The nitrogen cycle is one of the key macronutrient cycles that controls the distribution of life on Earth. The nitrogen cycle is composed of a series of distinct microbially mediated processes which may be affected differently with warming. Climate change is likely to affect all components of the nitrogen cycle. However, the extent to which each component will be affected and how this will alter interactions in natural systems is unknown. Here we used laboratory and field experiments to investigate the effect of warming on nitrogen cycling. We used a combination of pure cultures, in-situ measurements and laboratory manipulations of environmental samples to explore responses in freshwater and marine systems. In pure cultures of denitrifying bacteria, denitrification rates increased by 117-164%, with a 4oC temperature increase (11.5-15.5oC). In freshwater mesocosms, long term warming rates of sediment denitrification increased by 247%, with no significant thermal response of sediment nitrification within these systems. Marine sediment rates of denitrification and anammox increased by 4.69-16.23% and 3.71-35.39% respectively, depending on N substrate. Whereas a 3oC temperature increase in the water of the ETNP OMZ increased denitrification and anammox rates by 52.5% and 52.9% respectively, with no significant thermal response of nitrogen fixation in the OMZ surface waters. From this study, nitrogen removal processes increase with increasing temperature across systems but internal transformation and fixation of N show little to no thermal response. Further investigation into the causes of the observed variation in responses, such as substrate limitation and identification of microbes involved, will allow us to better understand and therefore better predict cross-system responses of the nitrogen cycle to global warming.

No / Are we creating an ungovernable world? Can we be confident that our existing modes of global governance are sufficient, or adaptable enough, to meet the challenges of globalization? This new study powerfully tackles these key questions, delivering a provocative examination of the cognitive, practical and political limits on our ability to exercise systems of regulation and control on the same scale as the globalizing forces already shaping the human condition. Key issues addressed include: * an examination of the many meanings of 'global governance' * a contextualised view of global governance within the complex interaction of human and natural systems * an analysis of global governance at a fundamental and conceptual level * a case study of disseminative systems and global governance This book is essential reading for those with research interests in global politics, international relations and globalization.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Geography / Lisa M. Harrington / Land-change science has become a foundational element of global environmental change. Understanding how complex coupled human and natural systems (CHANS) affect land change is part of understanding our planet and also helps us determine how to mitigate current and future problems. Upland birds such as the Ring-Necked Pheasant (Phasianus colchicus) have been widely studied. While myriad studies have been done that show relationships between land change driving forces and the pheasant, what are not found are long-term, comprehensive approaches that show the historical importance of how past land change drivers can be used to gain knowledge about what is happening today or what may happen in the future. This research set out to better understand how human and natural driving forces have affected land change, pheasants, and pheasant hunting in South Dakota from the early 1900s to the present. A qualitative historical geography approach was used to assemble information from historic literature and South Dakota Game, Fish, and Parks Department annual reports to show the linkages between human and natural systems and how they affect pheasant populations. A quantitative approach was used to gather information from hunters who participated in the 2006 pheasant hunting season. Two-thousand surveys were mailed that gathered socioeconomic data, information on types of land hunted, thoughts on land accessibility issues, as well as spatial information on where hunters hunted in South Dakota. Results from the hunter surveys provided some significant information. Non-resident and resident hunters tended to hunt in different parts of the state. Non-resident hunters were older, better educated, and had higher incomes than resident hunters. Resident hunters, when asked about issues such as crowded public hunting grounds and accessibility to private lands had more negative responses, whereas non-resident hunters, especially those who hunt on privately-held lands, were more satisfied with their hunting experiences. Linkages were also seen between changes in human and natural systems and pheasant populations. Some of the most important contributors to population changes were large-scale conservation policies (Conservation Reserve Program) and agricultural incentives, as well as broader economic issues such as global energy production and national demands for increases in biofuel production (ethanol and biodiesel). Many of the changes in pheasant populations caused by changes in human systems have been exacerbated by changes in natural systems, such as severe winter weather and less-than-optimal springtime breeding conditions.

No description available.

Today, throughout the world, we are in the midst of a man-made environmental crisis. We must change how we consume and affect natural resources on the planet if we are to retain its richness of landscapes and biodiversity. It is our job as landscape architects to lead the way in changing the human relationship to natural resource consumption and building. My thesis asks the question, how can an understanding of landscape as a system give form to architecture? In natural systems nothing is wasted, everything is interconnected and self-sufficient at the same time. How can we model our buildings -- our built landscapes -- after nature? Three natural systems are key components to modeling nature: water, vegetation and energy. The landscapes that we have constructed for cars exemplify the problems we have ecologically. Cars produce greenhouse gases creating global warming. Highways and parking lots denude the vegetative habitat and lead to excessive water runoff polluting the watersheds. Solving the car problem goes a long way to setting an example for ultimately resolving ecological development issues. Cars are both the epitome of freedom and environmental degradation. Joni Mitchell put it eloquently with "they paved paradise put up a parking lot." My studio project is a mixed use parking facility fabricating the natural systems of water, energy and vegetation in order to mitigate environmental problems as well as resolve the practical necessity of where to put cars in crowded urban centers. Park Park puts the paradise back into the pavement. / Master of Landscape Architecture

Human and freshwater ecosystems are intrinsically interconnected. To better design effective policies, modeling tools and valuation methods are necessary to help understanding the complex reciprocal linkages between ecosystem processes and human actions, and coupled human and natural systems (CNHS) sets up a critical paradigm to do so. It is thus of both academic and empirical appeal to integrate reliable economic valuation methods with tools and models from multiple disciplines in order to quantify the feedbacks between human and natural systems and to inform better policy design. Using freshwater resources as an example, this dissertation contains three essays which integrate natural science and economics models to understand how changes in human behavior and societal policies lead to changes in ecosystem services, and how changes in ecosystem services, in return, affect human decisions. The first two essays focus on agricultural nonpoint source pollution problems in United States and examines the impacts of potential water polices on both water polluters and water demanders. Specifically, in the first essay, a novel coupling between an ecological model of within-lake hydrodynamics and an economic model of hedonic property prices has been developed to quantify the connections between nutrient loading, lake water quality, and economic outcomes. Linking ecological processes with human decision-making provides a basis for enhanced evidence-based decision making in the context of reducing nonpoint-source pollution. In the second essay, an economic mathematical programming model is coupled with an agro-ecosystem model to investigate the behavioral adjustments and environmental pollution outcomes of water quality policies. A complete quantification of costs from all regulating sources are necessary to help pinpoint the efficient water policy design and reflecting the connection between human decisions and ecosystem processes. The third essay focus on the water quantity problem in another developed country, Australia. A discrete choice experiment method has been explored and used to provide estimates of willingness to pay for purchasing irrigation rights to restore a Ramsar-convention wetland. Water policy scenario described in this essay could directly affect the feedback between human and ecosystem processes and serve as a baseline for future planning and policy designs. By offering both conceptual and methodological advancements, this dissertation aims to improve the understanding of coupled human and natural systems and the implementation of water policies. This dissertation also provides a framework to establish multi-disciplinary dialogues and cooperation between scientists and economists in the search of efficient water polices. / Doctor of Philosophy / Freshwater resources are one of the most important elements in our daily life. It provides important goods and services to our society, but at the same time, due to human behaviors, freshwater resources are under threat in both their quality and quantity. This dissertation contains three essays which integrate knowledge from multiple disciplines to help understand and quantify the linkages between human and freshwater resources, and provides information to come up with better water polices. In the first essay, I explore the connections between nutrient loading, lake water quality, and the economic outcomes. The essay illustrates how potential change in nutrient loadings affect lake water quality, and how that induces people’s housing purchase behavior, property sales price and local governments’ property tax revenue. In the second essay, I focus on the agricultural production problem, which is one of the largest source for water quality degradation. By exploring the impacts of water policy on farmers’ production decisions, the essay sheds light on how to better design water polices to maintain farmers’ profit while simultaneously alleviating the impact of agricultural production to water qualities. In the third essay, I utilize a survey method, choice experiments, to elicit people’s willingness to pay for wetland ecosystem health. This could better allocate water resources between agricultural production use and residential use and come up with better water quantity polices.

Humans have fled environmental degradation for many millennia. Due partially to climate change, environments across the world have often degraded to the point that they can no longer securely sustain livelihoods. Entire communities and households have been displaced by extreme, rapid or creeping disasters; during their flight, they have left footprints across the globe that merit tracing. Sometimes this mobility is forced and at other times it is purely voluntary; for both, the mobility has roots in a changing environment. The footprint of environmentally influenced mobility (EIM) was traced through a series of three independent but related studies. The first study gained foundational perspective through an exploration of connections between climate drivers and natural and human impacts of climate change. This inquiry sought to answer the question, "How important is human mobility in the greater scheme of changing environments and changing climate?" Human mobility was one among 15 different climate drivers and impacts studied; the connections between all of them were examined to enable a quantitative comparison of system susceptibility, driving force, tight coupling and complexity. While degradation was the most complex of all natural elements, mobility surfaced as the human system element exerting the greatest forcing on other elements within the coupled system. The next study focused only on human mobility to explore how scholarly literature portrayed the two possible directions of the link between mobility and degrading environments--with a particular focus on urbanization as one manifestation of the phenomenon. Type A links, in which human mobility triggers environmental degradation, are portrayed in the literature as often as Type B links, in which degrading environments trigger human mobility. Surprisingly, science has not lent support to urbanization being a result of environmental change; plausible reasons for this are discussed. The final study canvassed expert opinion to examine why no scientific, humanitarian or governmental entity has succeeded in providing systematic support (e.g.., policy and interventions) to populations enduring environmentally influenced mobility. Four very different discourses emerged: Determined Humanists, Benevolent Pragmatists, Cynical Protectionists and Critical Realists. The complexity these discourses manifest help explain the inaction--a stalemate between actors--while confirming the inappropriateness of one-sided terminology and linear quantifications of environmentally influenced mobility. The results of these three studies demonstrate that human mobility has unequivocally destructive force that can trigger non-linear effects, potentially casting the coupled system into an unprecedented state; that the visible lack of scholarly exploration of environmentally influenced urbanization (EIU) can be partially explained by high system complexity and disciplinary research; and most important, that despite diametrically opposed viewpoints, experts unanimously agree that human mobility has strong connections to environmental change. Together, the results merge to confirm a "well-founded fear" on the part of those who dwell in degrading environments, and to highlight a pressing need to offer solutions both to those who remain in such environments as well as a name and protected status to those who flee them.

Human activities worldwide have altered nature in ways that create new combinations of species and environmental processes. To understand so-called "novel ecosystems" it is important to consider both the natural and the societal factors that shape them, and how those factors are interconnected or "coupled." We used such an approach to explore options for managing a non-native invasive frog, the coqui, which has become established on the island of Hawaii and threatens to spread to other parts of the state. The nighttime calls of the coqui create a nuisance for property owners when populations become dense enough, as often occurs in Hawaii where the frogs have no natural enemies. Humans have tried various ways to eliminate coqui on the island of Hawaii with little success. Therefore we studied how property owners cope with their presence, both through management practices and psychological coping strategies. We also examined results of those efforts. People whose properties had more frogs were more likely to take action to reduce their numbers, but also attitudes toward the coqui were less negative when people had grown used to having to share their properties with the frogs. For those who cannot cope psychologically, we found it would be possible to manage properties to reduce densities but only when leaf litter and low shrubs were completely removed from near a home. Information campaigns about managing coqui should be different when targeting people that already host frogs and those that do not.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-15T19:38:56Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 RAFAEL SILVEIRA XAVIER.pdf: 6103968 bytes, checksum: 1d52ca1ae861fc2f471419697e81c42f (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-09-16 / Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie / Currently, the natural sciences are taking advantage of information and computing concepts to investigate the structure of nature and the interrelationships among the various natural systems. Furthermore, scientists from various fields are arguing that nature performs computations and others argue that the basic structure of the physical world is based on informational and computational processes. Within this scenario, there is the Natural Computing, whose main premise is to assume that natural phenomena can be interpreted from a computational perspective and that these phenomena can be modeled computationally and applied in different scientific contexts. Although Natural Computing is committed with the computational interpretation of nature, there is no theoretical framework that leads to the explanation of natural systems from a computational perspective. In this context, this thesis proposes a Conceptual Framework that allows to computationally explain the structures and processes within natural systems. The Conceptual Framework is based on a set of concepts and macroconcepts and its formalization consists of two sets of tools: a conceptual map with its graphical view of macroconcepts and concepts and their relationships; and a set of UML diagrams to computationally modeling the structures, processes and subprocesses present in natural systems. Thus, the proposed Conceptual Framework brings an intuitive and visual way to understand the natural systems under a computational perspective and to guide the modeling of bioinspired algorithms. From the perspective of a bioinspired analysis of algorithms, modeling tools allow to view conceptual gaps in the algorithms. Finally, the proposed Conceptual Structure is used as a tool for the analysis and synthesis of bioinspired algorithms, more specifically to develop algorithms inspired by the behavior of bacteria. In this way, the proposed framework aims to build an analysis and synthesis tool to collaborate for the theoretical and interdisciplinary maturation of Natural Computing. / Atualmente, as ciências naturais estão se valendo de conceitos de informação e computação para investigar a estrutura da natureza e as inter-relações entre os diversos sistemas naturais. Além disso, cientistas de diversas áreas estão argumentando que a natureza realiza computações e outros defendem que a estrutura básica do mundo físico está fundamentada em processos informacionais e computacionais. Dentro deste cenário, existe a Computação Natural, cuja principal premissa é assumir que os fenômenos naturais podem ser interpretados sob uma perspectiva computacional e que esses fenômenos podem ser modelados computacionalmente e aplicados em diferentes contextos científicos. Embora a Computação Natural se comprometa com a interpretação computacional da natureza não existe um corpo teórico que permita explicar os sistemas naturais sob uma perspectiva computacional. Neste contexto, esta tese propõe uma Estrutura Conceitual, que explica computacionalmente as estruturas e processos presentes nos sistemas naturais. A Estrutura Conceitual é embasada em um conjunto de conceitos e macroconceitos e sua formalização consiste em dois conjuntos de ferramentas: um mapa conceitual que representa uma visualização gráfica dos macroconceitos e conceitos e suas relações; e um conjunto de diagramas UML para modelar computacionalmente as estruturas, processos e subprocessos presentes nos sistemas naturais. Desta forma, a Estrutura Conceitual proposta traz consigo uma forma intuitiva e visual de entender os sistemas naturais sob uma perspectiva computacional e de guiar a modelagem de algoritmos bioinspirados. Da perspectiva da análise de algoritmos bioinspirados, as ferramentas de modelagem permitem visualizar lacunas conceituais na engenharia dos algoritmos estudados. Por fim, a Estrutura Conceitual proposta é utilizada como ferramenta para o projeto e desenvolvimento (síntese) de algoritmos bioinspirados, mais especificamente para o desenvolvimento de algoritmos inspirados no comportamento das bactérias. Desta forma, a Estrutura Conceitual proposta visa a construção de um ferramental de análise e síntese que colabore para o amadurecimento teórico e interdisciplinar da Computação Natural.

No description available.