Impacts of Canopy Disturbances by Tree Logging on Soil Biota Increase With Organism Size.

Soil biota is essential for forest ecosystems' functioning as it plays a key role in litter decomposition, nutrient recycling, and soil carbon sequestration. Since forest disturbances can have major impacts on soil biota and associated ecosystem services, there is an urgent need to provide evidence on its ecological responses to such disturbances. To this end, we established an experimental site to study the impacts of disturbance on soil biota abundance and properties resulting from tree-felling interventions of different intensity as well as from post-disturbance treatments (adding slash or not to the soil) in a Quercus faginea Lam.

Global patterns of colouration complexity in the Paridae: Effects of climate and species characteristics across body regions.

Avian plumage colouration is an iconic example of trait variability among species. Sexual, social and natural selection, and the environmental variables modulating them are the main drivers of this variability. So far, most research exploring environmental effects on the variability of plumage colouration has focused on the variation in overall plumage darkness.

NAc-DBS selectively enhances memory updating without effect on retrieval.

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) has emerged as a widely used therapeutic option when pharmacological treatments prove ineffective or refractory for psychiatric patients. The nucleus accumbens (NAc) represents a frequently targeted site in DBS interventions due to its demonstrated safety profile and therapeutic efficacy in obsessive-compulsive disorder, major depression, and anorexia nervosa. However, limited mechanistic understanding hampers its broader clinical applicability.

Traceable and Scalable Food Balance Sheets from Agricultural Commodity Supply and Utilization Accounts (2010-2022).

The Food Balance Sheets (FBS), compiled by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), serve as a cornerstone dataset for studies on agricultural development, food security, and dietary health, providing a broad overview of global and regional food systems. However, its limited transparency and scalability hinder its application in empirical analysis and multisector dynamic modeling. Here, we present a traceable Food Balance Sheets (T-FBS) dataset, developed from detailed Supply Utilization Accounts (SUA) using a novel Primary Commodity equivalent (PCe) aggregation approach.

Integrating "nature" in the water-energy-food Nexus: Current perspectives and future directions.

Integrated approaches for managing natural resources are said to meet increasing demand for water, energy, and food, while maintaining the integrity of ecosystems, and ensuring equitable access to resources. The Water-Energy-Food (WEF) Nexus has been proposed as a cross-sectoral approach to manage trade-offs and exploit synergies that arise among these sectors. Although not initially included as a component of the Nexus, the role of nature in sustaining the water, energy, and food sectors and in regulating their interrelationships is increasingly recognised by Nexus researchers and practitioners.

Understanding Uncertainty in Market-Mediated Responses to US Oilseed Biodiesel Demand: Sensitivity of ILUC Emission Estimates to GLOBIOM Parametric Uncertainty.

The life cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of biofuels depend on uncertain estimates of induced land use change (ILUC) and subsequent emissions from carbon stock changes. Demand for oilseed-based biofuels is associated with particularly complex market and supply chain dynamics, which must be considered. Using the global partial equilibrium model GLOBIOM, this study explores the uncertainty in market-mediated impacts and ILUC-related emissions from increasing demand for soybean biodiesel in the United States in the period 2020-2050.

On the structure of species-function participation in multilayer ecological networks.

Understanding how biotic interactions shape ecosystems and impact their functioning, resilience and biodiversity has been a sustained research priority in ecology. Yet, traditional assessments of ecological complexity typically focus on species-species interactions that mediate a particular function (e.g.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Tier 1 forest biomass estimates from Earth Observation.

Aboveground biomass density (AGBD) estimates from Earth Observation (EO) can be presented with the consistency standards mandated by United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This article delivers AGBD estimates, in the format of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Tier 1 values for natural forests, sourced from National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA's) Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) and Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat-2), and European Space Agency's (ESA's) Climate Change Initiative (CCI). It also provides the underlying classification used by the IPCC as geospatial layers, delineating global forests by ecozones, continents and status (primary, young (≤20 years) and old secondary (>20 years)).

Cumulative human impacts on global marine fauna highlight risk to biological and functional diversity.

Anthropogenic stressors to marine ecosystems from climate change and human activities increase extinction risk of species, disrupt ecosystem integrity, and threaten important ecosystem services. Addressing these stressors requires understanding where and to what extent they are impacting marine biological and functional diversity. We model cumulative risk of human impact upon 21,159 marine animal species by combining information on species-level vulnerability and spatial exposure to a range of anthropogenic stressors.

Meta-analysis reveals that the effects of precipitation change on soil and litter fauna in forests depend on body size.

Anthropogenic climate change is altering precipitation regimes at a global scale. While precipitation changes have been linked to changes in the abundance and diversity of soil and litter invertebrate fauna in forests, general trends have remained elusive due to mixed results from primary studies. We used a meta-analysis based on 430 comparisons from 38 primary studies to address associated knowledge gaps, (i) quantifying impacts of precipitation change on forest soil and litter fauna abundance and diversity, (ii) exploring reasons for variation in impacts and (iii) examining biases affecting the realism and accuracy of experimental studies.

Harnessing the intragenomic variability of rRNA operons to improve differentiation of Vibrio species.

Although the 16S rRNA gene is frequently used as a phylogenetic marker in analysis of environmental DNA, this marker often fails to distinguish closely related species, including those in the genus Vibrio. Here, we investigate whether inclusion and analysis of 23S rRNA sequence can help overcome the intrinsic weaknesses of 16S rRNA analyses for the differentiation of Vibrio species. We construct a maximum likelihood 16S rRNA gene tree to assess the use of this gene to identify clades of Vibrio species.

Incorporating diverse values of nature in decision-making-theory and practice.

Values play a significant role in decision-making, especially regarding nature. Decisions impact people and nature in complex ways and understanding which values are prioritised, and which are left out is an important task for improving the equity and effectiveness of decision-making. Based on work done for the IPBES Values Assessment, this paper develops a framework to support analyses of how decision-making influences nature as well as whose values get prioritised.

An approximation of flights, delays and costs for different forecast scenarios: A backcasting exercise.

Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) play a critical role as a natural monopoly within the air traffic system and are subject to regulation. Achieving preset performance targets necessitates efficient resource planning, contingent upon accurate traffic forecasts. This means that forecast precision is a key determinant of operational efficiency.

Downed woody debris carbon emissions in a European temperate virgin forest as driven by species, decay classes, diameter and microclimate.

Downed woody debris (DWD) plays an important role as regulator of nutrient and carbon (C) cycling in forests, accounting for up to the 20 % of the total C stocks in primary forests. DWD persistence is highly influenced by microbial decomposition, which is determined by various environmental factors, including fluctuations in temperature and moisture, as well as in intrinsic DWD properties determined by species, diameter, or decay classes (DCs). The relative importance of these different drivers, as well as their interactions, remains largely unknown.

Sensitivity analysis for a participatory approach to enhance the climate resilience of Venice, Italy.

Increases in the magnitudes and frequencies of climate-related extreme events are redistributing risk across coastal systems, including their environmental, economic, and social components. Consequently, stakeholders (SHs) are faced with long-term challenges and complex information when managing assets, services, and uses of the coast. In this context, SH engagement is a key step for risk management and in the preparation of resilience plans to respond and adapt to climate change.

Assessing the energy trap of industrial agriculture in North America and Europe: 82 balances from 1830 to 2012.

Unlabelled: Early energy analyses of agriculture revealed that behind higher labor and land productivity of industrial farming, there was a decrease in energy returns on energy (EROI) invested, in comparison to more traditional organic agricultural systems. Studies on recent trends show that efficiency gains in production and use of inputs have again somewhat improved energy returns. However, most of these agricultural energy studies have focused only on external inputs at the crop level, concealing the important role of internal biomass flows that livestock and forestry recirculate within agroecosystems.

Topography modulates climate sensitivity of multidecadal trends of holm oak decline.

Forest decline events have increased worldwide over the last decades being holm oak (Quercus ilex L.) one of the tree species with the most worrying trends across Europe. Since this is one of the tree species with the southernmost distribution within the European continent, its vulnerability to climate change is a phenomenon of enormous ecological importance.

Diverse values of nature for sustainability.

Twenty-five years since foundational publications on valuing ecosystem services for human well-being, addressing the global biodiversity crisis still implies confronting barriers to incorporating nature's diverse values into decision-making. These barriers include powerful interests supported by current norms and legal rules such as property rights, which determine whose values and which values of nature are acted on. A better understanding of how and why nature is (under)valued is more urgent than ever.

The role of forests in the EU climate policy: are we on the right track?

Background: The European Union (EU) has committed to achieve climate neutrality by 2050. This requires a rapid reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and ensuring that any remaining emissions are balanced through CO removals. Forests play a crucial role in this plan: they are currently the main option for removing CO from the atmosphere and additionally, wood use can store carbon durably and help reduce fossil emissions.

Lyapunov exponents for temporal networks.

By interpreting a temporal network as a trajectory of a latent graph dynamical system, we introduce the concept of dynamical instability of a temporal network and construct a measure to estimate the network maximum Lyapunov exponent (nMLE) of a temporal network trajectory. Extending conventional algorithmic methods from nonlinear time-series analysis to networks, we show how to quantify sensitive dependence on initial conditions and estimate the nMLE directly from a single network trajectory. We validate our method for a range of synthetic generative network models displaying low- and high-dimensional chaos and finally discuss potential applications.

Whose waters, whose nutrients? Knowledge, uncertainty, and controversy over eutrophication in the Mar Menor.

This work explores the role of knowledge claims and uncertainty in the public dispute over the causes and solutions to nonpoint-driven overfertilization of the Mar Menor lagoon (Spain). Drawing on relational uncertainty theory, we combine the analysis of narratives and of uncertainty. Our results show two increasingly polarized narratives that deviate in the causes for nutrient enrichment and the type of solutions seen as effective, all of which relate to contested visions on agricultural sustainability.