Nobre, A.M and Ferreira, J.G., 2009. Integration of ecosystem-based tools to support coastal zone management. Journal of Coastal Research, SI 56 (Proceedings of the 10th International Coastal Symposium), pg – pg. Lisbon, Portugal, ISBN Over the past decades policy makers have defined new legislative and policy instruments to address coastal ecosystem degradation. It is important to provide coas...

A major reason for seeking sustainable environmental solutions is to maintain the benefits that come to humans from nature and its components. The term “Ecosystem Services” has been coined to describe these benefits. Ecosystem services include provision of clean air and water, natural fertilisation and nutrient cycling in soils, mitigation of climate, pollination of plants including crops, cont...

Measuring and modeling carbon (C) stock changes in terrestrial ecosystems are pivotal in addressing global C-cycling model uncertainties. Difficulties in detecting small short-term changes in relatively large C stocks require the development of robust sensitive flux measurement techniques. Net ecosystem exchange (NEE) ground-level chambers are increasingly used to assess C dynamics in low veget...

RECENT INVESTIGATIONS HAVE SHOWN THAT TWO COMPONENTS OF COMMUNITY TRAIT COMPOSITION ARE IMPORTANT FOR KEY ECOSYSTEM PROCESSES: (i) the community-weighted mean trait value (CWM), related to the mass ratio hypothesis and dominant trait values in the community, and (ii) functional diversity (FD), related to the complementarity hypothesis and the divergence of trait values. However, no experiments ...

The problem, however, is that many of the ecological and social amenities are not currently incorporated into the decision-making process. From the perspective of economic theory, they reveal themselves as positive externalities and as such have no direct market price. Another fundamental issue is getting at the quantitative characteristics of the ecosystem services. Traditionally, publications...

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are one tool that can be used in the comprehensive management of human activities in areas of the ocean. Although researchers have supported using MPAs as an ecosystem management tool, scientific research on MPAs in areas other than fisheries and fisheries management is limited. This paper presents a model for designing marine protected areas that protect important...

The worldwide occurrence of complex climate-induced ecological shifts in marine systems is one of the major challenges in sustainable bio-resources management. The occurrence of ecological environment-driven shifts was studied in the Southern Caspian Sea using the "shiftogram" method on available fisheries-related (i.e. commercially important bentho-pelagic fish stocks) ecological and climatic ...

The success of an innovating firm often depends on the efforts of other innovators in its environment. How do the challenges faced by external innovators affect the focal firm’s outcomes? To address this question we first characterize the external environment according to the structure of interdependence. We follow the flow of inputs and outputs in the ecosystem to distinguish between upstream ...

[1] Fire affects ecosystems by altering both their structure and the cycling of carbon and nutrients. The emissions from fires represent an important biogeochemical pathway by which the biosphere affects climate. For climate change studies it is important to model fire as a mechanistic climate-dependent process in dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) and the terrestrial ecosystem components...

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