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Assessing the vulnerability and adaptive capacity of species, communities, and ecosystems is essential for successful conservation. Climate change, however, induces extreme uncertainty in various pathways of assessments, which hampers robust decision-making for conservation. Here, we developed a framework that allows us to quantify the level of acceptable uncertainty as a metric of ecosystem robustness, considering the uncertainty due to climate change. Under the framework, utilizing a key concept from info-gap decision theory, vulnerability is measured as the inverse of maximum acceptable uncertainty to fulfill the minimum required goal for conservation. We applied the framework to 42 natural forest ecosystems and assessed their acceptable uncertainties in terms of maintenance of species richness and forest functional type. Based on best-guess estimate of future temperature in various GCM models and RCP scenarios, and assuming that tree species survival is primarily determined by mean annual temperature, we performed simulations with increasing deviation from the best-guess temperature. Our simulations indicated that the acceptable uncertainty varied greatly among the forest plots, presumably reflecting the distribution of ecological traits and niches among species within the communities. Our framework provides acceptable uncertainty as an operational metric of ecosystem robustness under uncertainty, while incorporating both system properties and socioeconomic conditions. We argue that our framework can enhance social consensus building and decision-making in the face of the extreme uncertainty induced by global climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rice paddy fields are important habitat for many dragonfly species. In Japan, populations of dragonflies inhabiting rice paddies, in particular Sympetrum (Odonata: Libellulidae), have decreased greatly in the last few decades. A major cause of the decline has been suggested to be the use of systemic insecticides (e.g., phenylpyrazole and neonicotinoid) in nursery boxes of rice seedlings. In this study, we examined the effects of chlorantraniliprole (CAP), a novel anthranilic diamide insecticide, on adult emergence of Sympetrum dragonflies in ten rice paddy fields by counting their exuviae remaining on the rice plants as an abundance index. Our results suggest that CAP is a potential factor that reduced the emergence rate of S. infuscatum but not of S. frequens. This difference may be due to differential sensitivity to CAP, different lengths of the nymphal stage, or different effects of bottom-up controls via reduction of prey organisms that are highly sensitive to CAP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate warming is of concern as a key factor in the worldwide decline in insect populations. In Japan, numbers of a common dragonfly in rice paddy fields, Sympetrum frequens, decreased sharply in the 1990s. Because S. frequens migrates to cooler mountains in summer, climate warming has been suggested as one of the main causes of the population decline in addition to agronomic factors. Here, we analysed the relation between summer temperatures and population densities of S. frequens and the related S. infuscatum, which does not migrate to mountains in summer, using published population monitoring data and temperature data from three regions (Toyama, Ishikawa, and Shizuoka) in Japan. Decadal differences in summer temperatures lay within the range of fluctuations among years, suggesting that an increase in summer temperatures cannot explain the past sharp population declines. However, regression analyses using monitoring data from Toyama showed that the population dynamics of both species in autumn are negatively correlated with summer temperatures in the same year. These results suggest that high temperatures in summer directly affect adult mortality to an extent that results in a decrease in population growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neonicotinoids and fipronil are the most widely used insecticides in the world. Previous studies showed that these compounds have high toxicity to a wide taxonomic range of non-target invertebrates. In rice cultivation, they are frequently used for nursery-box treatment of rice seedlings. The use of fipronil and neonicotinoid imidacloprid is suspected to be the main cause of population declines of red dragonflies, in particular Sympetrum frequens, because they have high lethal toxicity to dragonfly nymphs and the timing of the insecticides' introduction in Japan (i.e., the late 1990s) overlapped with the sharp population declines. However, a causal link between application of these insecticides and population declines of the dragonflies remains unclear. Therefore, we estimated the amount of the insecticides applied for nursery-box treatment of rice seedlings and analyzed currently available information to evaluate the causality between fipronil and imidacloprid usage and population decline of S. frequens using Hill's causality criteria. Based on our scoring of Hill's nine criteria, the strongest lines of evidence were strength, plausibility, and coherence, whereas the weakest were temporality and biological gradient. We conclude that the use of these insecticides, particularly fipronil, was a major cause of the declines of S. frequens in Japan in the 1990s, with a high degree of certainty. The existing information and our analyses, however, do not allow us to exclude the possibility that some agronomic practices (e.g., midsummer drainage or crop rotation) that can severely limit the survival of aquatic nymphs also played a role in the dragonfly's decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Worldwide, we rely on introduced plants for the essentials of human life; however, intentional plant introductions for commercial benefit have resulted in invaders with negative environmental, economic or social impacts. We argue that plant species of low expected economic value should be less acceptable for introduction than species of high economic value if their other traits are similar; however, key traits such as likelihood of escape and costs of escape are often highly uncertain. Methods do not currently exist which allow decision makers to evaluate costs and benefits of introduction under uncertainty. We developed a cost-benefit analysis for determining plant introduction that incorporates probability of escape, expected economic costs after escape, expected commercial benefits, and the efficiency and cost of containment. We used a model to obtain optimal decisions for the introduction and containment of commercial plants while maximizing net benefit or avoiding losses. We also obtained conditions for robust decisions which take into account severe uncertainty in model parameters using information-gap decision theory. Optimal decisions for introduction and containment of commercial plants depended, not only on the probability of escape and subsequent costs incurred, but also on the anticipated commercial benefit, and the cost and efficiency of containment. When our objective is to maximize net benefit, increasing uncertainty in parameter values increased the likelihood of introduction; in contrast, if our objective is to avoid losses, more uncertainty decreased the likelihood of introduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Invasive plants disrupt ecosystems from local to landscape scales. Reduction or reversal of spread is an important goal of many invasive plant management strategies, but few general guidelines exist on how to achieve this aim. We identified the main drivers of spread, and thus potential targets for management, using a spatially explicit simulation model tested on different life history categories in different spread and landscape scenarios. We used boosted regression trees to determine the parameters that most affected spread. Additionally, we analysed how spread reacted to changes in those parameters over a broad realistic range. From our results we deduce four simple management guidelines: (1) Manage dispersal if possible, as mean dispersal distance was an important driver of spread for all life history categories; (2) short bursts of rapid spread or more usual year on year spread can have different drivers, therefore managers need to decide what type of spread they want to slow; (3) efforts to manage spread will have variable outcomes due to interactions between, and non-linear responses to, key drivers of spread; and (4) the most useful demographic rates to target depend on dispersal ability, life history and how spread is measured. Fecundity was found to be important for driving spread only when reduced to low levels and particularly when the species was short lived. For longer lived species management should target survival, or age of maturity, especially when dispersal ability is limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Major upwelling systems around the world provide marine productivity and fishery yield out of proportion to their area. Upwelling winds have the counteracting effects that stronger winds upwell more nutrients to the surface for higher production, but they also transport that production off continental shelves where it may not be consumed by shelf-dwelling species. Because the patterns of wind fluctuations vary in these systems, we determined the conditions for maximal biological production using a simple conveyor belt model. The conditions are that: (1) the average cross-shelf velocity produced by the winds be the value that provides the maximum production with constant winds and (2) that the wind pattern be periodic with period equal to the cross-shelf transport time that results from maximizing production with constant winds. Examination of an example using winds in central California indicated wind patterns optimal for phytoplankton occurred more frequently than those for zooplankton. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]