The status of wetlands, threats and the predicted effect of global climate change: the situation in Sub-Saharan Africa

The larger wetlands of Sub-Saharan Africa, cover 2,072,775 km² (9.01 %) of the landmass. This paper reviews the major threats, including climate change, to these wetlands, a number of which lie in semi-arid regions. Climate change predictions are that the arid or semi-arid regions of Africa in the latitudes around the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer will become drier. The future of wetlands is allied to human well-being, and the effects of climate change cannot be de-linked from human activities occurring in and around wetlands. The high productivity of wetlands supports substantial populations of poor people dependent on ecosystem services for at least part of their livelihood. This is particularly so in the semi-arid Sahel in the North and equivalent latitudes in the south, which are seen as vulnerable to climate change largely due to high levels of poverty and low adaptive capacity. While sustainable ecosystem management is a long-term goal, survival is more immediate to poor people depending on ecosystem services for their livelihoods. Population increase and a decrease in the resource base due to predicted decreased rainfall will lead to over exploitation of the resource base. Certain engineering interventions redistribute ecosystem services to the benefit of those upstream or away from the river system. Governance systems play a key role in the sustainable management of resources. Breakdown of governance systems through civil war is seen as a driver of poverty and a major cause of breakdown in resource conservation, increasing the dependence of poor people on ecosystems.     

Current state of knowledge regarding the world’s wetlands and their future under global climate change: a synthesis

Wetlands cover at least 6 % of the Earth’s surface. They play a key role in hydrological and biogeochemical cycles, harbour a large part of the world’s biodiversity, and provide multiple services to humankind. However, pressure in the form of land reclamation, intense resource exploitation, changes in hydrology, and pollution threaten wetlands on all continents. Depending on the region, 30–90 % of the world’s wetlands have already been destroyed or strongly modified in many countries with no sign of abatement. Climate change scenarios predict additional stresses on wetlands, mainly because of changes in hydrology, temperature increases, and a rise in sea level. Yet, intact wetlands play a key role as buffers in the hydrological cycle and as sinks for organic carbon, counteracting the effects of the increase in atmospheric CO₂. Eight chapters comprising this volume of Aquatic Sciences analyze the current ecological situation and the use of the wetlands in major regions of the world in the context of global climate change. This final chapter provides a synthesis of the findings and recommendations for the sustainable use and protection of these important ecosystems.     

COMPUTER-ASSISTED TERRAIN STRATIFICATION

Terrain influences many ecological processes. Therefore, ecologists must consider terrain effects in sampling designs. Incomplete information on the ecological role of terrain, however, makes it difficult to account for terrain variability in sample designs. As a partial solution, we introduce a protocol that automatically stratifies complex terrain. This stratification method uses image-processing techniques to cluster digital images of slope, elevation, and aspect into homogeneous groupings. The technique is demonstrated for a stratification of complex terrain disturbed by a large forest fire. By identifying terrain complexity at several spatial resolutions, we were able to place transects that sample terrain variability and fire severity representatively across a controlled range of scales. [Key words: terrain, stratification, image processing, sample design.]     

Traversing Fantasies,Activating Desires: Economic Geography,Activist Research,and Psychoanalytic Methodology

In this article I recount the ways that key concepts in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory—the relationship between language and desire, fantasy and subject formation, ethics and the traversal of fantasy—have enabled a novel methodological approach to activist research. Psychoanalysis allows us to recast research as a process of encountering and traversing fantasies, which is simultaneously a process of engendering new representations, desires, subjectivities, and societies.     

Climatic Change and Desert Vegetation Distribution: Assessing Thirty Years of Change in Southern Nevada's Mojave Desert

A major theme in physical geography and biogeography is understanding how vegetation changes across geographic gradients during climate change. We assess shifts in distributions of fifteen Mojave Desert plant species based on a 2008 resurvey of 103 vegetation transects that were established in 1979. We model changes in species distributions using Maximum Entropy (Maxent) with environmental and climate variables to predict probability of species’ occurrences. Climate during the ten-year period preceding the 2008 vegetation survey was 1.5°C warmer and 3 cm per year of precipitation drier than the ten years preceding 1979. Species inhabiting the highest elevations and strongly correlated with precipitation displayed areal reductions from 1979 through 2008.     

A Bayesian Approach to Establishing a Reference Particle Size Distribution in the Presence of Outliers

The presence of observations or measurements that are unlike the majority is fairly common in studies conducted to establish particle size (or weight fraction) distributions. Therefore, there is a need to develop methods that are capable of producing estimates of particle size distributions that are not overly sensitive to the presence of a few observations that might be considered outliers. This article proposes a type of contamination mixture model that probabilistically allocates each observation to either a majority component or a contamination component. Observations that are allocated to a contamination component are down-weighted when estimating the particle size distribution (while the uncertainty of contamination classification is automatically accounted for in estimation). Computational methods are developed and the utility of the proposed methodology is demonstrated via a simulation study. The method is then applied to data produced from an inter-laboratory study conducted to establish a particle size distribution in cement.