Ecology: Global change and terrestrial plant community dynamics_from the renowned PNAS, (US Academy of Science) Paper freely available.

Global change and terrestrial plant community dynamics

Is I believe, a most welcomed contribution to help adjust to climate change.

Read the full paper below (page foot)  

1. Janet Franklina,1, 
2. Josep M. Serra-Diaza,b, 
3. Alexandra D. Syphardc, and 
4. Helen M. Regand

Author Affiliations

1. Contributed by Janet Franklin, February 2, 2016 (sent for review October 8, 2015; reviewed by Gregory P. Asner, Monica G. Turner, and Peter M. Vitousek)

1. Abstract
2. Full Text
3. Authors & Info
4. Figures
5. SI
6. Metrics
7. PDF
8. PDF + SI

Significance

Global terrestrial vegetation plays a critical role in biogeochemical cycles and provides important ecosystem services. Vegetation has been altered by anthropogenic global change drivers including land-use change, altered disturbance regimes, invasive species, and climate change, for decades to centuries, or in some cases millennia. Vegetation responses to land use and disturbance can be more immediate than to climate change and can be long lasting. The effect of global warming on water balance may have a stronger influence than the direct effects of temperature on vegetation. Models deployed at multiple ecological scales, populations, communities, and landscapes will be required to forecast vegetation responses and feedbacks to accelerated global change.

Abstract

Anthropogenic drivers of global change include rising atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses and resulting changes in the climate, as well as nitrogen deposition, biotic invasions, altered disturbance regimes, and land-use change. Predicting the effects of global change on terrestrial plant communities is crucial because of the ecosystem services vegetation provides, from climate regulation to forest products. In this paper, we present a framework for detecting vegetation changes and attributing them to global change drivers that incorporates multiple lines of evidence from spatially extensive monitoring networks, distributed experiments, remotely sensed data, and historical records. Based on a literature review, we summarize observed changes and then describe modeling tools that can forecast the impacts of multiple drivers on plant communities in an era of rapid change. Observed responses to changes in temperature, water, nutrients, land use, and disturbance show strong sensitivity of ecosystem productivity and plant population dynamics to water balance and long-lasting effects of disturbance on plant community dynamics. Persistent effects of land-use change and human-altered fire regimes on vegetation can overshadow or interact with climate change impacts. Models forecasting plant community responses to global change incorporate shifting ecological niches, population dynamics, species interactions, spatially explicit disturbance, ecosystem processes, and plant functional responses. Monitoring, experiments, and models evaluating multiple change drivers are needed to detect and predict vegetation changes in response to 21st century global change.

Please do not hesitate to read the full paper via the link below:

Global change and terrestrial plant community dynamics:



And why not join the community of readers of highly credible peer reviewed journal PNAS.(Proceedings of the American Academy of Science)  Link to all subject matter.

'via Blog this'

Public Understanding vs. Scientific Consensus via Yale

"Public understanding of climate change, however, is starkly different than the expert consensus: only 44% of Americans think global warming is both happening and human caused. " says Yale, School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.

- See more at: See More at Yale Univ. 



Heh! Come on you guys, come on Yale: When the chips are down, and they are down, who do you believe, Scientists whom you do not know and how do not pay your daily bills or Your Boss whom you know and who pays your every day lively hood!!!!

You swallow and hope maybe something will turn up and try to forget for the time being or if you are a real toughy you stick you chest out and bellow any old denial theory posing to be a hard boiled sceptical scientific enquiring mind. So it's

"BUSINESS AS USUAL"  & The boss is happy, hoping he will be in the next issue of Forbes Magazine's Worlds Richest individuals!

SEE for EXAMPLE (cf.): 

ExxonMobil Ignores IPCC Warning, Vows to Burn All Oil Reserves

You can add the strong negative message given by USA in the Huge Shale Fracking industry , huge GHG emission technique in itself and whose poor management of environmental concerns have been underlined by French Publc Television Programme "Envoye Speciale" if I remember correctly.

The public cannot lead on such an issue.  I believe only strongly led International Co-operation(s) at the highest levels can adaquatly respond to such an enormous challenge.  Suggestions I have made may be found in my previous post entitled insired by a summary by New Scientist link as follows:

 A Security Council Issue_Climate science: Why the world won't listen - opinion - 26 September 2013 - New Scientist

Top Article, Millenium Topic, Energy Biofuel and Food Dilema!

"Transportation bio-fuels such as synfuel hydrocarbons or cellulosic ethanol, if produced from low-input biomass grown on agriculturally marginal land or from waste biomass, could provide much greater supplies and environmental benefits than food-based bio-fuels. "

Neither Bio-diesel nor Ethanol, bio-fuel can replace much petroleum without impacting food supplies.

Even dedicating all U.S. corn and soybean production to bio-fuels would meet only 12% of gasoline demand and 6% of diesel demand.

To be a viable alternative to current transportation fuel, a bio-fuel should provide:
- a net energy gain,
-have environmental benefits,
-be economically competitive, and
-be producible in large quantities without reducing food supplies.

These criteria were used in life-cycle accounting, by the research team from the University of Minnesota to evaluate, ethanol from corn grain and bio-diesel from soybeans.

They conclude that:

Transportation bio-fuels such as synfuel hydrocarbons or cellulosic ethanol, if produced from low-input biomass grown on agriculturally marginal land or from waste biomass, could provide much greater supplies and environmental benefits than food-based bio-fuels.

Bio-diesel provides sufficient environmental advantages to merit subsidy. (debatable)

Some Life Cycle Accountancy results:
Energy Efficiency
-Ethanol yields 25% more energy than the energy invested in its production, whereas
-Bio-diesel yields 93% more.
Green House Gases (GHG) and Pollutants:
Bio-diesel better than Ethanol :
-Bio-diesel releases just 1.0%, 8.3%, and 13% of the agricultural nitrogen, phosphorus, and pesticide pollutants, respectively, per net energy gain compared with ethanol.
Bio-diesel better than Ethanol better than Fossil Fuels:
-Relative to the fossil fuels they displace, greenhouse gas emissions are reduced 12% by the production and combustion of ethanol and 41% by bio-diesel.
-Bio-diesel also releases less air pollutants per net energy gain than ethanol.

These advantages of bio-diesel over ethanol come from lower agricultural inputs and more efficient conversion of feedstocks to fuel.


Negative environmental consequences of fossil fuels and concerns about petroleum supplies have spurred the search for renewable transportation bio-fuels. Until recent increases in petroleum prices, high production costs made bio-fuels unprofitable without subsidies.

My Comment:
That bio-diesel provides sufficient environmental advantages to merit subsidy requires careful reading of the research paper and important effort in communication globally especially with special consideration given to possible negative signals given on food stress.

Source:
PNAS Dec 2008

Contributed by David Tilman, June 2, 2006Environmental, economic, and energetic costs and benefits of bio-diesel and ethanol biofuels Jason Hill*,†,‡,§, Erik Nelson†, David Tilman*,§, Stephen Polasky*,†, and Douglas Tiffany† +Author Affiliations Departments of *Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior and †Applied Economics, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN 55108; and ‡Department of Biology, St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN 55057

Top-Technology Trends from Roland Piquepaille_ Frenchman who blogs in english

Photo right- NASA: Ship trails over the Bay of Biscay -illustrates a scientific phenomenon known as the "Twomey Effect".

I first learned of Roland's Blog while "half"-listening to the french radio, Europe.

Roland is quoted on the radio; "as being a passionate reader and observer of scientific and technological progress, choosing what grabs his imagination at the moment - his hearts desire - "ses coups de coeur.""

I checked two recent posts 7 & 8 Sept08 and found an irresistible urge to delve into this work. I suppose that's the whole point of scientific communication.

Roland's blogs are extremely well presented, are well very documented via the classical post embedded links technique. New to me was the excellent link and tag presentation system, a problem that I have recently confronted with leading me to experimenting a Tag Cloud approach-also useful for analysing word relevance marketing input. Roland Piquepaille uses the Yahoo associated Delicious social bookmarking platform. His site is well worth more than a fleeting visit by any serious aspiring content oriented blogger, as it was to me, in my own efforts to improve my approaches to blogging.

Content is rich, but easy to read. It is I believe, from a rapid perusal, a useful contribution to the scientific technological, engineering and medically oriented blog-sphere. Albeit the very very high quality of sources both from scientific press news and online peer reviewed Journals. cf. Main Sources below.

Here I shall echo, to a large extent, only the first post I read, at Roland's Blog[Link-html] concerning a fairly radical approach to fighting climate change by a method well known to the scientific and engineering community as: autonomous cloud-seeding by a fleet of ships. This is the sort of thing reported here cf. photos. The important corpus of scientific data may be consulted via links below.

This is a big project if undertaken and cost estimates advanced are reported by Piquepaille. Serious science is deeply involved who further remarks in the following taken from his blog:

"This project has been led by Professor John Latham of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Latham worked with colleagues at the University of Edinburgh led by Professor Stephen Salter, whose main field is Wave Energy for Electrical Power Generation. You can see another picture of these conceptual cloud-seeding ships on page 3 of a paper presented by Slater in October 2005, "Beyond carbon: consideration of albedo control technologies to mitigate climate change" (PDF format, 6 pages, 653 KB)."
He further remarks that the research is supported by the highly reputable Royal Society and has been published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, PTRS_A under the title "Sea-going hardware for the cloud albedo method of reversing global warming" on August 29, 2008."

Piquepaille portrays an couple of often published speculative photos - artists views & a trial platform to fix the reader's attention and summarises sufficient data to whet the appetite of the motivated engineer or perhaps the motivated engineering firm -NB. NASA have tackled much more challenging & horrendous tasks.

Trial Rig

It is interesting that the decision makers and activists , take note that various pros and cons from a variety of sources are mentioned. Good places to get a balance view should the project be required to be taken from print to product - the probability is, I surmise, not a Non-Zero option, unfortunately, whatever our feelings to the contrary maybe in spite of continuing expert's lashing "Global Political Leadership. "

The link to the full text of this paper (PDF format, 18 pages, 1.75 MB). This article was included in a special issue of the PTRS journal named "Geoscale engineering to avert dangerous climate change" which carried another article co-authored by Latham, "Global temperature stabilization via controlled albedo enhancement of low-level maritime clouds."

Main Sources well worth reading:


(1) Edwin Cartlidge, for PhysicsWorld.com, September 4, 2008, and includes numerious comments and further references.

(2) Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A, doi:10.1098/rsta.2008.0136 Published online
Sea-going hardware for the cloud albedo method of reversing global warming by STEPHEN SALTER 1,*, GRAHAM SORTINO 2 AND JOHN LATHAM 3
1Institute for Energy Systems, School of Engineering, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3JL, UK 2School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, UK 3National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO 80307-3000, USA

NB. Geoscale engineering articles available online via FirstCite, (among many titles on diverse Science and Technological Issues).

Coping with carbon: a near-term strategy to limit carbon dioxide emissions from power stations
Issue Title
Theme Issue ‘Geoscale engineering to avert dangerous climate change’ compiled by Brian Launder and J. Michael T. Thompson
DOI
10.1098/rsta.2008.0113
Online Date
Friday, August 29, 2008

All Roland Piquepaille's selections may be found on his full blog at this [LINK]

Footnote:

The “Twomey effect”, says that increasing the concentration of water droplets within a cloud raises the overall surface area of the droplets and thereby enhances the cloud’s albedo-ie. the reflectivity of clouds lying about 1 km above the ocean’s surface.

By spraying fine droplets of sea water into the air, the small particles of salt within each droplet act as new centres of condensation when they reach the clouds above, leading to a greater concentration of water droplets within each cloud.