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Current trends of spatial planning policies give a strategic role to soils, the multifunctionality of which must be considered as a crucial driver facing cities’ forthcoming social-ecological transition. However, soils within urban areas are insufficiently studied as a long-term record of environmental history and heavy anthropization. This article investigates the extreme qualitative variability of urban soils by presenting a conceptual model and cartographic workflow highlighting soil evolution processes as a value which co-variates with urbanization. Based on a case study in West Lausanne (Switzerland), the layers and map series of an atlas underscore the applicability of different types of information and spatial analysis for documenting the influence of anthrosediments and land cover changes. Combined with empirical profile descriptions, such a consolidated concept map defines a template, in the form of a complex spatio-temporal figure, on which to apply the state factor approach. Instead of using a simple spatial transect or gradient, the increasing anthropic dominance over original landscape conditions is explained using a section through time. An urban anthroposequence consequently retraces contrasting soil development pathways as a coherent bundle of historical trajectories. Such a narrative integrates various facets of land use, including one-off construction techniques and recurring maintenance practices, planning tools, and morphologies, into a specific ‘project for the ground’ which brought forth the mixed mesh of the Swiss Plateau ‘cityterritory.’ Ultimately, the dynamic vision conveyed by these intertwined soil–urbanization coevolution trajectories outlines opportunities for the regeneration of the resource deposit made up of both West Lausanne’s urban fabric and its soils as a palimpsest.

Management actions often need to be taken in the absence of ecological information to mitigate the impact of pressing environmental problems. Managers counteracted the detrimental effects of cultural acidification on aquatic ecosystems during the industrial era using liming to salvage biodiversity and ecosystem services. However, historical contingencies, i.e., whether lakes were naturally acidic or degraded because of acidification, were largely unknown and therefore not accounted for in management. It is uncertain whether liming outcomes had a potentially detrimental effect on naturally acidic lakes. Evidence from paleolimnological reconstructions allowed us to analyze community structure in limed acidified and naturally acidic lakes, and acidified and circumneutral references. We analyzed community structure of phytoplankton, zooplankton, macroinvertebrates (littoral, sublittoral, profundal), and fish between 2000 and 2004. Naturally acidic limed lakes formed communities that were not representative of the other lake types. The occurrence of fish species relevant for ecosystem service provisioning (fisheries potential) in naturally acidic limed lakes were confounded by biogeographical factors. In addition, sustained changes in water quality were conducive to harmful algal blooms. This highlights a pathological outcome of liming lakes when their naturally acidic conditions are not accounted for. Because liming is an important socialecological system, sustained ecological change of lakes might incur undesired costs for societies in the long term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The implementation of ecosystem-based approaches to marine management points to several shared objectives between conservation and fisheries management that require: better knowledge of the life history of the exploited resources; to elucidate the information encoded into the calcified tissues (otoliths, scales, bones, shells and corals) of marine and freshwater organisms; to support knowledge-based sustainable ocean management and use. IOS2014 was the 5th in a series of independent symposia which have been convened, beginning in 1993, to encourage the exchange of information and expertise and promote the development of new techniques and applications for otolith-based analysis in ecology, management, and conservation. The aim of the Symposium was to explore the use of calcified tissues as tools to support management and define indicators at environmental, community, population and individual levels. Despite the economic difficulties worldwide, a total of 329 registrants from 45 countries attended the Symposium. The symposium was organized around four themes: Environmental indicators, Community indicators, Population indicators, and Individual indicators. One day was devoted to workshops; on Otolith Shape Analysis and on Age Validation. The traditional approach of using calcified tissues to determine fish age and therefore to determine the fish population structure has been augmented by new applications to address questions of population connectivity, migrations, and trophic ecology. These tools have become increasingly important as we transition to spatially explicit and ecosystem-level management tools. They are now extended to applications related to spatial use (essential habitats) and to the use of otoliths as a record of past and present environmental conditions. Otoliths are valuable as individual bio-recorders, and – as demonstrated in the variety of presentations at the symposium – also as indicators for higher levels of organisation. The increased appreciation for otolith archives was also apparent; taking advantage of the extended otolith sampling for stock assessment and providing ample collections from different species, as well as from the fossil records.

Management actions often need to be taken in the absence of ecological information to mitigate the impact of pressing environmental problems. Managers counteracted the detrimental effects of cultural acidification on aquatic ecosystems during the industrial era using liming to salvage biodiversity and ecosystem services. However, historical contingencies, i.e., whether lakes were naturally acidic or degraded because of acidification, were largely unknown and therefore not accounted for in management. It is uncertain whether liming outcomes had a potentially detrimental effect on naturally acidic lakes. Evidence from paleolimnological reconstructions allowed us to analyze community structure in limed acidified and naturally acidic lakes, and acidified and circumneutral references. We analyzed community structure of phytoplankton, zooplankton, macroinvertebrates (littoral, sublittoral, profundal), and fish between 2000 and 2004. Naturally acidic limed lakes formed communities that were not representative of the other lake types. The occurrence of fish species relevant for ecosystem service provisioning (fisheries potential) in naturally acidic limed lakes were confounded by biogeographical factors. In addition, sustained changes in water quality were conducive to harmful algal blooms. This highlights a pathological outcome of liming lakes when their naturally acidic conditions are not accounted for. Because liming is an important social-ecological system, sustained ecological change of lakes might incur undesired costs for societies in the long term.

We describe the career of John Birks as a pioneering scientist who has, over a career spanning five decades, transformed palaeoecology from a largely descriptive to a rigorous quantitative science relevant to contemporary questions in ecology and environmental change. We review his influence on students and colleagues not only at Cambridge and Bergen Universities, his places of primary employment, but also on individuals and research groups in Europe and North America. We also introduce the collection of papers that we have assembled in his honour. The papers are written by his former students and close colleagues and span many of the areas of palaeoecology to which John himself has made major contributions. These include the relationship between ecology and palaeoecology, late-glacial and Holocene palaeoecology, ecological succession, climate change and vegetation history, the role of palaeoecological techniques in reconstructing and understanding the impact of human activity on terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems and numerical analysis of multivariate palaeoecological data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land use changes have been shown to alter the balance of nutrient and mineral sources and sinks to coastal systems. These shifts are often preserved in sediment records. In Apalachicola Bay, productivity is dependent on nutrient loading from the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint (ACF) river basin; alterations to ACF watershed flow by management activities coupled with increased marine water inundation associated with rising sea level threaten this productivity. The objective of this research was to evaluate past changes in nutrient loading to Apalachicola Bay as recorded in sediment history and determine if these changes could be associated with both anthropogenic and natural alterations in the system. Sediment cores from three sites in the bay were collected and analyzed for organic carbon (C), total nitrogen (N), and total phosphorus (P) concentrations and δ13C and δ15N stable isotopic abundances. The three sites are located at the river mouth (S1), mid-bay (S2), and in the northeastern region of the bay (S3). Carbon and nitrogen concentrations, ratios, and stable isotopes coupled with grain-size shifts for the bay suggest a decrease in river organic matter supply and a change in sediment clay content supply and/or distribution for the bay. Overall, the applied indicators suggest an increase in marine influence on the organic matter in the estuary. These shifts appear to be associated with Apalachicola River management practices coupled with sea-level rise in the Gulf of Mexico. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]