Geoconservation and geoscience in England: a mutually beneficial relationship

Geoconservation in England, as in Great Britain more widely, is very well established. Sites of national or international scientific importance, as determined by a systematic site assessment and selection exercise, can be protected by designation as Sites of Special Scientific Interest. Sites of local importance e.g. Local Geological Sites may also be taken into account when planning decisions are made that could have an impact on them. As a whole, the network of conserved geosites represents the key elements of our current understanding of the geology and geomorphology of England. Site selection and safeguard and management of this network are dependent on geoscience information, and in return continued geoscience fieldwork is dependent on having conserved sites available for study. Here, we review the relationship between geoconservation and geoscience, and how it has developed since the first geoconservation legislation nearly 70 years ago. We discuss the achievements, challenges and where and how this relationship needs to strengthen further to meet future needs of both geoscience and nature conservation. In a changing world, there will continue to be a need for innovative geoscience supported by effective geoconservation. Those interested in conserving England’s geological heritage will need to engage the wider geoscience community more than ever to deliver a shared vision for the natural environment.     

Knowledge gaps in our perceptual model of Great Britain's hydrology

There is a no lack of significant open questions in the field of hydrology. How will hydrological connectivity between freshwater bodies be altered by future human alterations to the hydrological cycle? Where does water go when it rains? Or what is the future space–time variability of flood and drought events? However, the answers to these questions will vary with location due to the specific and often poorly understood local boundary conditions and system properties that control the functional behaviour of a catchment or any other hydrologic control volume. We suggest that an open, shared and evolving perceptual model of a region's hydrology is critical to tailor our science questions, as it would be for any other study domain from the plot to the continental scale. In this opinion piece, we begin to discuss the elements of and point out some knowledge gaps in the perceptual model of the terrestrial water cycle of Great Britain. We discuss six major knowledge gaps and propose four key ways to reduce them. While the specific knowledge gaps in our perceptual model do not necessarily transfer to other places, we believe that the development of such perceptual models should be at the core of the debate for all hydrologic communities, and we encourage others to have a similar debate for their hydrologic domain.     

Spatial variability of precipitation regimes over Turkey

Abstract

This study aims to predict the daily precipitation from meteorological data from Turkey using the wavelet—neural network method, which combines two methods: discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and artificial neural networks (ANN). The wavelet—ANN model provides a good fit with the observed data, in particular for zero precipitation in the summer months, and for the peaks in the testing period. The results indicate that wavelet—ANN model estimations are significantly superior to those obtained by either a conventional ANN model or a multi linear regression model. In particular, the improvement provided by the new approach in estimating the peak values had a noticeably high positive effect on the performance evaluation criteria. Inclusion of the summed sub-series in the ANN input layer brings a new perspective to the discussions related to the physics involved in the ANN structure.     

Mainstreaming adaptation to climate change in Least Developed Countries (LDCs)

Abstract

The Least Developed Countries (LDCs) are a group of 49 of the world's poorest countries. They have contributed least to the emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs) but they are most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. This is due to their location in some of the most vulnerable regions of the world and their low capacities to adapt to these changes. Adaptation to climate change has become an important policy priority in the international negotiations on climate change in recent years. However, it has yet to become a major policy issue within developing countries, especially the LDCs. This article focuses on two LDCs, namely Bangladesh and Mali, where progress has been made regarding identifying potential adaptation options. For example, Bangladesh already has effective disaster response systems, and strategies to deal with reduced freshwater availability, and Mali has a well-developed programme for providing agro-hydro-meteorological assistance to communities in times of drought. However, much remains to be done in terms of mainstreaming adaptation to climate change within the national policymaking processes of these countries. Policymakers need targeting and, to facilitate this, scientific research must be translated into appropriate language and timescales.     

Tourist behaviour,local values,and interpretation at Ulu<Emphasis Type="Underline">r</Emphasis>u: ‘The sacred deed at Australia’s mighty heart’

This paper explores issues relating to multiple and changing values and uses of desert landscapes in the context of tourism at Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park (UKTNP), co-managed by Aboriginal people and the Australian Government agency Parks Australia. More than 400,000 people visit the park each year, drawn mostly by the massive red monolith. To the local Aboriginal people, Anangu, this rock is Uluru, a complex of places with great spiritual importance. Since co-management, UKTNP has become a symbol of the reconciliation process between Aboriginal and settler Australians. Climbing the rock is a popular activity. Aboriginal co-managers ask visitors not to climb Uluru but rather to learn about their culture and home through their eyes. Park management aims to discourage climbing. This research investigated how visitors respond to the Anangu request not to climb, and why some climb while others do not. We argue that spatial and experiential aspects of the park support climbing at the expense of participation in other activities more attuned to Aboriginal understandings of landscape at Uluru.     

Effects of habitat complexity on cannibalism rates in European green crabs (Carcinus maenas Linnaeus, 1758)

The habitat in which predator–prey interactions take place may have a profound influence on the outcome of those interactions. Cannibalism is an intriguing form of predation whereby foraging by predators may contribute to the regulation of their own populations.This is particularly interesting in the case of invasive species, like the widely distributed European green crab (Carcinus maenas). This study explores how habitat complexity influences cannibalism rates in green crab populations of Prince Edward Island, Atlantic Canada. Both laboratory and field experiments were conducted to measure feeding rates by individual adult green crabs on a standard number of smaller conspecifics. In the laboratory, experimental treatments mimicked unstructured to increasingly structured habitats: water, sandy bottom, oyster shells, mussel shells, oyster shells with sandy bottom and mussel shells with sandy bottom. In those trials, adult green crabs consumed several times more juveniles on unstructured habitats than on the most structured ones, with a gradual decrease in predation rates across increasingly complex habitats. Field inclusion experiments used the same approach and were conducted in sandy bottoms, sandy bottoms with a layer of oyster shells and sandy bottoms with a layer of mussel shells. These trials showed similar patterns of decreasing feeding rates across increasingly complex habitats, but differences among treatments were not significant. These results support the idea that complex habitats have the potential to mediate predator–prey interactions, including adult–juvenile cannibalism in green crabs.     

Generating dark matter halo merger trees

We present a new Monte Carlo algorithm to generate merger trees describing the formation history of dark matter haloes. The algorithm is a modification of the algorithm of Cole et al. used in the galform semi-analytic galaxy formation model. As such, it is based on the Extended Press–Schechter theory and so should be applicable to hierarchical models with a wide range of power spectra and cosmological models. It is tuned to be in accurate agreement with the conditional mass functions found in the analysis of merger trees extracted from the Λ cold dark matter Millennium N -body simulation. We present a comparison of its predictions not only with these conditional mass functions, but also with additional statistics of the Millennium Simulation halo merger histories. In all cases, we find it to be in good agreement with the Millennium Simulation and thus it should prove to be a very useful tool for semi-analytic models of galaxy formation and for modelling hierarchical structure formation in general. We have made our merger tree generation code and code to navigate the trees available at http://star-www.dur.ac.uk/~cole/merger_trees .     

Influence of forest and shrub canopies on precipitation partitioning and isotopic signatures

Over a 4‐month summer period, we monitored how forest (Pinus sylvestris ) and heather moorland (Calluna spp. and Erica spp.) vegetation canopies altered the volume and isotopic composition of net precipitation (NP) in a southern boreal landscape in northern Scotland. During that summer period, interception losses were relatively high and higher under forests compared to moorland (46% of gross rainfall [GR] compared with 35%, respectively). Throughfall (TF) volumes exhibited marked spatial variability in forests, depending upon local canopy density, but were more evenly distributed under heather moorland. In the forest stands, stemflow was a relatively small canopy flow path accounting for only 0.9–1.6% of NP and only substantial in larger events. Overall, the isotopic composition of NP was not markedly affected by canopy interactions; temporal variation of stable water isotopes in TF closely corresponded to that of GR with differences of TF‐GR being ?0.52‰ for δ²H and ?0.14‰ for δ¹⁸O for forests and 0.29‰ for δ²H and ?0.04‰ for δ¹⁸O for heather moorland. These differences were close to, or within, analytical precision of isotope determination, though the greater differences under forest were statistically significant. Evidence for evaporative fractionation was generally restricted to low rainfall volumes in low intensity events, though at times, subtle effects of liquid–vapour moisture exchange and/or selective transmission though canopies were evident. Fractionation and other effects were more evident in stemflow but only marked in smaller events. The study confirmed earlier work that increased forest cover in the Scottish Highlands will likely cause an increase in interception and green water fluxes at the expenses of blue water fluxes to streams. However, the low‐energy, humid environment means that isotopic changes during such interactions will only have a minor overall effect on the isotopic composition of NP.