In these times of strong pressure on aquatic ecosystems and water resources due to climate change abstraction, intermittent rivers ephemeral streams (IRES) (rivers that periodically cease flow and/or dry) have become valuable assets. Indeed, not only do they supply but also offer services for humanity. Despite a growing recognition towards IRES, information assessing their ecosystem (ES) remain...

Population urbanization is a global trend, and socioeconomic activities in urban areas cause changes that affect the environment and human well-being beyond the specific territories, thus connecting urban to non-urban areas and creating city-regions. This article’s objective, from an ecosystem perspective, is to gather a set of information on municipalities (counties) belonging to the Middle Pa...

Biodiversity loss has become a global concern as evidence accumulates that it will negatively affect ecosystem services on which society depends. So far, most studies have focused on the ecological consequences of above-ground biodiversity loss; yet a large part of Earth's biodiversity is literally hidden below ground. Whether reductions of biodiversity in soil communities below ground have con...

The ecosystem service concept is becoming more and more acknowledged in science and decision-making. Taking an economic valuation approach, we quantified the economic value change of ecosystem services for different land use types in the middle basin of Heihe River, Northwest China. Eight ecosystem services indicators were selected: raw materials production, crop production, gas regulation, hyd...

Despite extensive growth in recent years, the field of "quality-of-life" appraisal still evokes debate about basic perception of the concept and is accompanied by a plethora of indexes for measurement. One prime reason for the problems is that the measurements have been transferred from two separate sources - medical health status indexes and social-science population indexes - neither of which...

Geo-information technologies are valuable tools for ecological assessment in stressed environments. Visualizing natural features prone to disasters from the oil sector spatially not only helps in focusing the scope of environmental management with records of changes in affected areas, but it also furnishes information on the pace at which resource extraction affects nature. Notwithstanding the ...

Considerable attention has been devoted to environmental assessment and monitoring, primarily by physical and biological scientists, and more recently by social scientists. However, population growth and global change have resulted in an imperative to assess the resiliency of the environment to adapt to large scale changes and to continue to produce goods and services for future generations (su...