Assessment of Fish Assemblages Before Dredging of the Shipping Channel Near the Mouth of the Savannah River in Coastal Georgia

Evaluating the effects of anthropogenic activities is dependent upon data collection prior to impact, though funds are rarely allocated to conduct an assessment before a critical need arises. The Savannah Harbor Expansion Project is one such activity that includes dredging of the Savannah River. It may potentially change physical conditions of the estuary thereby altering fish assemblages. The purpose of the present study was to characterize pre-impact fish assemblages along a salinity gradient near the mouth of the river and determine which abiotic factors most influence them. One site within the mouth of the Savannah River and two sites immediately outside the river mouth were sampled monthly for 2 years using both a beam trawl and seine net. Salinity, temperature, dissolved oxygen, and sediment grain size were assessed. All four factors had a significant effect on fish assemblages. A total of 3943 fishes representing ≥55 species formed three statistically distinct fish assemblages and at least three seasonal assemblages. Only 24 species (43.6 %) were collected by both gear types indicating the importance of using multiple gear types to assess fish assemblages. We conclude that the fish assemblages near the mouth of the Savannah River may be altered or may shift given the predicted increase in salinity and/or the possible changes in sediment composition from channel dredging. Understanding the abiotic factors that most influence spatial and seasonal fish distributions prior to dredging will be invaluable in predicting how organisms will be impacted by similar public projects elsewhere.     

Very early diagenesis in a calcareous,organic-rich mudrock from Jordan

The diagenesis in the organic-rich Cretaceous to Eocene Al Hisa Phosphorite Formation (AHP), Muwaqqar Chalk Marl Formation (MCM) and Umm Rijam Chert-Limestone Formation (URC) formations of Jordan can be linked directly to the fluctuating sedimentary environment of this shelf depositional system in the Middle to Late Eocene, and its influence on the composition of the deposited sediment and the early burial diagenetic environment. Most cementation was early, mostly within the first 10 m of burial, perhaps entirely within the first 100 m of burial. We propose that the siliceous cements are derived from biogenic silica, probably of diatoms, deposited in a shelf of enhanced productivity. Volumetrically, the most important processes were the redistribution of biogenic opal-A (diatoms) and calcite to form pervasive, layered and nodular cements. The formation of the silica and carbonate cements is closely linked through the effects their dissolution and precipitation have on pore fluid chemistry and pH. The chert beds have a biogenic silica origin, formed through replacement of diatoms and radiolaria by opal-CT, and subsequently by quartz. Calcite cement has carbonate derived from microbial diagenesis of organic matter and calcium derived from seawater. The Mg for early dolomite may have been generated by replacement of opal-CT by quartz, ore dissolution of unstable high Mg calcite bioclasts. The silica and carbonate diagenetic processes are both linked to microbial diagenesis of organic matter, and are intimately linked in both time and space, with pH possibly influencing whether a silica or a carbonate mineral precipitates. The paucity of metal cations capable of precipitating as sulphides is crucial to the creation of acidic pore water favourable to silica precipitation, either as opal-CT, chalcedony or quartz. The lack of clay minerals as a sink for the Mg required for opal-CT polymerisation is the principal factor responsible for the remarkably early silica cementation. All the diagenetic processes, with the probable exception of the opal-CT to quartz transition are early, almost certainly within the first 10 m of burial, possibly much less. A paragenetic sequence is presented here based on these two cores that should be tested against a wider core distribution to see whether this diagenetic history can be generalised throughout the basin. Warm bottom water temperatures probably led to silica diagenesis at much shallower burial depths than occurs in many other sedimentary basins. Silicified layers, in turn, commonly host fractures, suggesting that mechanical properties of the strata began to differentiate at a very early stage in the burial cycle. This has wide implications for processes linking diagenesis to deformation.     

High-Latitude Springtime Photochemistry. Part I: NOx, PAN and Ozone Relationships

Springtime measurements of NO_x, ozone, PAN,J(NO₂), and other compounds were made near Ny-Ålesund,Svalbard (78°54N, 11°53E), in 1994 and Poker Flat,Alaska (65°08N, 147°29W), in 1995. At Svalbard medianmixing ratios for PAN and NO_x of 237 and 23.7 pptv,respectively, were observed. The median mixing ratios at Poker Flat for PANand NO_x were 79.5 and 85.9 pptv, respectively. These data areused to estimate thermal PAN decomposition using several differentapproaches. At Svalbard PAN decomposition was very small, while at PokerFlat up to 30 pptv/h PAN decomposed. At both sites the NO_x/PANratio increased with temperature between –10 and 20°C implyingthat PAN decomposition is an important NO_x source. In-situozone production was calculated from the measured NO, NO₂,O₃, J(NO₂), and temperature data, using thesteady state assumption Median ozone production was 605 pptv/h at PokerFlat, and one order of magnitude smaller at Svalbard during the daytime.Only at Poker Flat could a direct influence on the diurnal ozone cycle beobserved from in-situ production. These results imply that PAN decompositionis a major source of NO_x in the high latitude troposphere, andthat this contributes to the observed spring maximum in surface ozone.     

Response of Nebraska Sand Hills Natural Vegetation to Drought, Fire, Grazing, and Plant Functional Type Shifts as Simulated by the Century Model

The Nebraska Sand Hills exist in a semi-arid climatic environment and the land surface is grassland growing on sandy soils. These soils have been periodically active throughout the Holocene, but are currently stabilized by the vegetation. However, a shift in climate could cause grassland death and eventual sand dune remobilization. Our studies used the CENTURY nutrient cycling and ecosystem model to investigate the impacts of drought, plant functional type, fire, grazing, and erosion on Nebraska Sand Hills vegetation and dune stability. Fire and grazing alone had little impact on the vegetation, but when combined with mild drought, biomass decreased. Overall biomass increased if one plant functional type was allowed to dominate the ecosystem. Addition of as little as 1 mm of erosion per year under current climate conditions decreases vegetation as much as a drought 20 percent drier than the worst of the 1930s drought years in Nebraska.     

Adaptive Governance and Climate Change in the Tropical Highlands of Western South America

Climate changes occurring during the past several decades in the high elevations of the tropical Andes Mountains have implications for the native plant and animal species, for the ecological integrity of the affected land cover, and for the human-biophysical systems involved. Consequences are also probable for rural inhabitants and their livelihoods, especially for farmers and pastoralists. Biophysical factors have always changed in these mountainous zones; the extent and degree of alteration acting on native and agricultural biodiversity is the concern. Addressing these climate changes is probably within the adaptive capacity of many local land-use systems, unless external socioeconomic or political forces are unsupportive or antagonistic. Suitable programs to provide information, subsidies, or alternatives could be designed. We highlight some of the inherent resiliencies of natural and cultural systems in the Andes and suggest that these systems contain lessons that could be useful elsewhere, in terms of the traits that allow for the sustainable utilization of dynamic and heterogeneous landscapes.     

Modelling Sea Surface Temperature (SST) in the Hudson Bay Complex Using Bulk Heat Flux Parameterization: Sensitivity to Atmospheric Forcing,and Model Resolution

ABSTRACT

Sea surface temperature (SST) from four Nucleus for European Modelling of the Ocean (NEMO) model simulations is analyzed to study the bulk flux parameterization to compute SST over the Hudson Bay Complex (HBC) for the summer months (August and September) from 2002 to 2009. The NEMO simulation was forced with two atmospheric forcing sets with different resolutions: the Coordinated Ocean-ice Reference Experiment, version 2 (COREv2), as the lower resolution and the Canadian Meteorological Centre’s Global Deterministic Prediction System Reforecasts (CGRF) as the higher resolution. The CGRF forcing is also implemented in the third and fourth runs using different runoff data and different NEMO resolutions (1/12° versus 1/4°). Results show that all four modelled SSTs followed observed SST patterns, with regional differences in SST bias between simulations with different atmospheric forcing. The SST differences are small between simulations forced with the same atmospheric forcing but with different model resolution or runoff. This implies that the model resolution and runoff have a small effect on the simulated SST in the HBC. Moreover, to better capture the effect of near-surface temperature (T_air) on simulated SST, we conducted three analyses using the Haney flux linearization formula. Results from these assessments did not indicate any direct influence on the model-simulated SSTs by T_air. Looking at the heat flux as a signature for SST showed that both averaged spatial distribution and time series of net heat flux produced by the three CGRF forcing simulations were higher than the net heat flux generated by the CORE 2 simulation. This was generally true for all four components of the total heat flux (sensible, latent, shortwave, and longwave) individually as well. Total heat flux in summer is governed by the shortwave heat flux, with values up to 120?W?m^?2 in August, and the longwave heat flux is the main contributor to the total heat flux differences. These heat flux differences lead to corresponding colder model SSTs for the CGRF runs and warmer SSTs for the CORE 2 simulations.     

Regional- and district-level drivers of timber harvesting in European Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the forestry sector in Russia underwent substantial changes: the state forestry sector was decentralized, the timber industry was privatized, and timber use rights were allocated through short- and long-term leases. To date, there has been no quantitative assessment of the drivers of timber harvesting in European Russia following these changes. In this paper we estimate an econometric model of timber harvesting using remote sensing estimations of forest disturbance from 1990–2000 to 2000–2005 as our dependent variable. We aggregate forest disturbance to administrative districts – equivalent to counties in the United States – and test the impact of several biophysical and economic factors on timber harvesting. Additionally, we examine the impact that regions – equivalent to states in the United States and the main level of decentralized governance in Russia – have on timber harvesting by estimating the influence of regional-level effects on forest disturbance in our econometric model. Russian regions diverged considerably in political and economic conditions after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the question is if these variations impacted timber harvesting after controlling for district-level biophysical and economic drivers. We find that the most important drivers of timber harvesting at the district level are road density, the percent of evergreen forest, and the total area of forest. The influence of these variables on timber harvesting changed over time and there was more harvesting closer to urban areas in 2000–2005. Even though district-level variables explain more than 70 percent of the variation in forest disturbance in our econometric model, we find that regional-level effects remain statistically significant. While we cannot identify the exact mechanism through which regional-level effects impact timber harvesting, our results suggest that sub-national differences can have a large and statistically significant impact on land-use outcomes and should be considered in policy design and evaluation.     

Long memory in temperature reconstructions

Ever since H. E. Hurst brought the concept of long memory time series to prominence in his study of river flows the origins of the so-called Hurst phenomena have remained elusive. Two sets of competing models have been proposed. The fractional Gaussian noises and their discrete time counter-part, the fractionally integrated processes, possess genuine long memory in the sense that the present state of a system has a temporal dependence on all past states. The alternative to these genuine long memory models are models which are non-stationary in the mean but for physical reasons are constrained to lie in a bounded range, hence on visual inspection appear to be stationary. In these models the long memory is merely an artifact of the method of analysis. There are now a growing number of millenial scale temperature reconstructions available. In this paper we present a new way of looking at long memory in these reconstructions and proxies, which gives support to them being described by the non-stationary models. The implications for climatic change are that the temperature time series are not mean reverting. There is no evidence to support the idea that the observed rise in global temperatures are a natural fluctuation which will reverse in the near future.     

Geochemistry of lamprophyres from the Western Alps,Italy: implications for the origin of an enriched isotopic component in the Italian mantle

Cenozoic lamprophyres (minettes, spessartites, kersantite) from the Western Alps, northern Italy, represent small volume, mafic melts with high Mg#s and high Ni and Cr contents. All the lamprophyres show light REE enrichment, high incompatible element contents, and Ta, Ti and Nb troughs on chondrite-normalized diagrams. Age-corrected ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr isotopic ratios (assuming t = 30 Ma) are highly variable and range from 0.70590 to 0.71884; ¹⁴³Nd/¹⁴⁴Nd ratios range from 0.51203 to 0.51242. Pb isotopic ratios are: ²⁰⁶Pb/²⁰⁴Pb = 18.669–18.895, ²⁰⁷Pb/²⁰⁴Pb = 15.605–15.689 and ²⁰⁸Pb/²⁰⁴Pb = 38.224–39.134. ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr ratios show a negative correlation with ¹⁴³Nd/¹⁴⁴Nd, and a positive correlation with K, Ba, and Rb as well as with Ti, Th, Ta, Nb and Zr abundances. The primitive nature of the lamprophyres, coupled with their enriched incompatible trace element and isotopic signatures, suggest derivation from a metasomatized upper mantle source. Linear arrays in isotope space and elemental data plots suggest mixing between two distinct end-members in the Italian mantle; an enriched end-member that is isotopically similar to pelagic sediments, and a significantly less enriched end-member that approaches Bulk Earth values. New isotopic data indicate that the mantle source(s) of the lamprophyres from the Western Alps contain a very high proportion of the enriched end-member. The geochemical signature of the enriched end-member is attributed to fluids or melts derived from pelagic sediments subducted during the closure of the Tethyan Ocean in the late Cretaceous to early Tertiary.