Effect of an environmental flow on vegetation growth and health using ground and remote sensing metrics

Understanding the effectiveness of environmental flow deliveries along rivers requires monitoring vegetation. Monitoring data are often collected at multiple spatial scales. For riparian vegetation, optical remote sensing methods can estimate growth responses at the riparian corridor scale, and field-based measures can quantify species composition; however, the extent to which these different measures are duplicative or complementary is important to understand when planning monitoring programmes with limited resources. In this study, we analysed riparian vegetation growth in the delta of the Colorado River in response to an experimental pulse flow. Our goal was to compare ground-based measurements of vegetation structure and composition with satellite-based Landsat radiometric variables, such as the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). We made this comparison in 21 transects following the delivery of 131.8 million cubic meters (mcm) of water in the stream channel during the spring of 2014 as a pulse flow and 38.4 mcm as base flows. Vegetation cover increased 14% and NDVI increased 0.02 (15%) by October 2015, and both variables returned to pre-pulse flow values in October 2016. Observed changes in vegetation structure and composition did not persist after the second year. The highest increase in vegetation cover in October 2014 and October 2015 resulted from species that could respond rapidly to additional water such as reeds (Arundo donax and Phragmites australis), cattail (Typha domingensis), and herbaceous plants. Dominant shrubs, saltcedar (Tamarix spp.) and arrowweed (Pluchea sericea), both indicative of nonrestored habitats showed variable increases in cover, and native trees (Salicaceae family) presented low increases (1%). The strong NDVI–vegetation cover relationship indicates that NDVI is appropriate to detect changes at the riparian corridor scale but needs to be complemented with ground data to determine the contributions by different species to the observed trends.     

Moisture Transport Through Sprayed Concrete Tunnel Linings

Waterproofing of permanent sprayed concrete tunnel linings with sprayed membranes in a continuous sandwich structure has been attempted since 2000 and has seen increased use in some countries. The main function of a sprayed membrane from a waterproofing perspective is to provide crack bridging and hence prevent flow of liquid water into the tunnel through cracks and imperfections in the concrete material. However, moisture can migrate through the concrete and EVA-based membrane materials by capillary and vapor diffusion mechanisms. These moisture transport mechanisms can have an influence on the degree of saturation, and may influence the pore pressures in the concrete material as well as risk of freeze–thaw damage of the concrete and membrane. The paper describes a detailed study of moisture transport material parameters, moisture condition in tunnel linings and climatic conditions tunnels in hard rock in Norway. These data have been included in a hygrothermal simulation model in the software WUFI for moisture transport to substantiate moisture transport and long-term effects on saturation of the concrete and membrane material. The findings suggest that EVA-based membranes exhibit significant water absorption and vapor transport properties although they are impermeable to liquid water flow. State-of-the-art sprayed concrete material applied with the wet mix method exhibits very low hydraulic conductivities, lower than 10^?14 m/s, thus saturated conductive water flow is a very unlikely dominant transport mechanism. Moisture transport through the lining structure by capillary flow and vapor diffusion are calculated to approximately 3 cm³/m² per day for lining thicknesses in the range of 25–35 cm and seasonal Nordic climate variations. The calculated moisture contents in the tunnel linings from the hygrothermal simulations are largely in agreement with the measured moisture contents in the tunnel linings. The findings also indicate that the concrete material exhibits a reduction of saturation on the immediate inside of the membrane. Near the location of the waterproofing membrane on either side, the concrete material exhibits degrees of capillary saturation between 85 and 95 %. Moisture content in the membrane is found to be consistently in the range of 12–17 % by weight, corresponding to a degree of saturation of 30–35 %. Possible effects of such moisture contents are lower risk of freezing degradation, higher tensile bonding strengths at the membrane interfaces, and a reduced risk of pore pressure in the concrete material.     

A retrospective analysis of contamination and periphyton PICT patterns for the antifoulant irgarol 1051, around a small marina on the Swedish west coast

Irgarol is a triazine photosystem II (PSII) inhibitor that has been used in Sweden as an antifouling ingredient since the 1990s. Early microcosm studies indicated that periphyton was sensitive to irgarol at concentrations regularly found in harbours and marinas. However, field studies of irgarol effects on the Swedish west coast in 1994, using the pollution-induced community tolerance (PICT) approach, failed to detect any effects of the toxicant in the field. A PICT study involves sampling of replicate communities in a gradient of contamination, and a comparison of their community tolerance levels, with an increase being an indication that sensitive species have been eliminated and replaced by more tolerant ones. Typically, short-term assays are used to quantify the community tolerance levels. Later PICT studies in the same area over a 10 year period demonstrate that irgarol tolerance levels have increased, although the contamination pattern has been stable. Our results support the hypothesis that that the PICT potential was low initially, due to a small differential sensitivity between the community members, and that a persistent selection pressure was required to favour and enrich irgarol-tolerant species or genotypes.     

Communicating global climate change using simple indices: an update

Previous studies have shown that there are several indices of global-scale temperature variations, in addition to global-mean surface air temperature, that are useful for distinguishing natural internal climate variations from anthropogenic climate change. Appropriately defined, such indices have the ability to capture spatio-temporal information in a similar manner to optimal fingerprints of climate change. These indices include the contrast between the average temperatures over land and over oceans, the Northern Hemisphere meridional temperature gradient, the temperature contrast between the Northern and Southern Hemisphere and the magnitude of the annual cycle of average temperatures over land. They contain information independent of the global-mean temperature for internal climate variations at decadal time scales and represent different aspects of the climate system, yet they show common responses to anthropogenic climate change. In addition, the ratio of average temperature changes over land to those over the oceans should be nearly constant for transient climate change. Hence, supplementing analysis of global-mean surface temperature with analyses of these indices can strengthen results of attribution studies of causes of observed climate variations. In this study, we extend the previous work by including the last 10 years of observational data and the CMIP3 climate model simulations analysed for the IPCC AR4. We show that observed changes in these indices over the last 10 years provide increased evidence of an anthropogenic influence on climate. We also show the usefulness of these indices for evaluating the performance of climate models in simulating large-scale variability of surface temperature.