Large, migratory predators are often cited as sentinel species for ecosystem processes and climate-related changes, but their utility as indicators is dependent upon an understanding of their response to environmental variability. Documentation of the links between climate variability, ecosystem change and predator dynamics is absent for most top predators. Identifying species that may be usefu...

In prioritising investment in natural capital, site-scale indicators are increasingly used to capture finescale variation inherent in complex ecosystems. However, site assessment is costly, has high skill demand, and is time-consuming. We assess the marginal gain associated with including site-scale indicators in metrics typically used by agri-environmental stewardship schemes and payments for ...

The intrinsic link between ecosystem health and human health has been firmly established in the literature and has given rise to the development of new multidisciplinary fields of research such as medical geology. An important practical implication of the ecosystem health approach is the utility of human disease outbreaks as indicators of underlying ecosystem disruption. The use of such a bioin...

As “kidneys of the earth”, wetlands play an important role in ameliorating weather conditions, flood storage, and the control and reduction of environmental pollution. With the development of local economies, the wetlands in both the Amazon and Yangtze River Basins have been affected and threatened by human activities, such as urban expansion, reclamation of land from lakes, land degradation, a...

Species' functional traits are closely related to ecosystem processes through evolutionary adaptation, and are thus directly connected to environmental changes. Species' traits are not commonly used in palaeoecology, even though they offer powerful advantages in understanding the impact of environmental disturbances in a mechanistic way over time. Here we show that functional traits of testate ...

The response of an ecosystem to external drivers may not always be gradual and reversible. Discontinuous and sometimes irreversible changes, called ‘regime shifts’ or ‘critical transitions’, can occur. The likelihood of such shifts is expected to increase for a variety of ecosystems, and it is difficult to predict how close an ecosystem is to a critical transition. Recent modelling studies iden...

i Table of contents iv List of figures and tables vi Acknowledgements xv Author’s declaration xvi Chapter 1: General introduction 1.1 Marine ecosystem change 1 1.2 Theoretical considerations: seabirds as indicators of marine ecosystem change 4 1.3 Seabirds-Climate change effects 5 1.4 Seabirds-Fishery interactions 8 1.5 Conclusions 11 1.6 Aims of the thesis 11 Chapter 2: Influence of climate ch...

This paper presents an evaluation of the long-term impact of microfinance programmes on Acehnese children during the post-tsunami recovery. The study, conducted from June to August 2010, examined the impact of microfinance programming six years after the tsunami. The sample consisted of 185 microfinance participants, with a comparison group of 192 individuals who did not participate in microfin...