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Climate change increases the risk of soil salinisation in Southern European vineyards. In this study, six of those soils were experimentally salinised, half of which were contaminated with Cu, a widely used fungicide. Changes in soil microbiota were assessed, including bacterial and fungal growth, respiration, carbon use efficiency calculation, and microbial community phospholipid fatty acids comp

It is urgent in science and society to address climate change and other sustainability challenges such as biodiversity loss, deforestation, depletion of marine fish stocks, global ill-health, land degradation, land use change and water scarcity. Sustainability science (SS) is an attempt to bridge the natural and social sciences for seeking creative solutions to these complex challenges. In this ar

Boreal lake and river ecosystems receive large quantities of organic nutrients and carbon (C) from their catchments. How bacterioplankton respond to these inputs is not well understood, in part because we base our understanding and predictions on total pools, yet we know little about the stoichiometry of bioavailable elements within organic matter. We designed bioassays with the purpose of exhaust

The need for sustainable agricultural systems, which for example enhance soil organic carbon (SOC) content, has increased the interest for management with reduced tillage. In this study we used a Swedish long-term (20 yrs.) systems experiment, including reduced tillage (harrowing 10 cm) and plowing (moldboard plow 0–20 cm) combined with three levels of nitrogen (N) fertilization. With this setup w

We investigate how the stereotype of the poor (vs. middle class) influences behavioral predictions. In Study 1 participants made predictions regarding another person’s economic behavior in scenarios pertaining to rate of time preferences (loss, gain of smaller and larger amount). We find that participants, across scenarios, expect individuals with low SES to show more short-sightedness, i.e., steeWe investigate how the stereotype of the poor (vs. middle class) influences behavioral predictions. In Study 1, participants made predictions regarding another person’s economic behavior in scenarios pertaining to rate of time preferences (loss, gain of smaller and larger amount). We find that participants, across scenarios, expect individuals with low SES to show more short-sightedness—i.e., stee

Open access is a well-known externality problem in fisheries causing excess capacity and overfishing. Due to global warming, externality problems from CO2 emissions have gained increased interest. With two externality problems, a first-best optimum can be achieved by using two regulatory instruments. However, solving the open-access externality problem also affects CO2 emissions. By using a bio-ec

There is a growing scientific consensus that limiting the increase in global average temperature to around 2 C above pre-industrial levels is necessary to avoid unacceptable impact on the climate system. This requires that the developed countries' emissions are radically reduced during the next 40 years. Energy scenario studies provide insights on the societal transitions that might be implied by

In this paper we appraise current agricultural subsidy policy in the EU. Several sources of its inefficiency are identified: it is inefficient for supporting farmers’ incomes or guaranteeing food security, and irrational transfer payments decoupled from actual performance that may be negative for environmental protection, social cohesion, etc. Based on a simplified economic model, we prove that th

Rainfall and temperature are important climatic inputs for agricultural production, especially in the context of climate change. However, accurate analysis and simulation of the joint distribution of rainfall and temperature are difficult due to possible interdependence between them. As one possible approach to this problem, five families of copula models are employed to model the interdependence

Abstract in French Une analyse de serie chronologique nous sert a evaluer les effets de la temperature et de la densite sur les fluctuations des recoltes d'ecrevisses adultes de grande taille. Nous verifions si la temperature durant les differents stades du cycle biologique des ecrevisses influence les recoltes observees entre 1946 et 2007 dans le lac Bunn (Suede). De 1946 a 1974, l'ecrevisse a pi

Dissolved organic carbon (DOC) loading is rarely estimated in tropical watersheds. This study quantifies DOC loading in the Rukarara River Watershed (RRW), a Rwandan tropical forest and agricultural watershed, and evaluates its relationship with hydrological factors, land use and land cover (LULC), and topography to better understand the impact of stream DOC export on watershed carbon budgets. The

Agricultural soils contribute to human welfare through their generation of manifold ecosystem services such as food security, water quality and climate regulation, but these are degraded by common farming practices. We have developed a roadmap for evaluating the contribution of both private- and public-good ecosystem services generated by agricultural soils to societal welfare. The approach consid

Groundwater is an important source to supply drinking water demands in both arid and semi-arid regions. Nevertheless, locating high quality drinking water is a major challenge in such areas. Against this background, this study proceeds to utilize and compare five decision tree-based data mining algorithms including Ordinary Decision Tree (ODT), Random Forest (RF), Random Tree (RT), Chi-square Auto

Dissolved organic carbon (DOC) plays a key role in linking terrestrial and aquatic carbon cycles. Most of the work on soil and water DOC has been conducted in temperate watersheds. There is still a gap in knowledge on DOC dynamics within the tropics. This study assesses water extractable organic carbon (WEOC) in topsoils and describes the relationship between WEOC and land use/land cover (LULC), s

Intra-seasonal variation in abiotic and biotic conditions can have profound consequences for pollinator community compositions and foraging movement, with flow-on effects upon pollination services. Yet, few studies have related such variations to pollination services in crop systems. In a cultivated highbush blueberry system with two primary pollinators — the managed European honey bee and a wild

Background: Increasing carbon stock in standing forests is one of the proposed ways to mitigate climate change. However, in production forests, this typically would lead to reduced harvesting possibilities and thus reduced financial gain for the forest owners. The size of this reduction should depend on the chosen target level of the carbon stock as well as the required speed of accumulation. Furt