrade ecosystem buffers against the extremes of climate perturbation, requires a strong global governance response. Of the numerous international legal instruments relating to the protection of nature, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is the most comprehensive. This paper examines its current emphasis on global biodiversity targets to extend our understanding of its trajectory, and its evolving nature as an instrument of global governance. We review CBD documents, and early examinations of its emergent character, in the context of the distinction between hard and soft law approaches, and combine analysis on the issue of targets from the literature on development, climate change and conservation biology. We emphasise that the CBD, created as a hard law instrument with a framework character, had the clear facility to develop subsidiary hard law instruments in the form of protocols but has not significantly followed this route. We document how its approach - which has been typically ‘soft’, as exemplified by its focus on global biodiversity targets which are not backed up by obligations - suggests it operates de facto as policy rather than an instrument requiring state action. The adoption of global targets has parallels with other initiatives within global governance and may influence international political agendas, but they have failed to provide practical instruments for national implementation. Conditions may now exist for the CBD to develop focussed hard legal instruments in specific areas of its wide remit that support realistic targets.     

Mapping conservation priorities and connectivity pathways under climate change for tropical ecosystems

Climate change and land use conversion are global threats to biodiversity. Protected areas and biological corridors have been historically implemented as biodiversity conservation measures and suggested as tools within planning frameworks to respond to climate change. However, few applications to national protected areas systems considering climate change in tropical countries exist. Our goal is to define new priority areas for biodiversity conservation and biological corridors within an existing protected areas network. We aim at preserving samples of all biodiversity under climate change and facilitate species dispersal to reduce the vulnerability of biodiversity. The analysis was based on a three step strategy: i) protect representative samples of various levels of terrestrial biodiversity across protected area systems given future redistributions under climate change, ii) identify and protect areas with reduced climate velocities where populations could persist for relatively longer periods, and iii) ensure species dispersal between conservation areas through climatic connectivity pathways. The study was integrated into a participatory planning approach for biodiversity conservation in Costa Rica. Results showed that there should be an increase of 11 % and 5 % on new conservation areas and biological corridors respectively. Our approach integrates climate change into the design of a network of protected areas for tropical ecosystems and can be applied to other biodiversity rich areas to reduce the vulnerability of biodiversity to global warming.     

上海气温变化及城市化影响初步分析

为研究在全球变化背景下上海市区气温变化规律和城市化进程对其影响,分析了上海市区气温对全球变暖的响应,对比了市区和郊区气温在不同气候背景下的变化趋势,采用与郊区台站对比法分析了上海市区气温城市化效应,研究了城市化进程与气温各分量长期变化趋势之间的关系,将高空与地面观测资料相结合,定量估算了城市化效应对平均气温的贡献,初步讨论了气温的城市化效应成因。研究结果表明：1873~2004年上海市区年平均气温的长期变化趋势为1.31 ℃/(100 a),在1921~1948年和1979~2004年两个时期增温明显,其中第二段增温强于第一段;与郊区站点相比,市区在降温期内降温最小,增温期内升温幅度最大;城市发展导致市区和郊区气温有显著差别且温差逐年加大,其中平均气温和最低气温在秋季的差别最大,最高气温市区和郊区之间差别在夏季最大;城市化进程加快了地面气温升高的速率,其中以最低气温最为明显;在1980年代城市化效应使上海市区年平均温度平均升高0.4 ℃,在1990年代平均升高1.1 ℃。     

High-resolution simulations of global climate, part 2: effects of increased greenhouse cases

We report results from the highest-resolution simulations of global warming yet performed with an atmospheric general circulation model. We compare the climatic response to increased greenhouse gases of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) climate model, CCM3, at T42 and T170 resolutions (horizontal grid spacing of 300 and 75 km respectively). All simulations use prescribed sea surface temperatures (SST). Simulations of the climate of 2100 ad use SSTs based on those from NCAR coupled model, Climate System Model (CSM). We find that the global climate sensitivity and large-scale patterns of climate change are similar at T42 and T170. However, there are important regional scale differences that arise due to better representation of topography and other factors at high resolution. Caution should be exercised in interpreting specific features in our results both because we have performed climate simulations using a single atmospheric general circulation model and because we used with prescribed sea surface temperatures rather than interactive ocean and sea-ice models.     

Land-use and climate change within assessments of biodiversity change: A review

Projected changes in biodiversity are likely inadequately estimated when climate and land-use change effects are examined in isolation. A review of studies of the effects of these drivers singly and in combination highlights little discussed complexities in revising these estimates. In addition to considering interactions, different characterisations of climate change, land-use change and biodiversity greatly influence estimates. Habitat loss leading to decreased species richness is the most common land-use change and biodiversity relationship considered with less attention being given to other land-use changes (e.g. other conversions, fragmentation, different management intensities) and biodiversity characterisations and responses (e.g. selected groups of species, increased species richness). Characterisations of more complex relationships between climate change, land-use change and biodiversity however are currently limited by a lack of process understanding, data availability and inherent scenarios uncertainties.     

Lake surface temperatures in a changing climate: a global sensitivity analysis

We estimate the effects of climatic changes, as predicted by six climate models, on lake surface temperatures on a global scale, using the lake surface equilibrium temperature as a proxy. We evaluate interactions between different forcing variables, the sensitivity of lake surface temperatures to these variables, as well as differences between climate zones. Lake surface equilibrium temperatures are predicted to increase by 70 to 85 % of the increase in air temperatures. On average, air temperature is the main driver for changes in lake surface temperatures, and its effect is reduced by ~10 % by changes in other meteorological variables. However, the contribution of these other variables to the variance is ~40 % of that of air temperature, and their effects can be important at specific locations. The warming increases the importance of longwave radiation and evaporation for the lake surface heat balance compared to shortwave radiation and convective heat fluxes. We discuss the consequences of our findings for the design and evaluation of different types of studies on climate change effects on lakes.     

Temperature change and macroinvertebrate biodiversity: assessments of organism vulnerability and potential distributions

Peninsular environments are ecosystems that are one of the most vulnerable to global warming. Despite the importance of conserving regional biodiversity, peninsular environments are among the least studied with respect to the influences of global warming. In this study, we used data on benthic macroinvertebrate communities from 521 sites across Korea (a nationwide scale) to evaluate the potential impact of temperature increases on river ecosystems. Weighted averaging regression models (WARMs) were used to project the relationships between relative macroinvertebrate abundance and water temperature, based on the temperature data of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) A1B scenario. Maximum tolerance water temperatures were used to quantify the risks to macroinvertebrates at the catchment and national scales. Ambient air temperatures in the 2090s were projected to increase by an average of 3.4?ºC relative to the baseline of the 2000s at the national scale. Mayflies, stoneflies and caddisflies were identified as potentially the most sensitive taxa to global warming. The impact of global warming on macroinvertebrates was predicted to be minimal prior to the 2060s; however, by the 2080s, species loss was predicted to be 55 %. Potential distribution ranges of cold water species in the future decades were expected to decrease continuously over time, while those of warm species were expected to increase from the 2000s to the 2040s and then decrease until the 2080s. Our projections may be useful for understanding how climate parameters affect the biogeographical patterns of aquatic biodiversity from a thermal-preference perspective.     

近50年秦岭南北不均匀增温及对城市化响应

根据1961—2012年陕西省均一化气温数据分析了秦岭南北两侧平均气温、最高气温、最低气温的年、季节变化特征,结果表明:秦岭南北两侧年平均气温、最高气温和最低气温均呈增加趋势,增加幅度南北分布不均,北麓温度增幅较南麓显著;气温季节变化存在一定差异,平均气温在春季和冬季增温显著,最高气温在春季增温显著,最低气温在冬季增温显著,秦岭南北两侧春季、秋季气温日较差变大,冬季和夏季气温日较差变小。为了进一步明确气温变化的原因,结合DMSP (defense mete-orological satellite program)/OLS (operational lines-can system) 数据将秦岭南北两侧分为5个区域,分别计算每个区域内城市化对气温变化的影响以及城市化影响的贡献率表明:秦岭北麓城市化过程较秦岭南麓快,城市化发展的差异,导致了城市化对秦岭南北两侧温度影响的不均匀性,秦岭北麓气温变化受城市化影响程度明显高于秦岭南麓,影响主要以平均气温和最低气温为主,城市化发展的差异加剧了秦岭南北两侧气温变化的非均匀性。     

Global urbanization projections for the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways

The new scenario process for climate change research includes the creation of Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) describing alternative societal development trends over the coming decades. Urbanization is a key aspect of development that is relevant to studies of mitigation, adaptation, and impacts. Incorporating urbanization into the SSPs requires a consistent set of global urbanization projections that cover long time horizons and span a full range of uncertainty. Existing urbanization projections do not meet these needs, in particular providing only a single scenario over the next few decades, a period during which urbanization is likely to be highly dynamic in many countries. We present here a new, long-term, global set of urbanization projections at country level that cover a plausible range of uncertainty. We create SSP-specific projections by choosing urbanization outcomes consistent with each SSP narrative. Results show that the world continues to urbanize in each of the SSPs but outcomes differ widely across them, with urbanization reaching 60%, 79%, and 92% by the end of century in SSP3, SSP2, and SSP1/SSP4/SSP5, respectively. The degree of convergence in urbanization across countries also differs substantially, with largely convergent outcomes by the end of the century in SSP1 and SSP5 and persistent diversity in SSP3. This set of global, country-specific projections produces urbanization pathways that are typical of regions in different stages of urbanization and development levels, and can be extended to further elaborate assumptions about the styles of urban growth and spatial distributions of urban people and land cover occurring in each SSP.     

Integrated assessment of climate change and urbanization impact on adaptation strategies: a case study in two small Korean watersheds

This study develops an integrated approach to assess climate change and urbanization impacts on adaptation strategies in watersheds. We considered the two adaptation strategies for two small watersheds in Korea: the redevelopment of an existing reservoir and the reuse of highly treated wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) effluent. Climate change scenarios were obtained by statistically downscaling the predicted precipitation and temperature with a global climate model (A1B and A2), and urbanization scenarios were derived by estimating the impervious area ratios with an impervious cover model. With the climate change and urbanization scenarios, we used the Hydrological Simulation Program-Fortran model to derive the flow and biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) concentration (conc.) duration curves, and calculate the numbers of days satisfying environmental requirement for instreamflow and the target BOD conc. Climate change reduced the effectiveness of the adaptation strategies with respect to low flow and BOD conc., whereas urbanization generally increased their effectiveness. Climate change had a greater impact on the effectiveness of the adaptation strategies for BOD conc. than for low flow, whereas urbanization had a greater impact on low flow. Comparing impacts of two strategies, a larger decrease in the effectiveness was observed for the WWTP effluent reuse strategy in response to climate change and urbanization. However, the consistent trends cannot be found with ease if climate change and urbanization happens jointly.     

Climate skepticism decreases when the planet gets hotter and conservative support wanes

Identifying historical patterns of fluctuation in climate change skepticism guides researchers, policy makers, and science communicators in efforts to catalyze change in the future. We analyzed data from 25 nationally representative polls collected in Australia from 2009 to 2019 (N = 20,655). Although it remains concerningly high, climate skepticism trended down in that 10-year period, particularly among conservatives. Multilevel analyses identified two variables that stood out as being relevant in explaining that trajectory. First, climate change skepticism was positively associated with support for conservative political parties in national polls. Second, climate change skepticism was negatively associated with the annual global temperatures the previous year. There was little evidence that climate change beliefs were associated with economic variables or with seasonal variations in temperature. Furthermore, there was only weak evidence that climate change beliefs were associated with national temperatures. This suggests that global temperatures in the previous year are impactful because of their informational value (as a communication heuristic for the urgency and immediacy of climate change) more so than for their experiential value (in the sense of people actually experiencing warmer weather). Importantly, the effect of previous global temperature was particularly pronounced among those with the strongest levels of skepticism: political conservatives. This suggests that rising global annual temperatures have the power to update beliefs among those most in need of converting to the climate cause.     

Approaches to defining a planetary boundary for biodiversity

The idea that there is an identifiable set of boundaries, beyond which anthropogenic change will put the Earth system outside a safe operating space for humanity, is attracting interest in the scientific community and gaining support in the environmental policy world. Rockstrom et al. (2009) identify nine such boundaries and highlight biodiversity loss as being the single boundary where current rates of extinction put the Earth system furthest outside the safe operating space. Here we review the evidence to support a boundary based on extinction rates and identify weaknesses with this metric and its bearing on humanity's needs. While changes to biodiversity are of undisputed importance, we show that both extinction rate and species richness are weak metrics for this purpose, and they do not scale well from local to regional or global levels. We develop alternative approaches to determine biodiversity loss boundaries and extend our analysis to consider large-scale responses in the Earth system that could affect its suitability for complex human societies which in turn are mediated by the biosphere. We suggest three facets of biodiversity on which a boundary could be based: the genetic library of life; functional type diversity; and biome condition and extent. For each of these we explore the science needed to indicate how it might be measured and how changes would affect human societies. In addition to these three facets, we show how biodiversity's role in supporting a safe operating space for humanity may lie primarily in its interactions with other boundaries, suggesting an immediate area of focus for scientists and policymakers.     

Climate Shifts during the Last Century

Fluctuations of the land surface areas covered by Koeppen climates are analysed for the 1901 to 1995 period using trends and outliers as indicators of climate shift. Only the extreme climate zones of the global Tropics and of the Tundra (with the highly correlated northern hemisphere temperature) realise statistically significant shifts and outliers. There are nosignificant trends and outliers in the fluctuating ocean-atmosphere patterns (Pacific Decadal and North Atlantic Oscillations) and the highly correlated intermediate climate zones (dry, subtropical and boreal) of the surrounding continents.     

Leveraging modern climatology to increase adaptive capacity across protected area networks

Human-driven changes in the global environment pose an increasingly urgent challenge for the management of ecosystems that is made all the more difficult by the uncertain future of both environmental conditions and ecological responses. Land managers need strategies to increase regional adaptive capacity, but relevant and rapid assessment approaches are lacking. To address this need, we developed a method to assess regional protected area networks across biophysically important climatic gradients often linked to biodiversity and ecosystem function. We plot the land of the southwestern United States across axes of historical climate space, and identify landscapes that may serve as strategic additions to current protected area portfolios. Considering climate space is straightforward, and it can be applied using a variety of relevant climate parameters across differing levels of land protection status. The resulting maps identify lands that are climatically distinct from existing protected areas, and may be utilized in combination with other ecological and socio-economic information essential to collaborative landscape-scale decision-making. Alongside other strategies intended to protect species of special concern, natural resources, and other ecosystem services, the methods presented herein provide another important hedging strategy intended to increase the adaptive capacity of protected area networks.     

Sensitivity of global warming to the pattern of tropical ocean warming

The current generations of climate models are in substantial disagreement as to the projected patterns of sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the Tropics over the next several decades. We show that the spatial patterns of tropical ocean temperature trends have a strong influence on global mean temperature and precipitation and on global mean radiative forcing. We identify the SST patterns with the greatest influence on the global mean climate and find very different, and often opposing, sensitivities to SST changes in the tropical Indian and West Pacific Oceans. Our work stresses the need to reduce climate model biases in these sensitive regions, as they not only affect the regional climates of the nearby densely populated continents, but also have a disproportionately large effect on the global climate.

---

Detecting urban warming signals in climate records

Determining whether air temperatures recorded at meteorological stations have been contaminated by the urbanization process is still a controversial issue at the global scale. With support of historical remote sensing data, this study examined the impacts of urban expansion on the trends of air temperature at 69 meteorological stations in Beijing, Tianjin, and Hebei Province over the last three decades. There were significant positive relations between the two factors at all stations. Stronger warming was detected at the meteorological stations that experienced greater urbanization, i.e., those with a higher urbanization rate. While the total urban area affects the absolute temperature values, the change of the urban area (urbanization rate) likely affects the temperature trend. Increases of approximately 10% in urban area around the meteorological stations likely contributed to the 0.13℃ rise in air temperature records in addition to regional climate warming. This study also provides a new approach to selecting reference stations based on remotely sensed urban fractions. Generally, the urbanization-induced warming contributed to approximately 44.1% of the overall warming trends in the plain region of study area during the past 30 years, and the regional climate warming was 0.30℃ (10 yr)-1 in the last three decades.     

土地利用和土地覆盖变化对气候系统影响的研究进展

土地利用和土地覆盖变化（LUCC或LULCC）不仅对人类赖以生存的地球环境有重要影响,同时与人类福祉密切联系。人类活动对气候的强迫不仅包括温室气体排放导致的气候变暖,还通过直接改变地表物理性状以及间接改变其他生物地球物理过程和生物地球化学过程等对气候系统产生深刻影响。作者在此认识的基础上回顾了LUCC对气候系统影响的研究历史,结合新近的研究结果归纳了诸如森林砍伐、城市化、修坝等LUCC活动在区域和全球尺度的气候效应。LUCC具有高度的空间异质性,因此气候系统对它的反馈也具有明显的空间差异。由于全球平均后变化幅度相对区域上的小,LUCC对区域气候影响显著,而对全球气候影响不明显。它对区域气候的影响取决于反照率、蒸散发效率和地表粗糙率等变化的综合效应：在热带地区LUCC主要引起温度升高,在高纬度地区使温度下降。在全球尺度上LUCC导致气候的变暖主要通过减少蒸散发和潜热通量引起陆表水循环的改变,其次通过改变地表反照率导致辐射强迫改变。最后指出目前LUCC在气候变化学科中的研究所存在的问题。在此基础上提出了未来的研究首先需要评估的3个气候指标,并提倡多学科间的相互合作。