Research Institute for Humanity and Nature

Freshwater biodiversity is the over-riding conservation priority during the International Decade for Action - 'Water for Life' - 2005 to 2015. Fresh water makes up only 0.01% of the World's water and approximately 0.8% of the Earth's surface, yet this tiny fraction of global water supports at least 100000 species out of approximately 1.8 million - almost 6% of all described species. Inland waters and freshwater biodiversity constitute a valuable natural resource, in economic, cultural, aesthetic, scientific and educational terms. Their conservation and management are critical to the interests of all humans, nations and governments. Yet this precious heritage is in crisis. Fresh waters are experiencing declines in biodiversity far greater than those in the most affected terrestrial ecosystems, and if trends in human demands for water remain unaltered and species losses continue at current rates, the opportunity to conserve much of the remaining biodiversity in fresh water will vanish before the 'Water for Life' decade ends in 2015. Why is this so, and what is being done about it? This article explores the special features of freshwater habitats and the biodiversity they support that makes them especially vulnerable to human activities. We document threats to global freshwater biodiversity under five headings: overexploitation; water pollution; flow modification; destruction or degradation of habitat; and invasion by exotic species. Their combined and interacting influences have resulted in population declines and range reduction of freshwater biodiversity worldwide. Conservation of biodiversity is complicated by the landscape position of rivers and wetlands as 'receivers' of land-use effluents, and the problems posed by endemism and thus non-substitutability. In addition, in many parts of the world, fresh water is subject to severe competition among multiple human stakeholders. Protection of freshwater biodiversity is perhaps the ultimate conservation challenge because it is influenced by the upstream drainage network, the surrounding land, the riparian zone, and - in the case of migrating aquatic fauna - downstream reaches. Such prerequisites are hardly ever met. Immediate action is needed where opportunities exist to set aside intact lake and river ecosystems within large protected areas. For most of the global land surface, trade-offs between conservation of freshwater biodiversity and human use of ecosystem goods and services are necessary. We advocate continuing attempts to check species loss but, in many situations, urge adoption of a compromise position of management for biodiversity conservation, ecosystem functioning and resilience, and human livelihoods in order to provide a viable long-term basis for freshwater conservation. Recognition of this need will require adoption of a new paradigm for biodiversity protection and freshwater ecosystem management - one that has been appropriately termed 'reconciliation ecology'.

Water is a naturally circulating resource that is constantly recharged. Therefore, even though the stocks of water in natural and artificial reservoirs are helpful to increase the available water resources for human society, the flow of water should be the main focus in water resources assessments. The climate system puts an upper limit on the circulation rate of available renewable freshwater resources (RFWR). Although current global withdrawals are well below the upper limit, more than two billion people live in highly water-stressed areas because of the uneven distribution of RFWR in time and space. Climate change is expected to accelerate water cycles and thereby increase the available RFWR. This would slow down the increase of people living under water stress; however, changes in seasonal patterns and increasing probability of extreme events may offset this effect. Reducing current vulnerability will be the first step to prepare for such anticipated changes.

Previous estimates of land-atmosphere interaction (the impact of soil moisture on precipitation) have been limited by a lack of observational data and by the model dependence of computational estimates. To counter the second limitation, a dozen climate-modeling groups have recently performed the same highly controlled numerical experiment as part of a coordinated comparison project. This allows a multimodel estimation of the regions on Earth where precipitation is affected by soil moisture anomalies during Northern Hemisphere summer. Potential benefits of this estimation may include improved seasonal rainfall forecasts.

Concern is growing about the consequences of biodiversity loss for ecosystem functioning, for the provision of ecosystem services, and for human well being. Experimental evidence for a relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem process rates is compelling, but the issue remains contentious. Here, we present the first rigorous quantitative assessment of this relationship through meta-analysis of experimental work spanning 50 years to June 2004. We analysed 446 measures of biodiversity effects (252 in grasslands), 319 of which involved primary producer manipulations or measurements. Our analyses show that: biodiversity effects are weaker if biodiversity manipulations are less well controlled; effects of biodiversity change on processes are weaker at the ecosystem compared with the community level and are negative at the population level; productivity-related effects decline with increasing number of trophic links between those elements manipulated and those measured; biodiversity effects on stability measures ('insurance' effects) are not stronger than biodiversity effects on performance measures. For those ecosystem services which could be assessed here, there is clear evidence that biodiversity has positive effects on most. Whilst such patterns should be further confirmed, a precautionary approach to biodiversity management would seem prudent in the meantime.

Plant traits-the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants-determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research spanning from evolutionary biology, community and functional ecology, to biodiversity conservation, ecosystem and landscape management, restoration, biogeography and earth system modelling. Since its foundation in 2007, the TRY database of plant traits has grown continuously. It now provides unprecedented data coverage under an open access data policy and is the main plant trait database used by the research community worldwide. Increasingly, the TRY database also supports new frontiers of trait-based plant research, including the identification of data gaps and the subsequent mobilization or measurement of new data. To support this development, in this article we evaluate the extent of the trait data compiled in TRY and analyse emerging patterns of data coverage and representativeness. Best species coverage is achieved for categorical traits-almost complete coverage for 'plant growth form'. However, most traits relevant for ecology and vegetation modelling are characterized by continuous intraspecific variation and trait-environmental relationships. These traits have to be measured on individual plants in their respective environment. Despite unprecedented data coverage, we observe a humbling lack of completeness and representativeness of these continuous traits in many aspects. We, therefore, conclude that reducing data gaps and biases in the TRY database remains a key challenge and requires a coordinated approach to data mobilization and trait measurements. This can only be achieved in collaboration with other initiatives.

A daily gridded precipitation dataset covering a period of more than 57 yr was created by collecting and analyzing rain gauge observation data across Asia through the activities of the Asian Precipitation—Highly Resolved Observational Data Integration Towards Evaluation of Water Resources (APHRODITE) project. APHRODITE's daily gridded precipitation is presently the only long-term, continental-scale, high-resolution daily product. The product is based on data collected at 5,000–12,000 stations, which represent 2.3–4.5 times the data made available through the Global Telecommunication System network and is used for most daily gridded precipitation products. Hence, the APHRODITE project has substantially improved the depiction of the areal distribution and variability of precipitation around the Himalayas, Southeast Asia, and mountainous regions of the Middle East. The APHRODITE project now contributes to studies such as the determination of Asian monsoon precipitation change, evaluation of water resources, verification of high-resolution model simulations and satellite precipitation estimates, and improvement of precipitation forecasts. The APHRODITE project carries out outreach activities with Asian countries, and communicates with national institutions and world data centers. We have released open-access APHRO_V1101 datasets for monsoon Asia, the Middle East, and northern Eurasia (at 0.5° × 0.5° and 0.25° × 0.25° resolution) and the APHRO_JP_V1005 dataset for Japan (at 0.05° × 0.05° resolution; see www.chikyu.ac.jp/precip/ and http://aphrodite.suiri.tsukuba.ac.jp/). We welcome cooperation and feedback from users.

Abstract. We developed a new emission inventory for Asia (Regional Emission inventory in ASia (REAS) Version 1.1) for the period 1980–2020. REAS is the first inventory to integrate historical, present, and future emissions in Asia on the basis of a consistent methodology. We present here emissions in 2000, historical emissions for 1980–2003, and projected emissions for 2010 and 2020 of SO2, NOx, CO, NMVOC, black carbon (BC), and organic carbon (OC) from fuel combustion and industrial sources. Total energy consumption in Asia more than doubled between 1980 and 2003, causing a rapid growth in Asian emissions, by 28% for BC, 30% for OC, 64% for CO, 108% for NMVOC, 119% for SO2, and 176% for NOx. In particular, Chinese NOx emissions showed a marked increase of 280% over 1980 levels, and growth in emissions since 2000 has been extremely high. These increases in China were mainly caused by increases in coal combustion in the power plants and industrial sectors. NMVOC emissions also rapidly increased because of growth in the use of automobiles, solvents, and paints. By contrast, BC, OC, and CO emissions in China showed decreasing trends from 1996 to 2000 because of a reduction in the use of biofuels and coal in the domestic and industry sectors. However, since 2000, Chinese emissions of these species have begun to increase. Thus, the emissions of air pollutants in Asian countries (especially China) showed large temporal variations from 1980–2003. Future emissions in 2010 and 2020 in Asian countries were projected by emission scenarios and from emissions in 2000. For China, we developed three emission scenarios: PSC (policy success case), REF (reference case), and PFC (policy failure case). In the 2020 REF scenario, Asian total emissions of SO2, NOx, and NMVOC were projected to increase substantially by 22%, 44%, and 99%, respectively, over 2000 levels. The 2020 REF scenario showed a modest increase in CO (12%), a lesser increase in BC (1%), and a slight decrease in OC (−5%) compared with 2000 levels. However, it should be noted that Asian total emissions are strongly influenced by the emission scenarios for China.

Abstract Drainage basins in many parts of the world are ungauged or poorly gauged, and in some cases existing measurement networks are declining. The problem is compounded by the impacts of human-induced changes to the land surface and climate, occurring at the local, regional and global scales. Predictions of ungauged or poorly gauged basins under these conditions are highly uncertain. The IAHS Decade on Predictions in Ungauged Basins, or PUB, is a new initiative launched by the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS), aimed at formulating and implementing appropriate science programmes to engage and energize the scientific community, in a coordinated manner, towards achieving major advances in the capacity to make predictions in ungauged basins. The PUB scientific programme focuses on the estimation of predictive uncertainty, and its subsequent reduction, as its central theme. A general hydrological prediction system contains three components: (a) a model that describes the key processes of interest, (b) a set of parameters that represent those landscape properties that govern critical processes, and (c) appropriate meteorological inputs (where needed) that drive the basin response. Each of these three components of the prediction system, is either not known at all, or at best known imperfectly, due to the inherent multi-scale space—time heterogeneity of the hydrological system, especially in ungauged basins. PUB will therefore include a set of targeted scientific programmes that attempt to make inferences about climatic inputs, parameters and model structures from available but inadequate data and process knowledge, at the basin of interest and/or from other similar basins, with robust measures of the uncertainties involved, and their impacts on predictive uncertainty. Through generation of improved understanding, and methods for the efficient quantification of the underlying multi-scale heterogeneity of the basin and its response, PUB will inexorably lead to new, innovative methods for hydrological predictions in ungauged basins in different parts of the world, combined with significant reductions of predictive uncertainty. In this way, PUB will demonstrate the value of data, as well as provide the information needed to make predictions in ungauged basins, and assist in capacity building in the use of new technologies. This paper presents a summary of the science and implementation plan of PUB, with a call to the hydrological community to participate actively in the realization of these goals.

Abstract A new gauge-based analysis of daily precipitation has been constructed on a 0.5° latitude–longitude grid over East Asia (5°–60°N, 65°–155°E) for a 26-yr period from 1978 to 2003 using gauge observations at over 2200 stations collected from several individual sources. First, analyzed fields of daily climatology are computed by interpolating station climatology defined as the summation of the first six harmonics of the 365-calendar-day time series of the mean daily values averaged over a 20-yr period from 1978 to 1997. These fields of daily climatology are then adjusted by the Parameter-Elevation Regressions on Independent Slopes Model (PRISM) monthly precipitation climatology to correct the bias caused by orographic effects. Gridded fields of the ratio of daily precipitation to the daily climatology are created by interpolating the corresponding station values using the optimal interpolation method. Analyses of total daily precipitation are finally calculated by multiplying the daily climatology by the daily ratio. Cross-validation tests indicated that this gauge-based analysis has high quantitative quality with a negligible bias and a correlation coefficient of ∼0.6 for comparisons between withdrawn station data and the analysis at a 0.05° latitude–longitude grid box. The quality of the analysis increases with the gauge network density. The mean distribution and annual cycle of this new gauge analysis present similar patterns but with more detailed structures and slightly larger magnitude compared to other published monthly gauge analyses over the region. The East Asia gauge analysis is applied to verify the performance of five satellite-based precipitation estimates. This examination reveals the regionally and seasonally dependent performance of the satellite products with the best statistics observed for relatively wet regions. Further improvements of the daily gauge analysis are underway to increase the gauge network density and to refine the algorithm to better deal with the orographic effects especially over South and Southeast Asia.

BACKGROUND: Health-care services are necessary for sustaining and improving human wellbeing, yet they have an environmental footprint that contributes to environment-related threats to human health. Previous studies have quantified the carbon emissions resulting from health care at a global level. We aimed to provide a global assessment of the wide-ranging environmental impacts of this sector. METHODS: In this multiregional input-output analysis, we evaluated the contribution of health-care sectors in driving environmental damage that in turn puts human health at risk. Using a global supply-chain database containing detailed information on health-care sectors, we quantified the direct and indirect supply-chain environmental damage driven by the demand for health care. We focused on seven environmental stressors with known adverse feedback cycles: greenhouse gas emissions, particulate matter, air pollutants (nitrogen oxides and sulphur dioxide), malaria risk, reactive nitrogen in water, and scarce water use. FINDINGS: Health care causes global environmental impacts that, depending on which indicator is considered, range between 1% and 5% of total global impacts, and are more than 5% for some national impacts. INTERPRETATION: Enhancing health-care expenditure to mitigate negative health effects of environmental damage is often promoted by health-care practitioners. However, global supply chains that feed into the enhanced activity of health-care sectors in turn initiate adverse feedback cycles by increasing the environmental impact of health care, thus counteracting the mission of health care. FUNDING: Australian Research Council, National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources project.

Environmental DNA (eDNA) from aquatic vertebrates has recently been used to estimate the presence of a species. We hypothesized that fish release DNA into the water at a rate commensurate with their biomass. Thus, the concentration of eDNA of a target species may be used to estimate the species biomass. We developed an eDNA method to estimate the biomass of common carp (Cyprinus carpio L.) using laboratory and field experiments. In the aquarium, the concentration of eDNA changed initially, but reached an equilibrium after 6 days. Temperature had no effect on eDNA concentrations in aquaria. The concentration of eDNA was positively correlated with carp biomass in both aquaria and experimental ponds. We used this method to estimate the biomass and distribution of carp in a natural freshwater lagoon. We demonstrated that the distribution of carp eDNA concentration was explained by water temperature. Our results suggest that biomass data estimated from eDNA concentration reflects the potential distribution of common carp in the natural environment. Measuring eDNA concentration offers a non-invasive, simple, and rapid method for estimating biomass. This method could inform management plans for the conservation of ecosystems.

All species have an environmental niche, and despite technological advances, humans are unlikely to be an exception. Here, we demonstrate that for millennia, human populations have resided in the same narrow part of the climatic envelope available on the globe, characterized by a major mode around ∼11 °C to 15 °C mean annual temperature (MAT). Supporting the fundamental nature of this temperature niche, current production of crops and livestock is largely limited to the same conditions, and the same optimum has been found for agricultural and nonagricultural economic output of countries through analyses of year-to-year variation. We show that in a business-as-usual climate change scenario, the geographical position of this temperature niche is projected to shift more over the coming 50 y than it has moved since 6000 BP. Populations will not simply track the shifting climate, as adaptation in situ may address some of the challenges, and many other factors affect decisions to migrate. Nevertheless, in the absence of migration, one third of the global population is projected to experience a MAT >29 °C currently found in only 0.8% of the Earth's land surface, mostly concentrated in the Sahara. As the potentially most affected regions are among the poorest in the world, where adaptive capacity is low, enhancing human development in those areas should be a priority alongside climate mitigation.

Abstract The Global Land–Atmosphere Coupling Experiment (GLACE) is a model intercomparison study focusing on a typically neglected yet critical element of numerical weather and climate modeling: land–atmosphere coupling strength, or the degree to which anomalies in land surface state (e.g., soil moisture) can affect rainfall generation and other atmospheric processes. The 12 AGCM groups participating in GLACE performed a series of simple numerical experiments that allow the objective quantification of this element for boreal summer. The derived coupling strengths vary widely. Some similarity, however, is found in the spatial patterns generated by the models, with enough similarity to pinpoint multimodel “hot spots” of land–atmosphere coupling. For boreal summer, such hot spots for precipitation and temperature are found over large regions of Africa, central North America, and India; a hot spot for temperature is also found over eastern China. The design of the GLACE simulations are described in full detail so that any interested modeling group can repeat them easily and thereby place their model’s coupling strength within the broad range of those documented here.

Study region: Asia, Europe, Oceania, North America, South America, Middle East and Africa. Study focus: The purpose of this paper is to review and analyze the water, energy, and food nexus and regions of study, nexus keywords and stakeholders in order to understand the current state of nexus research. New hydrological insights: Through selected 37 projects, four types of nexus research were identified including water–food, water–energy–food, water–energy, and climate related. Among them, six projects (16%) had a close linkage with water–food, 11 (30%) with water–energy–food, 12 (32%) with water–energy, and eight (22%) with climate. The regions were divided into Asia, Europe, Oceania, North America, South America, Middle East and Africa. North America and Oceania had a tendency to focus on a specific nexus type, water–energy (46%) and climate (43%), while Africa had less focus on water–energy (7%). Regarding keywords, out of 37 nexus projects, 16 projects listed keywords in their articles. There were 84 keywords in total, which were categorized by the author team depending on its relevance to water, food, energy, climate, and combination of water–food–energy–climate, and 40 out of 84 keywords were linked with water and only 4 were linked with climate. As for stakeholders, 77 out of 137 organizations were related to research and only two organizations had a role in media.

The process of rice domestication occurred in the Lower Yangtze region of Zhejiang, China, between 6900 and 6600 years ago. Archaeobotanical evidence from the site of Tianluoshan shows that the proportion of nonshattering domesticated rice (Oryza sativa) spikelet bases increased over this period from 27% to 39%. Over the same period, rice remains increased from 8% to 24% of all plant remains, which suggests an increased consumption relative to wild gathered foods. In addition, an assemblage of annual grasses, sedges, and other herbaceous plants indicates the presence of arable weeds, typical of cultivated rice, that also increased over this period.

Reproducible climate reconstructions of the Common Era (1 CE to present) are key to placing industrial-era warming into the context of natural climatic variability. Here we present a community-sourced database of temperature-sensitive proxy records from the PAGES2k initiative. The database gathers 692 records from 648 locations, including all continental regions and major ocean basins. The records are from trees, ice, sediment, corals, speleothems, documentary evidence, and other archives. They range in length from 50 to 2000 years, with a median of 547 years, while temporal resolution ranges from biweekly to centennial. Nearly half of the proxy time series are significantly correlated with HadCRUT4.2 surface temperature over the period 1850-2014. Global temperature composites show a remarkable degree of coherence between high- and low-resolution archives, with broadly similar patterns across archive types, terrestrial versus marine locations, and screening criteria. The database is suited to investigations of global and regional temperature variability over the Common Era, and is shared in the Linked Paleo Data (LiPD) format, including serializations in Matlab, R and Python.

Prehistoric cultivation of wild wheat in the Fertile Crescent led to the selection of mutants with indehiscent (nonshattering) ears, which evolved into modern domestic wheat. Previous estimates suggested that this transformation was rapid, but our analyses of archaeological plant remains demonstrate that indehiscent domesticates were slow to appear, emerging approximately 9500 years before the present, and that dehiscent (shattering) forms were still common in cultivated fields approximately 7500 years before the present. Slow domestication implies that after cultivation began, wild cereals may have remained unchanged for a long period, supporting claims that agriculture originated in the Near East approximately 10,500 years before the present.

We present a multisite analysis of the relationship between plant diversity and ecosystem functioning within the European BIODEPTH network of plant-diversity manipulation experiments. We report results of the analysis of 11 variables addressing several aspects of key ecosystem processes like biomass production, resource use (space, light, and nitrogen), and decomposition, measured across three years in plots of varying plant species richness at eight different European grassland field sites. Differences among sites explained substantial and significant amounts of the variation of most of the ecosystem processes examined. However, against this background of geographic variation, all the aspects of plant diversity and composition we examined (i.e., both numbers and types of species and functional groups) produced significant, mostly positive impacts on ecosystem processes. Analyses using the additive partitioning method revealed that complementarity effects (greater net yields than predicted from monocultures due to resource partitioning, positive interactions, etc.) were stronger and more consistent than selection effects (the covariance between monoculture yield and change in yield in mixtures) caused by dominance of species with particular traits. In general, communities with a higher diversity of species and functional groups were more productive and utilized resources more completely by intercepting more light, taking up more nitrogen, and occupying more of the available space. Diversity had significant effects through both increased vegetation cover and greater nitrogen retention by plants when this resource was more abundant through N2 fixation by legumes. However, additional positive diversity effects remained even after controlling for differences in vegetation cover and for the presence of legumes in communities. Diversity effects were stronger on above- than belowground processes. In particular, clear diversity effects on decomposition were only observed at one of the eight sites. The ecosystem effects of plant diversity also varied between sites and years. In general, diversity effects were lowest in the first year and stronger later in the experiment, indicating that they were not transitional due to community establishment. These analyses of our complete ecosystem process data set largely reinforce our previous results, and those from comparable biodiversity experiments, and extend the generality of diversity–ecosystem functioning relationships to multiple sites, years, and processes.

Knowledge of the presence of an invasive species is critical to monitoring the sustainability of communities and ecosystems. Environmental DNA (eDNA), DNA fragments that are likely to be bound to organic matters in the water or in shed cells, has been used to monitor the presence of aquatic animals. Using an eDNA-based method, we estimated the presence of the invasive bluegill sunfish, Lepomis macrochirus, in 70 ponds located in seven locales on the Japanese mainland and on surrounding islands. We quantified the concentration of DNA copies in a 1 L water sample using quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) with a primer/probe set. In addition, we visually observed the bluegill presence in the ponds from the shoreline. We detected bluegill eDNA in all the ponds where bluegills were observed visually and some where bluegills were not observed. Bluegills were also less prevalent on the islands than the mainland, likely owing to limited dispersal and introduction by humans. Our eDNA method simply and rapidly detects the presence of this invasive fish species with less disturbance to the environment during field surveys than traditional methods.

Abstract Cyclonic storms associated with the midlatitude Subtropical Westerly Jet (SWJ), referred to as Western Disturbances (WDs), play a critical role in the meteorology of the Indian subcontinent. WDs embedded in the southward propagating SWJ produce extreme precipitation over northern India and are further enhanced over the Himalayas due to orographic land‐atmosphere interactions. During December, January, and February, WD snowfall is the dominant precipitation input to establish and sustain regional snowpack, replenishing regional water resources. Spring melt is the major source of runoff to northern Indian rivers and can be linked to important hydrologic processes from aquifer recharge to flashfloods. Understanding the dynamical structure, evolution‐decay, and interaction of WDs with the Himalayas is therefore necessary to improve knowledge which has wide ranging socioeconomic implications beyond short‐term disaster response including cold season agricultural activities, management of water resources, and development of vulnerability‐adaptive measures. In addition, WD wintertime precipitation provides critical mass input to existing glaciers and modulates the albedo characteristics of the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau, affecting large‐scale circulation and the onset of the succeeding Indian Summer Monsoon. Assessing the impacts of climate variability and change on the Indian subcontinent requires fundamental understanding of the dynamics of WDs. In particular, projected changes in the structure of the SWJ will influence evolution‐decay processes of the WDs and impact Himalayan regional water availability. This review synthesizes past research on WDs with a perspective to provide a comprehensive assessment of the state of knowledge to assist both researchers and policymakers, and context for future research.