769 results match your criteria: "School of Geography and the Environment[Affiliation]"

The planned relocation of communities away from areas of climate-related risk has emerged as a critical strategy to adapt to the impacts of climate change. Empirical examples from around the world show, however, that such relocations often lead to poor outcomes for affected communities. To address this challenge, and contribute to developing guidelines for just and sustainable relocation processes, this paper calls attention to three fundamental tensions in planned relocation processes: (1) conceptualizations of risk and habitability; (2) community consultation and ownership; and (3) siloed policy frameworks and funding mechanisms.

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Grassy ecosystems cover more than 40% of the world's terrestrial surface, supporting crucial ecosystem services and unique biodiversity. These ecosystems have experienced major losses from conversion to agriculture with the remaining fragments threatened by global change. Woody plant encroachment, the increase in woody cover threatening grassy ecosystems, is a major global change symptom, shifting the composition, structure, and function of plant communities with concomitant effects on all biodiversity.

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The 2021 Pacific Northwest heatwave was so extreme as to challenge conventional statistical and climate-model-based approaches to extreme weather attribution. However, state-of-the-art operational weather prediction systems are demonstrably able to simulate the detailed physics of the heatwave. Here, we leverage these systems to show that human influence on the climate made this event at least 8 [2-50] times more likely.

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Comprehensive spatial planning in international waters is key to achieving ocean sustainability.

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Financing ecosystem restoration.

Curr Biol

May 2024

Department of Environmental Systems Sciences, ETH Zurich, Universitätsstrasse 16, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland.

The global community has outlined ambitious ecosystem restoration targets. Yet implementation is slow, and a lack of funding is a key barrier to upscaling restoration activities. Most restoration projects are funded by public institutions and recent high-level initiatives have emphasised the need to scale private finance in restoration.

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As land use leaves massive tracts of land vacant for recovery, restoration must undergo a substantial shift to incorporate a complexity perspective beyond the traditional community, biodiversity or functional views. With an interaction-function perspective, we may be able to achieve ecosystems with better chances to adapt to current environmental changes and, especially, to climate change. We explore combined approaches that include still unused and underexplored techniques that will soon go mainstream and produce massive amounts of information to address the complexity gap.

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Dissimilar forests along the Rio Doce watershed call for multiple restoration references to avoid biotic homogenization.

Sci Total Environ

June 2024

Ecologia Evolutiva & Biodiversidade, Departamento de Genética, Ecologia e Evolução/ICB, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, 31270-901, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil; Knowledge Center for Biodiversity, 31270-901, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Electronic address:

An environmental disaster caused by the rupture of a mining tailings dam has impacted a large area of the Rio Doce watershed in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, resulting in unprecedented damage at spatial and temporal scales. The Atlantic Forest is one of the world's most important biodiversity hotspots. A long history of land use conversion has resulted in a highly fragmented landscape.

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This study analyses how residents create safety in Taranto, Italy, a city located next to one of the largest steel plants in Europe. Combining long-term ethnographic research with an online-based survey, our study shows that most respondents recognise and criticise the presence of environmental risks in their daily lives but encounter such risks in complex ways. Contrary to previous scholarship suggesting that pollution can result in alienating residents from their lived environment, this research shows that acute awareness of environmental risks does not necessarily undermine attachment to place but rather can co-exist with or even strengthen it.

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Community Transport's Dual Role as a Transport and a Social Scheme: Implications for Policy.

Int J Environ Res Public Health

March 2024

Transport Studies Unit, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QY, UK.

Community transport comprises diverse local, not-for-profit, and primarily volunteer-run transport schemes that operate across the United Kingdom. These schemes support the travel needs of thousands of people, most of whom are older, live in rural areas, and have few other transport options. Further, this transport sector is unique in that most schemes are designed, created, and run by older people themselves.

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There is increasing evidence that interactions between microbes and their hosts not only play a role in determining health and disease but also in emotions, thought, and behavior. Built environments greatly influence microbiome exposures because of their built-in highly specific microbiomes coproduced with myriad metaorganisms including humans, pets, plants, rodents, and insects. Seemingly static built structures host complex ecologies of microorganisms that are only starting to be mapped.

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Bringing nature into decision-making.

Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci

June 2024

Natural Capital Project, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.

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Reinforcing Feedbacks for Sustainable Implementation of Rural Drinking-Water Treatment Technology.

ACS ES T Water

April 2024

School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QY, U.K.

Progress toward universal access to safe drinking water depends on rural water service delivery models that incorporate water safety management. Water supplies of all types have high rates of fecal contamination unless water safety risks are actively managed through water source protection, treatment, distribution, and storage. Recognizing the role of treatment within this broader risk-based framework, this study focuses on the implementation of passive chlorination and ultraviolet (UV) disinfection technologies in rural settings.

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Article Synopsis
  • - Tropical forests in equatorial Africa are crucial for the global carbon cycle, but there has been insufficient biometric data on their productivity levels (GPP and NPP).
  • - A study conducted on 14 one-hectare plots in West Africa revealed that these forests generally exhibit higher productivity and lower carbon use efficiency compared to a similar aridity gradient in the Amazon.
  • - The research highlighted that the highest reported NPP and GPP for intact forests occur at a medium-aridity site in Ghana, with findings indicating that existing data models underestimate forest productivity in both regions.
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Water supply interruptions contribute to household water insecurity. Unpredictable interruptions may particularly exacerbate water insecurity, as uncertainty limits households' ability to optimize water collection and storage or to modify other coping behaviors. This study used regression models of survey data from 2873 households across 10 sites in 9 middle-income countries to assess whether water supply interruptions and the predictability of interruptions were related to composite indicators of stressful behaviors and emotional distress.

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Joint environmental and social benefits from diversified agriculture.

Science

April 2024

Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, Biodiversity Research Centre and Department of Zoology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Article Synopsis
  • * Research across 2,655 farms in 11 countries shows that diversifying agriculture—through livestock, crops, soils, non-crop plantings, and water conservation—improves both social outcomes like food security and environmental outcomes like biodiversity.
  • * Using multiple diversification strategies together yields better results than using any one strategy alone, highlighting the need for supportive policies to encourage these practices.
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Assessing vulnerability for future Zika virus outbreaks using seroprevalence data and environmental suitability maps.

PLoS Negl Trop Dis

March 2024

Center for Global Health, Colorado School of Public Health, University of Colorado, Aurora, Colorado, United States of America.

The 2015-17 Zika virus (ZIKV) epidemic in the Americas subsided faster than expected and evolving population immunity was postulated to be the main reason. Herd immunization is suggested to occur around 60-70% seroprevalence, depending on demographic density and climate suitability. However, herd immunity was only documented for a few cities in South America, meaning a substantial portion of the population might still be vulnerable to a future Zika virus outbreak.

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Leaf litter decomposition is a major component of nutrient cycling which depends on the quality and quantity of the leaf material. Ash trees (, decay time ∼ 0.4 years) are declining throughout Europe due to a fungal pathogen (), which is likely to alter biochemical cycling across the continent.

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In plant ecology, the terms growth and development are often used interchangeably. Yet these constitute two distinct processes. Plant architectural traits (e.

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Introduction: In India, regulatory trials, which require the drug regulator's permission, must be registered with the Clinical Trials Registry-India (CTRI) as of 19 March 2019. In this study, for about 300 trials, we aimed to identify the CTRI record that matched the trial for which the regulator had given permission. After identifying 'true pairs', our goal was to determine whether the sites and Principal Investigators mentioned in the permission letter were the same as those mentioned in the CTRI record.

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Numerous studies have shown reduced performance in plants that are surrounded by neighbours of the same species, a phenomenon known as conspecific negative density dependence (CNDD). A long-held ecological hypothesis posits that CNDD is more pronounced in tropical than in temperate forests, which increases community stabilization, species coexistence and the diversity of local tree species. Previous analyses supporting such a latitudinal gradient in CNDD have suffered from methodological limitations related to the use of static data.

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On Disease Configurations, Black-Grass Blowback, and Probiotic Pest Management.

Ann Am Assoc Geogr

February 2024

School of Geography and the Environment and Hertford College, University of Oxford, UK.

This article explores approaches to managing pests that are being developed in response to the faltering effectiveness of antibiotic regimes of chemical control. It focuses on black-grass (), an endemic plant in European agriculture that has emerged as a serious yield-robber with increasing levels of herbicidal resistance. Following farmers and agronomists who have developed "integrated" approaches to black-grass management, the article identifies approaches to biosecurity that do not target unwanted life so much as they modulate ecological systems in their entirety.

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Article Synopsis
  • Alpine grasslands are crucial for biodiversity but face threats from climate change and environmental shifts, prompting research into how vegetation reacts to these changes for better ecosystem understanding.* -
  • Researchers studied plant traits in Puna grasslands in the Peruvian Andes across 1314 meters in elevation, gathering data on plant composition, biomass, climate, and more over three years.* -
  • The study resulted in a comprehensive dataset with 3,665 plant records and 54,036 trait measurements, significantly enhancing existing knowledge of local flora by 420% and including many previously undocumented plant traits.*
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We deploy a prompt-augmented GPT-4 model to distill comprehensive datasets on the global application of debt-for-nature swaps (DNS), a pivotal financial tool for environmental conservation. Our analysis includes 195 nations and identifies 21 countries that have not yet used DNS before as prime candidates for DNS. A significant proportion demonstrates consistent commitments to conservation finance (0.

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Competition drives community composition and structure in many ecosystems. Spatial and temporal niche partitioning, in which competing species divide the environment in space or time, are mechanisms that may allow for coexistence among ecologically similar species. Such division of resources may be especially important for carnivores in African savannas, which support diverse carnivore assemblages.

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