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The Biofuels Landscape Through the Lens of Industrial Chemistry
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Replacing petroleum feedstock with biomass in the production of fuels and value-added chemicals carries considerable appeal. As in industrial chemistry more broadly, high-throughput experimentation has greatly facilitated innovation in small-scale exploration of biomass production and processing. Yet biomass is hard to transport, potentially hindering the integration of manufacturing-scale processes. Moreover, the path from laboratory breakthrough to commercial production remains as tortuous as ever.
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The challenge of hot drought
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1st paragraph: rought is heating up around the warm- ing world. Particularly hot drought has cost more than US$40 billion and claimed 218 human lives since 2010 in the United States alone1. These hot and dry conditions have also contributed to unusually widespread and devastating wildfires1, fuelled by wide expanses of weakened and dead trees that were unable to deal with heat stress and subsequent insect attack2. Yet, to get a real sense of how this recent change in drought severity might shape the future, one has to look to the past. An analysis of regional and pan- continental North American drought over the past 1,000 years, reported by Cook et al.3 in the Journal of Climate, makes it clear that recent droughts, as costly as they have been, are only a taste of what might lie ahead, independently of any big climate change.
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The challenge to keep global warming below 2 °C
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The latest carbon dioxide emissions continue to track the high end of emission scenarios, making it even less likely global warming will stay below 2 °C. A shift to a 2 °C pathway requires immediate significant and sustained global mitigation, with a probable reliance on net negative emissions in the longer term.
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The Clean Water Act Owner's Manual is coming soon!
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The Clean Water Act became law 50 years ago. To commemorate the milestone of this landmark legislation and mark our continued resolve to protect waterways across our country, River Network is updating our transformational Clean Water Act Owner’s Manual!
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The Conservation Foundation
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The support of more than 5,000 members and 500 volunteers helps us carry out our mission to improve the health of our communities by preserving and restoring open space and natural lands, protecting rivers and watersheds, and promoting stewardship of our environment in northeastern Illinois. We focus our work in DuPage, Kane, Kendall, and Will Counties where we have helped preserve more than 35,000 acres of open space, and we also go where we are needed in LaSalle, DeKalb, and Grundy Counties.
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THE COST OF LEAFING
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Understanding the trade-offs involved for plants making leaves promises fresh insights on every scale from the plant to the planet, finds John Whitfield.
Excerpt: One definition of economics is the study choice under the constraint of scarcity, and the narrowrangeofchoicesintheleafeconomics
spectrum provides a vivid illus- tration of the various scarcities that dominate plants’ lives. The fact that all leaves lie fairly close to the axis of the spectrum shows that, despite the vast diversity of foliage produced over hundreds of millions of years of evolution, plants have little room for manoeuvre in
how they build their leaves. “Most textbooks of ecology project the idea that there’s an almost infinite diversity of organisms,” says plant ecologist Philip Grime of the University of Sheffield, UK. “But if you look at the core biology of what organisms do with resources, you find severe constraints and trade-offs.”
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The cost of policy simplification in conservation incentive programs
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Incentive payments to private landowners provide a common strategy to conserve biodiversity and enhance the supply of goods and services from ecosystems. To deliver cost-effective improvements in biodiversity, payment schemes must trade-off inefficiencies that result from over-simplified policies with the administrative burden of implementing more complex incentive designs. We examine the effectiveness of different payment schemes using field parameterized, ecological economic models of extensive grazing farms. We focus on profit maximising farm management plans and use bird species as a policy-relevant indicator of biodiversity. Common policy simplifications result in a 49–100% loss in biodiversity benefits depending on the conservation target chosen. Failure to differentiate prices for conservation improvements in space is particularly problematic. Additional implementation costs that accompany more complicated policies are worth bearing even when these constitute a substantial proportion (70% or more) of the payments that would otherwise have been given to farmers.
Keywords
Agriculture, agri-environment scheme, biodiversity, cost-effectiveness, ecological economics, grazing, incentive
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The Disappearing Cryosphere: Impacts and Ecosystem Responses to Rapid Cryosphere Loss
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The cryosphere—the portion of the Earth’s surface where water is in solid form for at least one month of the year—has been shrinking in response to climate warming. The extents of sea ice, snow, and glaciers, for example, have been decreasing. In response, the ecosystems within the cryosphere and those that depend on the cryosphere have been changing. We identify two principal aspects of ecosystem-level responses to cryosphere loss: (1) trophodynamic alterations resulting from the loss of habitat and species loss or replacement and (2) changes in the rates and mechanisms of biogeochemical storage and cycling of carbon and nutrients, caused by changes in physical forcings or ecological community functioning. These changes affect biota in positive or negative ways, depending on how they interact with the cryosphere. The important outcome, however, is the change and the response the human social system (infrastructure, food, water, recreation) will have to that change.
Keywords: cryosphere, ecosystem response, environmental observatories
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The eDNAtlas and Archive for aquatic taxa in Western North America
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The ease, efficiency, and sensitivity of environmental DNA (eDNA) sampling of species in aquatic environments is leading to an explosion in its use across North America.
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The effect of changing climate on the frequency of absolute extreme events
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n some areas of climate impact analysis, the possible impact of a changing mean
climate has been dismissed by some writers either because of a belief that society can adapt to a slowly changing mean and/or because expected rates of future changes lie within or not far outside those experienced in the past. The two standard counter arguments to this optimistic view are: (1) the future will lead to much longer periods of protracted change in one direction, with final conditions well into the no-analogue region; and/or (2) the main impacts will accrue through changes in the frequency of extremes. In the literature on greenhouse effect, lip service is often paid to the effect of changes in the frequency of extremes. But just how will a slowly changing mean affect the frequency of extremes?
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