Prompted by the work of the Stiglitz’s Commission, the growing attention to the beyond-GDP measures has led to the inclusion of well-being indicators in the policy agenda. This innovation asks for an improvement of the existing methodology to produce composite indices, in order to correctly address spatial and temporal comparisons as well as tackling for unbalances. Following a short review of the

In today’s societies, scavengers play an important role as providers of nature’s contribution to people (NCP), such as disease control and carcass removal. Yet very little is known about the non-material NCP (i.e. nature’s effects on subjective and psychological aspects of people’s well-being) that scavengers provide societies with. The first aim of this study is to determine which species of obligate

The Deepwater Horizon (DWH) accident occurred on 20 April 2010 in the Northern Gulf of Mexico and resulted in a deep-sea plume of petroleum hydrocarbons and a marine oiled snow sedimentation and flocculent accumulation (MOSSFA) event. It is hypothesized that recovery will occur when the contaminated sediment is buried below the biologically active zone of 10 cm. Recovery rate can be inferred from the

Vegetation is an important link between water, atmosphere and land, and the growth of vegetation is an important indicator of ecosystem change. Therefore, it is essential to study the dynamic changes of vegetation and predict the vegetation dynamics. Based on the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and statistical analysis (e.g., trend analysis methods and Hurst exponent), this study investigates

How to balance the relationship between man and land has always been an essential problem for human beings. In 2011, the Gully Land Consolidation (GLC) project was implemented on the Loess Plateau in China. The aim of this project was to improve the living conditions of the local people through land-use management while ensuring the integrity of the environment. As little is known about the GLC, the

Soil health status should be monitored to allow planning sustainable management, but indicators available do not encourage frequent soil health evaluation because of the complexity, time-consumption, and expensiveness of the methodologies. Aggregate stability (AS) is a good soil physical health indicator associated with soil (SOC) and particulate (POC) organic carbon but is difficult to monitor. Anaerobically

In a recent paper in Ecological Indicators, Butturi-Gomes and Petrere (2020) investigated Morisita's index of patchiness in relation to edge effects and concluded: that edge avoidance by a species drives its patchiness estimation … which might be the reason behind so many claims of population aggregation' and that 'the presence of edge avoidance leads to false claims of population aggregation, based

Community Level Physiological Profiles (CLPPs) have been used as ecological indicators from long ago as they determine physiologic and metabolic potential of microbial communities and indicate the capability to adapt their metabolism to anthropogenic stressors or to changes in environmental conditions. Also, these profiles are proxies for functional diversity or functional traits of a microbial community

Conservation planning processes and wetland management require spatial estimations of aquatic habitats to support the maintenance of aquatic biodiversity. However, physical access to several wetlands and freshwater habitats can be restricted due to difficult topography and technological limitations associated with ground-based observations. In addition to these constraints, the distribution of some

Wind turbines have considerable impact on flying animals, particularly bats, which are sometimes killed in large numbers by the moving rotors. A longstanding question remains why bats are attracted to wind turbines and risk their lives among the moving rotor blades. One hypothesis is that they feed on insects swarming around the turbine towers and another is that they congregate there to court. The

Cultural ecosystem services such as aesthetic value are highly context-specific and often present difficulties in their assessment. Here we present a case study in the northern English Protected Area of the Yorkshire Dales National Park. Utilising publicly available images, paired-comparison surveys, probability modelling, machine-learning based text annotations, natural language processing and regression

Cropland is fundamental for food production, which consumes a considerable amount of fresh water in the production process. Cropland with a high yield and low water intensity is extremely precious for realizing the sustainable and environmentally friendly utilization of cropland. However, urban expansion often occurs on cropland, and there is not enough scientific understanding of the features of cropland

The benthic fauna of European continental shelves is a severely impacted community, mostly due to intense bottom trawling activity. Trawling effect may be dependent on the spatial and temporal distribution of abrasion, the habitat type including natural perturbation intensity and the fishing gear used. Nonetheless, there is an urgent need to identify or develop indices likely to measure the effect

The expansion and intensification of human activities in the Argentinean Pampas have affected birds and mammals that inhabit the agroecosystems, threatening their populations and aggravating their conflicts with humans. On the other hand, they play different roles in the provision of Ecosystem Services (ES). Therefore, identifying and understanding the relationships between species and humans, and

Traits define how organisms interact with their surrounding environment and with other organisms. Thus, trait composition of biological communities is expected to change predictably along environmental gradients. Because organisms’ traits, but not taxonomic identity, determine their fitness, trait-environment relationships should provide a better way to elucidate how biodiversity respond to environmental

Mining activities have caused heavy metal pollution in Xikuangshan (XKS), China. This work aims to assess heavy metal ecological risk in XKS using a potential ecological risk (PER) index and detect the responses of the soil bacterial community under heavy metal stress at different pH levels. The PER index indicated that antimony (Sb), cadmium (Cd), and arsenic (As) posed the most serious ecological

Demographic shifts in populations of bioindicator species are widely used to gauge the extent of impacts of human disturbances on ecosystems. Yet, the mechanistic drivers of these demographic changes are often poorly understood. The Atlantic ghost crab, Ocypode quadrata is a bioindicator species of human disturbances on sandy shores, and experiences similar demographic changes as other bioindicator

Hunting bag statistics are often the only available data for performing ecological studies about harvested species, and total harvest is sometimes used as a proxy of abundance of the game species under study in a given geographical area and period of time. This practice raises at least two questions, (i) are the total hunting bag estimates good indices of population abundance, and if so, for what uses

Trawl bans are relatively uncommon, particularly at the level of an entire coastal jurisdiction, and have seldom been studied in the tropics. A permanent territory-wide trawl ban has been implemented in Hong Kong coastal waters since the beginning of 2013. We used isotope-based metrics, in addition to traditional community measurements, to determine whether benthic crustacean assemblages had shown

Mapping the supply of ecosystem services (ESs) is essential for communicating the importance of ESs to policy makers and to demonstrate that sustainable development is being applied with due diligence by forest managers. ES mapping facilitates the integration of ES assessments into the decision-making process. To that end, the main objective of this study was to provide a mapping framework for a specific

Coordinating urbanization and ecosystem conservation is necessary for future regional sustainability. Understanding the coupling relationship between urbanization and ecosystem conservation has great significance in ecological management and policy making. Based on a comprehensive index system of urbanization and ecosystem services (ESS), this study used the coupling coordination degree (CCD) model

Methodological choices made when studying functional feeding groups (FFGs) may influence the outcome of feeding diversity analyses and of the ecological quality assessment. We assessed the impact of select methodological choices based on seasonal macrobenthos surveys carried out in Bohai Bay, China. Results of the paired-sample t test showed that the choice to remove rare species from analyses had

Long-term monitoring of cetacean vocalizations allows for the exploration of their occurrence, seasonality and abundance. However, accurate automatic detection of vocalizations from vast acoustic datasets containing diverse sound sources remains a challenge. In this study, we propose the permutation entropy (H) and the sample entropy (SE) as metrics for the unattended detection of whistles and clicks

Zooplankton structure may serve as predictor of a multiplicity of environmental conditions, including long-scale distance between shallow water bodies. Two different categories of zooplankton indices (1/ biocoenotic indices, including dominating species; 2/ trait-based approaches, including ecological groups: littoral vs. pelagic community and functional feeding groups) were compared in small water

Scientific research requires selection of accurate research methodology to generate evidence based findings. In a study conducted by Puri et al. (2020) titled “The balancing act: Maintaining leopard–wild prey equilibrium could offer economic benefits to people in a shared forest landscape of central India” the authors have reported occupancy estimate of common leopard without incorporating false positive

Rapid urbanization intensifies land-use transition by shrinking cropland and increasing the land development of land in China, which affects the ecosystem services value (ESV) and causes environmental degradation. To improve the quality of the ecological environment, China has launched a strategy for the construction of an ecological civilization and attempted to build an ecological compensation mechanism

Alpine mountain lake biota are adapted to harsh conditions making them particularly vulnerable to global change. However, as each mountain lake has a different limnology, there are supposed to be differential responses and degrees of resilience to climate change. In this study, 23 lakes in the Bavarian-Tyrolian Alps differing in altitude, size and geology were examined for their diatom community response

Rural spaces are multifunctional, often containing production, living and ecological functions. Optimizing the production-living-ecological space has become one of the cores of China’s ecological civilization and sustainable development strategy. Research of the coupling coordination relationships among rural production, living and ecological functions is of immense significance for sustainable rural

An important element of the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Aichi Target 15 – i.e. to enhance “ecosystem resilience … through conservation and restoration” – remains largely unaddressed by existing indicators. We here develop an indicator addressing just one of many possible dimensions of ecosystem resilience, by focusing on the capacity of ecosystems to retain biological diversity in the face

The “Rade de Cherbourg” (RdC, Cotentin) hosts the only marine salmon fish farm along the French coasts. High hydrodynamic regime would limit, there, organic matter (OM) accumulation directly under the cages, and enhance the transport of OM in the surrounding of the cages. This study was aiming at (1) monitoring the impact of a salmon fish farm on ecological quality statuses (EcoQs) of the RdC based

The use of bioindicators requires environmental information and a detailed knowledge of the biota to which it is assign a sensitivity value. The objective of this work was assessing the sensitivity of chironomids to several water quality variables. We used multivariate analysis and occupancy modelling to understand the relationship between abundance and occupancy of chironomid taxa and water quality

With increased frequency and intensity of drought occurrence in the changing climate, the drought resilience of forest trees is of widespread interest. Particularly, it is not clear as to how the resilience differs between tree species and whether or not such resilience changes over time. Understanding tree resilience to drought requires observations not only from recent events but also from the historical

The deleterious anthropogenic impact on animals is often hidden and not revealed in indexes of mortality in populations. Hence, animal monitoring should not only involve population numbers and survival, but also the individual physiological condition. Here we analyzed the physiological condition of the monarch butterfly Danaus plexippus in terms of protein content, immune response (proPhenoloxidase

The average farm size is an important indicator of agricultural sustainability. Over the last decades, farmers in the European Union (EU) Member States faced multiple changes of business environment that fuelled shifts in agricultural land use and farm structure. The aim of this paper is to develop and employ a novel index decomposition analysis framework that allows decomposing the changes in the

The avian dawn chorus presents a challenging opportunity to test autonomous recording units (ARUs) and associated recogniser software in the types of complex acoustic environments frequently encountered in the natural world. To date, extracting information from acoustic surveys using readily-available signal recognition tools (‘recognisers’) for use in biodiversity surveys has met with limited success

Understanding of the nexus between soil quality (SQ) and productivity, the heterogeneity of SQ and the restricting indicators that affect crop productivity is essential for a specific region to encourage improving of SQ while contributing to profitable crop production. The objectives of this study were to develop minimum dataset (MDS) variable selection methods that reflects the total dataset (TDS)

By relating observed changes to the pressures suffered, the Marine Strategy Framework Directive intends to better control the factors of environmental degradation and to manage their consequences in European waters. Several descriptors are defined within the framework of the MFSD and in particular descriptor 1 relating to the biological diversity of the seabed and descriptor 6 relating to the seabed

Groundwater quality is a very important issue, especially in the agricultural sector, where it is used extensively. Sodium Absorption Ratio (SAR) is an important parameter in water quality classification for irrigation usages. In this research, SAR was estimated by using the M5 decision tree integrated with a Geographical Information System (GIS). The main goal of this research was to calculate SAR

Nitrogen pollution is one of the main problems affecting the environment and human activity. This is especially true in semiarid regions where the quantity-quality relationship is a key constraining factor. In this paper, we propose and apply a method to quantify the economic value of the environmental service a river provides as a nitrate purifier/diluent. The main aim is to provide water management

The processes affecting the formation of the chemical composition of the waters take place in specific hydrochemical zones. The knowledge of such phenomena allows to draw conclusions regarding the origin and conditions prevailing in the regions of their occurrence, e.g. indicate a zone of active water exchange, i.e. an inflow of infiltration waters, or a zone of isolated geological structures, where

Anthropogenic activities may affect wild animal populations. Among them, amphibians are particularly sensitive to environmental change. The aim of this study was to evaluate the health condition of Rhinella fernandezae populations at three sites in the Buenos Aires Province, Argentina: a site inside a natural reserve (S1), a site surrounded mainly by industrial activities (S2) and a site surrounded

Different indices have been developed to quantify the extent and severity of river fragmentation. These indices vary depending on the specific goals of the study. Here, we present a new Conservation Connectivity Index (CCIP) for potamodromous fish species that considers the conservation value (richness, rarity and vulnerability) of river segments. The Iberian Peninsula holds > 20 endemic and endangered

Understanding plant-environment interactions is an important link to studying the impact of climate change on community assemblies and population dynamics, especially for tree species that define the ecosystem they occupy. Based on seed mass and germination data of three conifers over six decades (1955–2015) across British Columbia, Canada, we performed pairwise correlation analysis between focal traits

Brazil must restore 12 million hectares of degraded areas by 2030 to meet its goal of the Paris Global Climate Agreement (PGCA). In view of this, the development of mixed planting projects related to carbon-offset in degraded areas is increasing, which demonstrates environmental and social responsibility of corporate and governmental organizations. Despite the great potential of mixed restoration plantations

Desertification is a global problem that impacts a significative part of the Earth's surface, which cause a large environmental and social losses in several regions of the world. The Brazilian semiarid region, located mainly in the northeast part of the country, includes areas of moderate to very high susceptibility to desertification. In order to contribute to a comprehension of the dimensions of

Rangelands provide important ecosystem services worldwide. The present study was aimed to map rangeland degradation in a critical mountainous rangeland ecosystem of Iran. The study was carried out based on seven years intensive fieldwork and recording 1147 locations with downward trends in the quality of the rangelands. Twelve conditional factors and two important ensemble algorithms including Probability

Governance is an essential element in land-use decision-making and ecosystem management choices and thus for ecosystem service provisioning. Although a community-based approach, i.e. governance involving actors from all spheres of society (the state, market and civil society), is considered most appropriate for natural resource management, there is a lack of knowledge about its actual effects on environmental