A Spatial Data Infrastructure Approach for the Characterization of New Zealand's Groundwater Systems

The future information needs of stakeholders for hydrogeological and hydro‐climate data management and assessment in New Zealand may be met with an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards‐compliant publicly accessible web services framework which aims to provide integrated use of groundwater information and environmental observation data in general. The stages of the framework development described in this article are search and discovery as well as data collection and access with (meta)data services, which are developed in a community process. The concept and prototype implementation of OGC‐compliant web services for groundwater and hydro‐climate data include demonstration data services that present multiple distributed datasets of environmental observations. The results also iterate over the stakeholder community process and the refined profile of OGC services for environmental observation data sharing within the New Zealand Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) landscape, including datasets from the National Groundwater Monitoring Program and the New Zealand Climate Database along with datasets from affiliated regional councils at regional‐ and sub‐regional scales. With the definition of the New Zealand observation data profile we show that current state‐of‐the‐art standards do not necessarily need to be improved, but that the community has to agree upon how to use these standards in an iterative process.     

Do perceptions of the Red‐tailed Hawk indicate a human‐wildlife conflict on the island of La Gonave,Haiti?

The Caribbean subspecies of the Red‐tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis solitudinus or B.j. jamaicensis) is the largest native carnivore on the island of La Gonave, Haiti, and the island's apex predator. On other Caribbean islands, raptors have been persecuted by local people typically because of their depredation of livestock. In addition to possible persecution from humans, Red‐tailed Hawks on La Gonave face challenges from island‐wide timber overharvest and rapid land‐cover changes. To better understand the human‐apex predator relationship on La Gonave, we surveyed islanders about their perceptions of, and interactions with, the Red‐tailed Hawk. According to 121 respondents from 10 villages, La Gonavans do not hunt, kill, or consume Red‐tailed Hawks. Our study revealed a notable absence of negative perceptions of the hawk by respondents despite intense hawk depredation of domestic chickens. While the chicken depredation may lead outside observers to consider the human‐hawk relationship on La Gonave as representative of a human‐wildlife conflict, our interview data do not support that conception. Our findings reflect an important conversation in related contemporary scientific literature about what constitutes human‐wildlife conflicts across various cultures. Despite tolerance by residents, Red‐tailed Hawks on La Gonave remain threatened by habitat degradation.     

Bathymetry of the Reykjanes Ridge

We present a series of 1:200,000 scale maps of the bathymetry of the Reykjanes Ridge. The data are divided into four maps, extending 630 km along the ridge axis and between 30 and 100 km off-axis. This compilation of bathymetry data is extremely detailed, gridded at approximately 100 m resolution, and with almost no gaps. The Reykjanes Ridge is one of the best examples of a hotspot-dominated ridge, whose characteristics are influenced by its proximity to the Iceland plume. Many fundamental questions may be addressed at the Reykjanes Ridge, which is why the BRIDGE programme identified it as one of its four regional projects. These maps represent a BRIDGE contribution to the general scientific community.     

Assessing the feasibility of ecosystem-based fisheries management in tropical contexts

This analysis documents the reasons for emerging interest in ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM) and relates this management model to others. It highlights the central challenges to EBFM in the tropical context and examines an ongoing project, Fisheries Improved for Sustainable Harvest (FISH), in the Philippines—likely the first EBFM project in the tropics. The Philippine legal and institutional context provides major governance challenges to EBFM, especially as management is scaled up. A monitoring framework with process and output criteria is applied to FISH to establish progress to date. Major institutional and governance challenges for EBFM will require monitoring, evaluation, and adaptation.     

The seasonal cycle of diabatic heat storage in the Pacific Ocean

This study quantifies uncertainties in closing the seasonal cycle of diabatic heat storage (DHS) over the Pacific Ocean from 20°S to 60°N through the synthesis of World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) reanalysis products from 1993 to 1999. These products are DHS from Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO); near-surface geostrophic and Ekman currents from Earth and Space Research (ESR); and air-sea heat fluxes from Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (COADS), National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), and European Center for Mid-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). With these products, we compute residual heat budget components by differencing long-term monthly means from the long-term annual mean. This allows the seasonal cycle of the DHS tendency to be modeled. Everywhere latent heat flux residuals dominate sensible heat flux residuals, shortwave heat flux residuals dominate longwave heat flux residuals, and residual Ekman heat advection dominates residual geostrophic heat advection, with residual dissipation significant only in the Kuroshio-Oyashio current extension. The root-mean-square (RMS) of the differences between observed and model residual DHS tendencies (averaged over 10° latitude-by-20° longitude boxes) is <20 W m⁻² in the interior ocean and <100 W m⁻² in the Kuroshio-Oyashio current extension. This reveals that the residual DHS tendency is driven everywhere by some mix of residual latent heat flux, shortwave heat flux, and Ekman heat advection. Suppressing bias errors in residual air-sea turbulent heat fluxes and Ekman heat advection through minimization of the RMS differences reduces the latter to <10 W m⁻² over the interior ocean and <25 W m⁻² in the Kuroshio-Oyashio current extension. This reveals air-sea temperature and specific humidity differences from in situ surface marine weather observations to be a principal source of bias error, overestimated over most of ocean but underestimated near the Intertropical Convergence Zone.     

A Benthic Terrain Classification Scheme for American Samoa

Coral reef ecosystems, the most varied on earth, continually face destruction from anthropogenic and natural threats. The U.S. Coral Reef Task Force seeks to characterize and map priority coral reef ecosystems in the U.S./Trust Territories by 2009. Building upon NOAA Biogeography shallow-water classifications based on Ikonos imagery, presented here are new methods, based on acoustic data, for classifying benthic terrain below 30 m, around Tutuila, American Samoa. The result is a new classification scheme for American Samoa that extends and improves the NOAA Biogeography scheme, which, although developed for Pacific island nations and territories, is only applicable to a maximum depth of 30 m, due to the limitations of satellite imagery. The scheme may be suitable for developing habitat maps pinpointing high biodiversity around coral reefs throughout the western Pacific.