The kinetics of propionate degradation, acetate splitting, and hydrogen consumption in digesting sludge were investigated in a lab-scale digester. At natural steady-state conditions, the acetate-splitting systems in well-digested sludge were about half saturated. Propionate-degrading systems were saturated to only 10 to 15%, and hydrogen removal was less than 1% of the maximum possible rate. It...

Macroalgae are considered as primary producers in ecosystem food chain. This study investigated spatial and temporal variation of three species of macroalgae namely, Laurencia caspica (red macroalga) Enteromorpha intestinalis and Cladophora glomerata (green macroalgae) on the hard substrates of the southern Caspian Sea coasts and their relation with environmental factors. Seasonal sampling pref...

To complement this Special Feature on global water governance, we focused on a generic challenge at the global level, namely, the degree to which water issues need to be dealt with in a centralized, concentrated, and hierarchical manner. We examined water ecosystem services and their impact on human well-being, the role of policies, indirect and direct drivers in influencing these services, and...

Urbanization is a key driver of social and environmental change world-wide. However, our understanding its impacts on the multidimensional well-being benefits that people obtain from ecosystems remains limited. We explored how contributions land- seascapes varied with urbanization level in Solomon Islands, fast-urbanizing Small Island Developing State. Drawing framework, we compared perceived d...

Biodiversity widely observed in ecological systems is attributed to the dynamical balance among the competing species. The time-varying populations of the interacting species are often captured rather well by a set of deterministic replicator equations in the evolutionary game theory. However, intrinsic fluctuations arisen from the discreteness of populations lead to stochastic derivations from...

Human well-being is intricately connected to ecosystem services. A keystone contribution to the ecosystem service literature has been the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, MA, (Ecosystems and human well-being: a framework for assessment, Island Press, Washington, DC; 2003, 2005). Much of the work on ecosystem services to date has focused on the assessment and classification of environmental func...