Several marine ecosystems under anthropogenic pressure have experienced shifts from one ecological state to another. In the central Baltic Sea, the regime shift of the 1980s has been associated with food-web reorganization and redirection of energy flow pathways. These long-term dynamics from 1974 to 2006 have been simulated here using a food-web model forced by climate and fishing. Ecological ...

Long-term measurements of ecological effects of warming are often not statistically significant because of annual variability or signal noise. These are reduced in indicators that filter or reduce the noise around the signal and allow effects of climate warming to emerge. In this way, certain indicators act as medium pass filters integrating the signal over years-to-decades. In the Alaskan Arct...

Background, Aim and Scope. Fresh water is a basic resource for humans; however, its link to human health is seldom related to lack of physical access to sufficient fresh water, but rather to poor distribution and access to safe water supplies. On the other hand, fresh water availability for aquatic ecosystems is often reduced due to competition with human uses, potentially leading to impacts on...

Hitherto fungi have rarely been considered in conservation biology, but this is changing as the field moves from addressing single species issues to an integrative ecosystem-based approach. The current emphasis on biodiversity as a provider of ecosystem services throws the spotlight on the vast diversity of fungi, their crucial roles in terrestrial ecosystems, and the benefits of considering fu...

The Mediterranean Sea has been defined "under siege" because of intense pressures from multiple human activities; yet there is still insufficient information on the cumulative impact of these stressors on the ecosystem and its resources. We evaluate how the historical (1950-2011) trends of various ecosystems groups/species have been impacted by changes in primary productivity (PP) combined with...

Ecosystem modelling is increasingly used to explore ecosystem-level effects of changing environmental conditions and management actions. For coral reefs there has been increasing interest in recent decades in the use of ecosystem models for evaluating the effects of fishing and the efficacy of marine protected areas. However, ecosystem models that integrate physical forcings, biogeochemical and...

The purpose of this study is to propose a GIS-based mechanism for diagnosing karst rocky desertification (KRD) ecosystem health. Using the Huajiang Demonstration Area in Guizhou Province as a case study, this research offers a multi-factor indicator system for diagnosing KRD ecosystem health. A set of geologic, environmental, and socio-economic health indicators were developed based on remote s...

The shrinking Baiyangdian Lake and drying up rivers are widely observed in recent years. Due to the significant advantages in integrated analyses of natural and economic systems, emergy analysis is introduced in this paper to assess the health status of Baiyangdian Watershed. First, we establish a emergy based conceptual framework for the assessment, delineate an emergy flow diagram of Baiyangd...

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We analyzed data from catch statistics, scientific surveys and results from ecosystem models to assess main changes in marine resources of the North-Central Adriatic Sea (Central Mediterranean) from the mid 1970s to the early 2000s. We then quantified food-web changes using these datasets and trophodynamic indicators. We applied time series trends and a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to red...