From mobile hunter-gatherers to a series of state societies, Mediterranean climate regions (MED) around the world have been critical areas for human and biological evolution for millennia. Comprised of five regions on six continents, the MED are important today for human settlement, global food production, transportation, industry, and tourism, but these regions are also extremely vulnerable to projected

Physical heterogeneity is a strong driver of ecosystem function in rivers, but it is not clear whether this relationship persists in “Anthropocene” rivers: those affected by pronounced and persistent anthropogenic stressors. Such stressors can result in regime shifts of rivers, altering not only ecosystem structure and function, but also their heterogeneity. This study examines the heterogeneity of

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs have been implemented worldwide to balance human needs and ecosystem conservation. However, the effects of PES programs on economic activities and the associated effects on wildlife remain unclear. China’s Grain-to-Green program (GTGP) that aims to convert cropland to forest or grassland represents one of the largest PES programs in the world. We combine

Human activities can greatly affect the chemical and biological composition of High Arctic lakes that otherwise receive only sparse inputs from their watersheds and airsheds. This paper reports a study of three High Arctic waterbodies in which wastewater from an airport was released over the span of several decades. Using sediment cores from these waterbodies, we reconstructed the history of wastewater

Ancient soils contain geochemical signatures of human land use, making them usable as a “golden spike,” or globally synchronous marker, to identify traces of the early “Anthropocene.” This article examines the sedimentary record in northern China to determine when, and under what cultural circumstances, did ancient pollution appear in buried soils and sediments. Using methods of Inductively Coupled

The concept of legacy sediments, introduced in the early 2010s, is increasingly common to refer to sediment produced in watersheds within a limited period by anthropogenic disturbances. Primarily applied for cases in the USA, legacy sediment is a key concept to characterize the health of river corridors and design relevant restoration schemes. Surprisingly, examples of legacy sediments in European

With increasing costs of floods across the globe, interest has grown in using managed retreat strategies, such as home buyouts, for flood mitigation. For years, national-level estimates of the benefits of flood mitigation investments in the United States have been estimated as being on the order of 4:1 (USD) or more recently 6:1 (USD), according to the Federal Emergency management Agency and others

The Southern Ocean is warming faster than the average global ocean and is particularly vulnerable to ocean acidification due to its low temperatures and moderate alkalinity. Coccolithophores are the most productive calcifying phytoplankton and an important component of Southern Ocean ecosystems. Laboratory observations on the most abundant coccolithophore, Emiliania huxleyi, suggest that this species