The paper deals with the use of biological life support systems, initially created for long-duration space flights [1, 2], for the solution of problems with the sustainability of metropolitan cities, which must meet the requirements of decrease of environmental load. Motivated by applications in issues of design of water purification stations for new generation of high-rise buildings ''Sky City...

California’s primary hydrologic system, the San Francisco Estuary and its upstream watershed, is vulnerable to the regional hydrologic consequences of projected global climate change. Previous work has shown that a projected warming would result in a reduction of snowpack storage leading to higher winter and lower spring-summer streamflows and increased spring-summer salinities in the estuary. ...

Despite mounting evidence of invasive species’ impacts on the environment and society, our ability to predict invasion establishment, spread, and impact are inadequate. Efforts to explain and predict invasion outcomes have been limited primarily to terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems. Invasions are also common in coastal marine ecosystems, yet to date predictive marine invasion models are abs...

Despite suggestions that extensive mixing and large-scale transport of organic matter occurs within estuarine systems and across fluvial-estuarine-coastal ecotones (Teal 1962, Odum 1980), more recent evidence in estuarine detritus-based food web systems has shown strong gradients in the sources of organic matter assimilated by consumers across diverse fluvial-estuarine-coastal ocean scales (Pet...

Undisturbed natural wetlands are important carbon sinks due to their low soil respiration. When compared with inland alpine wetlands, estuarine wetlands in densely populated areas are subjected to great pressure associated with environmental pollution. However, the effects of water pollution and eutrophication on soil respiration of estuarine and their mechanism have still not been thoroughly i...

The world's marine and coastal ecosystems are under threat and single-sector management efforts have failed to address those threats. Scientific consensus suggests that management should evolve to focus on ecosystems and their human, ecological, and physical components. Estuaries are recognized globally as one of the world's most productive and most threatened ecosystems and many estuarine area...

A simple model of estuarine eutrophication is built on biomechanical (or mechanistic) descriptions of a number of the key ecological processes in estuaries. Mechanistically described processes include the nutrient uptake and light capture of planktonic and benthic autotrophs, and the encounter rates of planktonic predators and prey. Other more complex processes, such as sediment biogeochemistry...

Assessments of trophic structure through ecological network analysis (ENA) have been done in a wide variety of estuarine and coastal environments. For example, some have used it to compare trophic structures within ecosystems focusing on temporal conditions (Baird and Ulanowicz 1989; Baird et al. 1998) and among ecosystems focusing on spatial conditions (e.g. Baird and Ulanowicz 1993; Christens...

Muramic acid, a component of the muramyl peptide found only in the cell walls of bacteria and blue-green algae, furnishes a measure of detrital or sedimentary procaryotic biomass. A reproducible assay involving acid hydrolysis, preparative thin-layer chromatographic purification, and colorimetric analysis of lactate released from muramic acid by alkaline hydrolysis is described. Comparison of s...