Defining nutrient ecoregions for reference nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations in rivers from the major South American biomes.

Delineating reference (i.e., baseline) riverine nutrient concentrations is essential to understand fundamental processes of biogeochemical transport from continents to the ocean, describe ecological conditions, and inform managers of best attainable conditions when attempting to control anthropogenic eutrophication.

The value of private properties for the conservation of biodiversity in the Brazilian Cerrado.

Areas set aside for conservation within private lands may be key to enhancing biodiversity-friendly landscapes. This conservation strategy should be especially effective in highly threatened regions that are poorly protected by public lands, such as the Brazilian Cerrado. Brazil's Native Vegetation Protection Law has included set-aside areas within private properties, but their relevance to conservation has not been evaluated.

The gap between experts, farmers and non-farmers on perceived environmental vulnerability and the influence of values and beliefs.

Science has played a mixed role in guiding conservation and sustainability-oriented decision-making by individuals, policymakers, institutions, and governments. Not all science-based conservation and sustainability initiatives that address issues facing humanity and ecosystems and global problems have gained public support. Conservation decisions and policy prescriptions are and may be based on perceptions about and experiences with the environment, local land use, and ecosystems that may not align with or be grounded in science or evidence from experts in the field.

Local environment and individuals' beliefs: The dynamics shaping public support for sustainability policy in an agricultural landscape.

Agricultural landscapes are the leading edge in the advancement of sustainability and climate change adaptation. The purpose of this study is to endogenize culture as shaped by natural-cultural feedback into individuals' decision-making processes on sustainability policy support. We present an agent-based model in which an adaptive cultural decision-rule quantifies the probability of an agent deciding to support a wildlife area policy for the Smoky Hill River Watershed (SHRW) in Kansas, USA.

Estimating environmental vulnerability in the Cerrado with machine learning and Twitter data.

Estimating vulnerability is critical to understand human-induced influenceimpacts on the environmental system. The purpose of the current study was to integrate machine learning algorithm and Twitter data to estimate environmental vulnerability in the Brazilian Cerrado for the years 2011 and 2016. We first selected six exposure indicators and five sensitivity indicators to build an environmental vulnerability model and applied an Autoencoder algorithm to find the representation of exposure and sensitivity, respectively.

Model approaches to estimate spatial distribution of bee species richness and soybean production in the Brazilian Cerrado during 2000 to 2015.

Agricultural expansion as a main human activity has affected pollinator's habitat, causing spatial distribution changes. Meanwhile, pollinators still provide pollination service to improve crop production. However, their spatial response is unclear because of environmental changes.

Testing Luminescence Dating Methods for Small Samples from Very Young Fluvial Deposits.

The impetus behind this study is to understand the sedimentological dynamics of very young fluvial systems in the Amazon River catchment and relate these to land use change and modern analogue studies of tidal rhythmites in the geologic record. Initial quartz optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating feasibility studies have concentrated on spit and bar deposits in the Rio Tapajós. Many of these features have an appearance of freshly deposited pristine sand, and these observations and information from anecdotal evidence and LandSat imagery suggest an apparent decadal stability.

Evaluating environmental change and behavioral decision-making for sustainability policy using an agent-based model: A case study for the Smoky Hill River Watershed, Kansas.

Sustainability has been at the forefront of the environmental research agenda of the integrated anthroposphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere since the last century and will continue to be critically important for future environmental science. However, linking humans and the environment through effective policy remains a major challenge for sustainability research and practice. Here we address this gap using an agent-based model (ABM) for a coupled natural and human systems in the Smoky Hill River Watershed (SHRW), Kansas, USA.

Predictors of compliance with tornado warnings issued in Joplin, Missouri, in 2011.

Joplin, a city in the southwest corner of Missouri, United States, suffered an EF-5 tornado in the late afternoon of 22 May 2011. This event, which claimed the lives of 162 people, represents the deadliest single tornado to strike the US since modern record-keeping began in 1950. This study examines the factors associated with responses to tornado warnings.

Economic linkages to changing landscapes.

Many economic processes are intertwined with landscape change. A large number of individual economic decisions shape the landscape, and in turn the changes in the landscape shape economic decisions. This article describes key research questions about the economics of landscape change and reviews the state of research knowledge.

Protecting the Amazon with protected areas.

This article addresses climate-tipping points in the Amazon Basin resulting from deforestation. It applies a regional climate model to assess whether the system of protected areas in Brazil is able to avoid such tipping points, with massive conversion to semiarid vegetation, particularly along the south and southeastern margins of the basin. The regional climate model produces spatially distributed annual rainfall under a variety of external forcing conditions, assuming that all land outside protected areas is deforested.

Road building, land use and climate change: prospects for environmental governance in the Amazon.

Some coupled land-climate models predict a dieback of Amazon forest during the twenty-first century due to climate change, but human land use in the region has already reduced the forest cover. The causation behind land use is complex, and includes economic, institutional, political and demographic factors. Pre-eminent among these factors is road building, which facilitates human access to natural resources that beget forest fragmentation.