Referential qualities are qualities of an entity taken with reference to another entity. For example the vulnerability of a coast to sea level rise. In contrast to most non-relational qualities which only depend on their host, referential qualities require a referent additional to their host, i.e. a quality Q of an entity X taken with reference to another entity R. These qualities occur frequen...

BACKGROUND AND TROPHIC DIVERSITY STUDY Lake Turkana is an understudied desert lake shared by Kenya and Ethiopia. This system is at the precipice of large-scale changes in ecological function due to climate change and economic development along its major inflowing river, the Omo River. To anticipate response by the fish community to these changes, we quantified trophic diversity for seven ecolog...

Over 40% of the earth’s land surface are drylands that are home to approximately 2.5 billion people. Livelihood sustainability in drylands is threatened by a complex and interrelated range of social, economic, political, and environmental changes that present significant challenges to researchers, policy makers, and, above all, rural land users. Dynamic ecological and environmental change model...

The present study was devoted to identify the evolutionary path of a number of local systems in a Mediterranean country vulnerable to soil degradation (SD) in the last decades. A multivariate analysis was used to evaluate the socio-ecological conditions and to estimate rapidity-of-change of local systems by considering 6 bio-physical factors predisposing soil to degradation and 23 socioeconomic...

Tourism industry has become one of the biggest and dynamic industries in the world, giving a great impetus to the economic development. However, its vulnerability and the crisis management have been the momentous problem. The findings of researches and practices have shown that tourism crisis will possibly take place due to the destruction of system balance, which is similar to the ecological c...

The extinction of a species is inevitably preceded by the extirpation of a series of local populations. Ecological theory predicts that vulnerability to extirpation varies between populations and is ultimately linked to environmental heterogeneity. If populations of a species are present in multiple regions separated by abrupt changes in environmental conditions (e.g., biomes), spatial variatio...

The majority of vulnerability and adaptation scholarship, policies and programs focus exclusively on climate change or global environmental change. Yet, individuals, communities and sectors experience a broad array of multi-scalar and multi-temporal, social, political, economic and environmental changes to which they are vulnerable and must adapt. While extensive theoretical— and increasingly e...

Aeolian desertification is a kind of land degradation that is characterized by aeolian activity, resulting from the responses of land ecosystems to climate change and anthropogenic disturbances. The source areas of the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers are typical regions of China’s Tibetan Plateau affected by aeolian desertification. We assessed the vulnerability of these areas to aeolian desertificat...