Thirty years of river restoration in Switzerland: implemented measures and lessons learned

In the age of climate change and ecosystem degradation, governments realise more and more that it is crucial to protect ecosystem health, to preserve water resources and to maintain flood protection. Therefore, several countries, among those Switzerland, have implemented laws to make the restoration of riverine ecosystems a legal obligation. In Switzerland, restoration projects were implemented as early as 1979, prior to these laws coming into force. For this article, 848 Swiss restoration projects, implemented between 1979 and 2012, were investigated, spanning a total of 307 river kilometres. No correlation was found between the geographical distribution of total restored lengths in a way that larger cantons performed more restorations. Neither was there a correlation between the total restored length and the canton’s population density or financial status. Restoration activities increased steadily after 1992, with most restorations being reported for the years 2004, 2005 and 2009. The average restoration rate was 9.8 km per year, ranging between 0.5 km in 1979 and 23.9 km in 2004. Restoration measures were very diverse, ranging from measures that directly affected the wildlife, e.g. by providing habitats, to measures which indirectly enhanced conditions for the ecosystem, such as water quality ameliorations. Data regarding success evaluation was only available for 232 of the 848 projects, making it difficult to state whether the implemented restoration projects reached the intended objectives. Over the next 80 years, a further 4,000 km of Swiss rivers will be restored, requiring a restoration rate of 50 km per year, which, according to the data, is an achievable goal.     

Pollen analyses off Senegal: Evolution of the coastal palaeoenvironment during the last deglaciation

Pollen and dinoflagellate cysts from marine sediments in core A180-48 (15°19′N, 18°06′W; 2450 m water depth; 530 cm length) are used to reconstruct palaeoenvironmental conditions of nearshore tropical west Africa during the last deglaciation. High concentrations and influxes of pollen and dinoflagellate cysts between 11 000 and 10 000 yr BP are interpreted as reflecting an increase in continental trade-wind circulation and related coastal upwelling at 15°N latitude. The sea-surface temperature difference between glacial and interglacial times was not as strong as previously suggested. Together with local (fresh) ground-water input, this smaller temperature difference may explain the persistence of the Rhizophora mangrove and Guinean gallery forests near the shore until their massive extension during the early Holocene humid maximum around 9500 yr BP. Pollen data from the core are compared with data from Rosilda N110-Z, from the continental shelf at the same latitude.     

A new approach to define surface/sub-surface transition in gravel beds

The vertical structure of river beds varies temporally and spatially in response to hydraulic regime, sediment mobility, grain size distribution and faunal interaction. Implicit are changes to the active layer depth and bed porosity, both critical in describing processes such as armour layer development, surface-subsurface exchange processes and siltation/ sealing. Whilst measurements of the bed surface are increasingly informed by quantitative and spatial measurement techniques (e.g., laser displacement scanning), material opacity has precluded the full 3D bed structure analysis required to accurately define the surface-subsurface transition. To overcome this problem, this paper provides magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data of vertical bed porosity profiles. Uniform and bimodal (?? _g = 2.1) sand-gravel beds are considered following restructuring under sub-threshold flow durations of 60 and 960 minutes. MRI data are compared to traditional 2.5D laser displacement scans and six robust definitions of the surface-subsurface transition are provided; these form the focus of discussion.     

The shape of the dark matter halo in the early-type galaxy NGC 2974

We present H  i observations of the elliptical galaxy NGC 2974, obtained with the Very Large Array. These observations reveal that the previously detected H  i disc in this galaxy is in fact a ring. By studying the harmonic expansion of the velocity field along the ring, we constrain the elongation of the halo and find that the underlying gravitational potential is consistent with an axisymmetric shape.
We construct mass models of NGC 2974 by combining the H  i rotation curve with the central kinematics of the ionized gas, obtained with the integral-field spectrograph SAURON. We introduce a new way of correcting the observed velocities of the ionized gas for asymmetric drift, and hereby disentangle the random motions of the gas caused by gravitational interaction from those caused by turbulence. To reproduce the observed flat rotation curve of the H  i gas, we need to include a dark halo in our mass models. A pseudo-isothermal sphere provides the best model to fit our data, but we also tested an NFW halo and modified Newtonian dynamics, which fit the data marginally worse.
The mass-to-light ratio M / L _I increases in NGC 2974 from 4.3 M_⊙/L_⊙, _I at one effective radius to 8.5 M_⊙/L_{⊙, I} at 5  R _e. This increase of M / L already suggests the presence of dark matter: we find that within 5  R _e at least 55 per cent of the total mass is dark.