Plants and soil are natural regulators of atmospheric CO2. Whereas plants sequester atmospheric carbon, soils deposit it for decades. As cities become increasingly more densely built, the available land area for such ecosystem services may decrease. We studied seven different housing areas in the Finnish city of Espoo to ascertain the extent to which site efficiency affects to the ecosystem services if the full life-cycle GHG emissions of these areas are taken into account. The results show that the impact of CO2 uptake through carbon sinks in growing plants and the uptake of soil organic carbon vary greatly. Its share of all emissions varied from a marginal value of 1.2% to a more considerable value of 11.9%. The highest potential was calculated for a detached house located on a large site, while the weakest was calculated for compact apartment blocks. The study revealed that in order to quantify this potential more accurately, several knowledge gaps must first be addressed. These include impartial growth algorithms for Nordic wood species, missing accumulation factors for soil organic carbon in cold climates and statistical maintenance scenarios for gardens.
Download full-text PDF |
Source |
---|---|
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2016.03.168 | DOI Listing |
Proc Biol Sci
January 2025
Evolution and Ecology Research Centre, School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales 2052, Australia.
Publishing preprints is quickly becoming commonplace in ecology and evolutionary biology. Preprints can facilitate the rapid sharing of scientific knowledge establishing precedence and enabling feedback from the research community before peer review. Yet, significant barriers to preprint use exist, including language barriers, a lack of understanding about the benefits of preprints and a lack of diversity in the types of research outputs accepted (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEnviron Monit Assess
January 2025
College of Geoscience and Surveying Engineering, China University of Mining and Technology, Beijing, 100083, China.
Land use changes alter the capacity for the stable provisioning of regional ecosystem services, and the rational integration of ecological and economic benefits has become a critical challenge. The values of 11 specific ecosystem service functions and ecosystem service trade-off degrees were estimated. The Pearson correlation coefficient method and spatial autocorrelation were then utilized to investigate the relationship between these variables.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNat Commun
January 2025
State Key Laboratory of Herbage Improvement and Grassland Agro-Ecosystems, College of Ecology, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, China.
Shrub encroachment into grasslands poses a global concern, impacting species biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Yet, the effect of shrub encroachment on herbaceous diseases and the dependence of that effect on climatic factors remain ambiguous. This study spans over 4,000 km, examining significant variability in temperature and precipitation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNat Commun
January 2025
NUS Environmental Research Institute, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore.
Southeast Asia (SEA) contributes approximately one-third of global land-use change carbon emissions, a substantial yet highly uncertain part of which is from anthropogenically-modified peat swamp forests (PSFs) and mangroves. Here, we report that between 2001-2022 land-use change impacting PSFs and mangroves in SEA generate approximately 691.8±97.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Plant Physiol
January 2025
Department of Ecology, Faculty of Sciences, University of Málaga, Málaga, Spain.
Cold-temperate and Arctic hard bottom coastal ecosystems are dominated by kelp forests, which have a high biomass production and provide important ecosystem services, but are subject to change due to ocean warming. However, the photophysiological response to increasing temperature of ecologically relevant species, such as Laminaria digitata, might depend on the local thermal environment where the population has developed. Therefore, the effects of temperature on growth rate, biochemical composition, maximum quantum yield, photosynthetic quotient and carbon budget of young cultured sporophytes of Laminaria digitata from the Arctic at Spitsbergen (SPT; cultured at 4, 10 and 16 °C) and from the cold-temperate North Sea island of Helgoland (HLG; cultured at 10, 16 and 22 °C) were comparatively analyzed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEnter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!