Changes in the abundance of species—especially those that influence water and nutrient dynamics, trophic interactions, or disturbance regime—affect the structure and functioning of ecosystems. Diversity is also functionally important, both because it increases the probability of including species that have strong ecosystem effects and because it can increase the efficiency of resource use. Diff...

Biosafety refers to environmental safety in the context of genetic engineering. Genetic engineering risk a new form of pollution or ‘contamination’, called genetic pollution or biopollution. In certain cases, biopollution can have major health and environmental impacts and create biohazards – dangers threatening biodiversity at the genetic, species or ecosystem level. The introduction of new sp...

A survey of remote sensing-based aboveground biomass estimation methods in forest ecosystems Dengsheng Lu, Qi Chen, Guangxing Wang, Lijuan Liu, Guiying Li & Emilio Moran a Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Carbon Cycling in Forest Ecosystems and Carbon Sequestration, School of Environmental & Resource Sciences, Zhejiang A&F University, Lin'An, China b Center for Global Change and Earth Obse...

What would it be like to walk into a real-life “Holodeck” or “Cerebro” and experience a stunning new world unlike anything seen before? Beyond this, what if we were able to experience hitherto unobservable aspects of nature, as environments into which the body cannot actually venture? In fact, these questions are on the minds of scientists and artists working together, right now, in the AlloSph...

The term environmental flows has become widely used to define the hydrological regime required to sustain freshwater and estuarine ecosystems and the human livelihoods and well-being that depend on them. A large range of frameworks and methods has been developed to assess environmental flow needs and many authors have identified subtleties in the approaches needed for different situations and r...

A major force affecting many forest ecosystems is the encroachment of residential, commercial and industrial development. Analysis of the complex interactions between development decisions and ecosystems, and how the environmental consequences of these decisions influence human values and subsequent decisions will lead to a better understanding of the environmental consequences of private choic...

We present a model for evolution and extinction in large ecosystems. The model incorporates the effects of interactions between species and the influences of abiotic environmental factors. We study the properties of the model by approximate analytic solution and also by numerical simulation, and use it to make predictions about the distribution of extinctions and species lifetimes that we would...

Conservation and environmental management are principal countermeasures to the degradation of marine ecosystems and their services. However, in many cases, current practices are insufficient to reverse ecosystem declines. We suggest that restoration ecology, the science underlying the concepts and tools needed to restore ecosystems, must be recognized as an integral element for marine conservat...

In times of global environmental change, the sustainability of human–environment systems is only possible through a better understanding of ecosystem processes. An assessment of anthropogenic environmental impacts depends upon monitoring natural ecosystems. These systems are intrinsically complex and dynamic, and are characterized by ecological gradients. Remote sensing data repeatedly collecte...

EPA Grant Number: R-82868401 Subproject: 001 Center: The Atlantic Slope Consortium––Developing Ecological Indicators for Aquatic Ecosystems of the Atlantic Slope Region Center Director: Robert Brooks Title: Integrated Assessment of Estuarine Ecosystems Investigators: Dennis Whigham, Charles Gallegos, Mark Brinson, Kirk Havens, Anson Hines, Peter Marra, Rick Rheinhardt, Lyle Varnell Institutions...