Dataset Information

Extending the timescale and range of ecosystem services through paleoenvironmental analyses, exemplified in the lower Yangtze basin.

ABSTRACT: In China, and elsewhere, long-term economic development and poverty alleviation need to be balanced against the likelihood of ecological failure. Here, we show how paleoenvironmental records can provide important multidecadal perspectives on ecosystem services (ES). More than 50 different paleoenvironmental proxy records can be mapped to a wide range of ES categories and subcategories. Lake sediments are particularly suitable for reconstructing records of regulating services, such as soil stability, sediment regulation, and water purification, which are often less well monitored. We demonstrate the approach using proxy records from two sets of lake sediment sequences in the lower Yangtze basin covering the period 1800-2006, combined with recent socioeconomic and climate records. We aggregate the proxy records into a regional regulating services index to show that rapid economic growth and population increases since the 1950s are strongly coupled to environmental degradation. Agricultural intensification from the 1980s onward has been the main driver for reducing rural poverty but has led to an accelerated loss of regulating services. In the case of water purification, there is strong evidence that a threshold has been transgressed within the last two decades. The current steep trajectory of the regulating services index implies that regional land management practices across a large agricultural tract of eastern China are critically unsustainable.

SUBMITTER: Dearing JA

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3345004 | biostudies-literature | 2012 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Extending the timescale and range of ecosystem services through paleoenvironmental analyses, exemplified in the lower Yangtze basin.

Dearing John A JA Yang Xiangdong X Dong Xuhui X Zhang Enlou E Chen Xu X Langdon Peter G PG Zhang Ke K Zhang Weiguo W Dawson Terence P TP

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20120412 18

In China, and elsewhere, long-term economic development and poverty alleviation need to be balanced against the likelihood of ecological failure. Here, we show how paleoenvironmental records can provide important multidecadal perspectives on ecosystem services (ES). More than 50 different paleoenvironmental proxy records can be mapped to a wide range of ES categories and subcategories. Lake sediments are particularly suitable for reconstructing records of regulating services, such as soil stabil ...[more]

PMID: 22499786

Similar Datasets

Project description:The revolution of molecular techniques has revealed that the composition of natural bacterial communities normally includes a few abundant taxa and many rare taxa. Unraveling the mechanisms underlying the spatial assembly process of both abundant and rare bacterial taxa has become a central goal in microbial ecology. Here, we used high-throughput sequencing to explore geographic patterns and the relative importance of ecological processes in the assembly of abundant and rare bacterial subcommunities from 25 lakes across the middle and lower reaches of Yangtze River basin (MLYB), located in Southeast China, where most of the lakes are interconnected by river networks. We found similar biogeographic patterns of abundant and rare subcommunities which could significantly distinguish the community compositions of the two lake groups that were far from each other but which could not distinguish the community compositions of the nearby lakes. Both abundant and rare bacteria followed a strong distance-decay relationship. These findings suggest that the interconnectivity between lakes homogenizes the bacterial communities in local areas, and the abundant and rare taxa therein may be affected by the same ecological process. In addition, based on the measured environmental variables, the deterministic processes explain a small fraction of variation within both abundant and rare subcommunities, while both neutral and null models revealed a high stochasticity ratio for the spatial distribution patterns of both abundant and rare taxa. These findings indicate that the stochastic processes exhibited a greater influence on both abundant and rare bacterial subcommunity assemblies among interconnected lakes.IMPORTANCE The middle and lower Yangtze Plain is a typical floodplain in which many lakes connect with each other, especially in the wet season. More importantly, with the frequent change of regional water level in the wet season, there is a mutual hydrodynamic exchange among these lakes. The microbial biogeography among these interconnected lakes is still poorly understood. This study aims to unravel the mechanisms underlying the assembly process of abundant and rare bacteria among the interconnected lakes in the middle and lower Yangtze Plain. Our findings will provide a deeper understanding of the biogeographic patterns of rare and abundant bacterial taxa and their determined processes among interconnected aquatic habitats.

Project description:Intense human activities in the Aral Sea Basin have changed its natural distribution of land use. Although they provide certain economic benefits, these anthropogenic influences have led to the rapid shrinkage of the Aral Sea, severely affecting the region's ecosystem. However, the spatiotemporal variability of the Aral Sea Basin's Ecosystem Service Values (ESVs) is not well understood. In this study, we used 300-meter resolution land use maps from 1995, 2005, and 2015 and the Patch-generating Land Use Simulation (PLUS) model to predict the future land use patterns of the Aral Sea Basin in 2025. Simultaneously, we divided the Aral Sea Basin into three regions (upstream, midstream, and downstream) and evaluated the dynamic responses of their ESVs to Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) changes. The changes in the types of ecosystem services provided by the Aral Sea Basin, their trade-off, and synergistic relationships were analyzed by weighting their associations. The results showed that from 1995 to 2025, the grassland, urban, and cropland areas in the Aral Sea Basin will expand rapidly, while the areas covered by water bodies will shrink rapidly, causing a total loss of 31.97 billion USD. The downstream loss of 27.79 billion USD of the total amount is mainly caused by the conversion of water bodies to bare land. The ESVs of the middle region will increase by 6.81 billion USD, mainly due to the large amount of water extracted from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya Rivers in the middle regions of the Aral Sea Basin that are used to reclaim cultivated land and expand urban areas. The ESVs and areas experiencing land use changes in the upper regions are relatively small. At the same time, our results show that biodiversity, food production, and water regulation are the major ecosystem service functions, and account for 79.46% of the total ESVs. Of the ecosystem service relationships in the Aral Sea Basin, synergy accounts for 55.56% of the interactions, with a fewer amount of trade-off exchanges. This synergy mainly exists in the relationships involving water regulation, waste treatment and recreation, and culture and tourism. We propose protection measures that will coordinate eco-environmental protection efforts with socioeconomic development in the region in order to achieve the United Nations' sustainable development goals.

Dataset Information

Extending the timescale and range of ecosystem services through paleoenvironmental analyses, exemplified in the lower Yangtze basin.

Publications

Extending the timescale and range of ecosystem services through paleoenvironmental analyses, exemplified in the lower Yangtze basin.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets