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Few studies have examined the critical role of policy and network governance mechanism in addressing sustainability and FEW nexuses. This study aims to examine the efforts in meeting the UN Sustain...

Invasive species that compromise ecosystem functioning through direct and indirect (or cascading) pathways are a rising global threat. Apple snails (Pomacea spp.) are semi-aquatic freshwater invaders that have exerted devastating ecological and economic impacts on agricultural wetlands and are emerging as a major threat to the structures and functions of natural wetlands. In this research, we conducted a field mesocosm experiment in subtropical wetlands in Florida, USA to investigate how P. maculata alter a suite of wetland vegetation, water, and soil processes and how these effects vary across wetlands under two different management intensities. Overall, we found that invasive snails substantially decreased aboveground biomass and vegetation cover and exhibited preferential feeding on wetland plant species. In addition, snails increased water nutrients (e.g., total carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous and dissolved solids), but showed minimal impacts on soil pools and processes. While most effects of invasive P. maculata were similar across wetland types, certain responses (e.g., algal biomass) were divergent. Our study provides holistic evidence on multiple direct and indirect consequences of invasive apple snails along the wetland plant-water-soil continuum. By altering plant assemblages and nutrient cycling (e.g., via consumption, egestion, and excretion), P. maculata invasion could hamper vital wetland services, which is concerning for these globally vulnerable ecosystems. Differential snail effects across management intensities further suggest the need for tailored actions to mitigate apple snail impacts and conserve wetland ecosystems.

Sustainability is often framed as achieving prosperity, equality, and environmental integrity: in other words, high living standards, evenly-distributed, and low-impact. But what if there is a trilemma that inhibits the joint achievement of these three key goals? We analyzed synergies and tradeoffs between these dimensions of sustainability by investigating historical data on per-capita gross national income, the Gini coefficient for income distribution, and per-capita ecological footprint. We found that no country in the world successfully solved this trilemma, but there are typologies of countries that can help identify common barriers, and strategies to overcome them. Countries typically reduce inequality and then increase prosperity and environmental impact. Some countries are trapped in a high inequality space, while prosperous countries have reduced inequality only at the expense of increasing environmental impact. Escaping this trilemma to achieve ambitious sustainability goals will likely require economic redistribution and more urgent collective action for planetary stewardship.

Our society has entered in an era of Anthropocene, in which people and their activities dominate almost all ecosystems on the planet. In the context of growing uncertainties, landscape sustainability science (LSS), as a place-based, use-inspired science, aims to understand and improve the dynamic relationship between ecosystem services and human well-being. In this editorial, we identify the major theoretical foundations of LSS, discuss recent innovations in research methodology to advance LSS, summarize the extension of LSS through landscape design and geo-design, and examine the application of LSS for addressing sustainability challenges across multiple landscapes. We highlight that long-term regional sustainability can only be achieved by integrating context-based sustainability across agricultural, urban, and natural landscapes so as to minimize the regional ecological footprint and make advancement towards achieving the sustainable development goals.

Litter decomposition is a fundamental process underpinning multiple ecosystem services. Despite a long history of research on decomposition, direct and indirect effects of multiple interactive land management on wetland decomposition yet remain less well understood. Here, we used a long-term whole-ecosystem wetland experiment in south-central Florida to investigate interactive effects of land-use intensification, cattle grazing and prescribed fire on in situ wetland plant litter decomposition. We further examined the direct and indirect pathways of land management effects on litter decomposition through changes in associated litter traits, soil properties, and soil microbial attributes using structural equation models. We used the litterbag technique that quantifies decomposition rates (k-values) and recalcitrant fractions (A-values). Our results showed that land-use intensification increased k-values in ungrazed wetlands and decreased k-values in grazed wetlands, but consistently reduced A-values regardless of other treatments. Prescribed fire individually suppressed litter decomposition by reducing k and increasing A. Further, these effects occurred through altering litter, soil, and microbial properties. Our results revealed that litter traits and soil properties were the first two strongest factors in determining wetland decomposition processes. Particularly, litter P and Mg contents and soil P and K contents were the best predictors for k, while litter Ca and lignin contents and soil pH, N and water content best predicted A. Moreover, microbial traits exhibited interactive effects with litter and soil properties to affect wetland litter decomposition. Our research suggests that cattle grazing could buffer against stimulating effect of land-use intensification on decomposition rates and thus avoid nutrient releases pulses. Our study further indicates that land-use intensification and fire suppression in subtropical wetlands could promote organic matter depletion and thus nutrient loss, highlighting the need to reduce anthropogenic disturbances to natural wetlands to maintain their capacity for providing associated regulating and supporting services.

This review highlights recent progress on how landscape pattern (composition, configuration, landscape context, keystone landscape, scaling, and nonlinearity) affects pollination, pest control, water quality, flood control, and cultural ecosystem services (ES)—landscape esthetics and recreation. Landscape composition and configuration showed ES-specific effects. Recent studies confirmed that pollination increased in complex, heterogeneous landscapes with more surrounding natural/semi-natural habitats. Landscape pattern could also interact with local factors to affect pollination, with stronger effects at smaller spatial scales. For pest control, a comprehensive synthesis revealed inconsistent effects of non-crop habitat composition, perhaps due to diverse responses from different enemies and pests and complex tri-trophic interactions. Spatial configuration of land-covers, connectivity, and edge effects also mattered for pest control ES. Moreover, recent studies showed that configuration of land-covers could sometimes trump composition as the primary driver for water quality. Comparing across scales (e.g., riparian vs. watershed), landscape pattern effects on water quality tended to be more pronounced at small spatial scales. For flood control, studies showed that larger and less fragmented natural covers reduced peak runoffs, with a compositional threshold ~ 30–40%. Spatial location also mattered where imperviousness concentrated closer to outlet tended to increase peak runoffs. For cultural ES, landscape esthetics and recreation showed positive correlations with naturalness composition and landscape heterogeneity. Five overarching themes emerge for future research to advance understanding of landscape pattern effects on ES: (1) using social-ecological measures of ES; (2) assessing ES supply, flow, and demand; (3) considering interactions among multiple drivers across scales; (4) addressing ES interactions; and (5) enhancing predictive capacity of landscape models.

Complex socio-environmental challenges require interdisciplinary, team-based research capacity. Graduate students are fundamental to building such capacity, yet formal opportunities for graduate students to develop these capacities and skills are uncommon. This paper presents an assessment of the Graduate Pursuit (GP) program, a formal interdisciplinary team science graduate research and training program administered by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC). Quantitative and qualitative assessment of the program’s first cohort revealed that participants became significantly more comfortable with interdisciplinary research and team science approaches, increased their capacity to work across disciplines, and were enabled to produce tangible research outcomes. Qualitative analysis of four themes—(1) discipline, specialization, and shared purpose, (2) interpersonal skills and personality, (3) communication and teamwork, and (4) perceived costs and benefits—encompass participants’ positive and negative experiences and support findings from past assessments. The findings also identify challenges and benefits related to individual personality traits and team personality orientation, the importance of perceiving a sense of autonomy and independence, and the benefit of graduate training programs independent of the university and graduate program environment.

Understanding how the biological invasion is driven by environmental factors will improve model prediction and advance early detection, especially in the context of accelerating anthropogenic ecological changes. Although a large body of studies has examined how favorable environments promote biological invasions, a more comprehensive and mechanistic understanding of invasive species response to unfavorable/stressful conditions is still developing. Grass invasion has been problematic across the globe; in particular, C4 grass invaders, with high drought tolerance, adaptations to high temperatures, and high water use efficiency, could become more severe. Here, we conducted a rigorous microcosm experiment, with one of the most damaging invasive C4 grass - cogongrass (Imperata cylindrica), to explore how cogongrass responds to soil water and nutrient stress. We further integrated the results of the microcosm study with a species distribution model to (1) corroborate greenhouse results with field observations and (2) validate the robustness of our findings at sub-continental scales. Both the microcosm experiments and species distribution model agreed that soil water stress had a stronger impact on cogongrass than the nutrient one. New vegetative growth of cogongrass continued to be inhibited by the prior water stress. The significant water effect on cogongrass total biomass was supported by the finding that both allometric and biochemical traits of cogongrass did not show significant responses to the changes in water treatment. Different to the conventional wisdom that nutrient enrichment plays a bigger role in facilitating biological invasions, this study highlighted the possibility that water conditions may have a more substantial effect on some aggressive invaders. Therefore, an important implication of this study on biological conservation is that field managers might take advantage of the negative effect of global drought on some invasive species to increase the efficiency of their controlling efforts because invasive species may become more vulnerable under drought effect.

International audience; The Food-Energy-Water (FEW) nexus for urban sustainability needs to be analyzed via an integrative rather than a sectoral or silo approach, reflecting the ongoing transition from separate infrastructure systems to an integrated social-ecological-infrastructure system. As technology hubs can provide food, energy, water resources via decentralized and/or centralized facilities, there is an acute need to optimize FEW infrastructures by considering cost-benefit-risk tradeoffs with respect to multiple sustainability indicators. This paper identifies, categorizes, and analyzes global trends with respect to contemporary FEW technology metrics that highlights the possible optimal integration of a broad spectrum of technology hubs for possible cost-benefit-risk tradeoffs. The challenges related to multiscale and multiagent modeling processes for the simulation of urban FEW systems were discussed with respect to the aspects of scaling-up, optimization process, and risk assessment. Our review reveals that this field is growing at a rapid pace and the previous selection of analytical methodologies, nexus criteria, and sustainability indicators largely depended on individual FEW nexus conditions disparately, and full-scale cost-benefit-risk tradeoffs were very rare. Therefore, the potential full-scale technology integration in three ongoing cases of urban FEW systems in Miami (the United States), Marseille (France), and Amsterdam (the Netherlands) were demonstrated in due purpose finally.

Background Soil microbiomes play important roles in invasion biology, yet it is often treated as a ‘black box’ in modeling or large-scale field studies. Hence, investigating the change of association between invasive vegetation and soil microbes under changing environmental conditions, and exploring the genetic functions of associated microbiomes will provide a deeper understanding of invasion mechanisms. We performed a microcosm experiment with cogongrass (Imperata cylindrica (L.) P. Beauv.), which is one of the 100 worst invasive plants in the world. We combined rigorous sequencing analysis, including 16S rRNA, ITS, and shotgun metagenome sequencing, for the first time, to investigate the interactive effect of change in soil water and nutrient concentrations on microbiomes diversity, composition and genetic functions under invasion. Results We found that experimental drought has a stronger effect on the bacterial community than the fungal community. We discovered an enrichment of microbial groups, including Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes and Chloroflexi under drought treatment, could likely contribute to invasion success. Further, we showed a striking trend of induction of cell wall, membrane and desiccation-related genes in drought treatment and a marked downregulation in regular treatment, which could create a more hydrated microenvironment, facilitating biofilm formation and better protection from desiccation.Conclusions Our work contributes to highlighting the associated microbial communities may have a potential long-term impact on increasing cogongrass drought resistance, ultimately, future invasion might be severe due to the plant-microbe interaction. These findings are important because current modeling practice, lacking comprehensive consideration of the plant-microbe interaction, could lead to a significant underestimate of predictions of future invasion patterns.

The impacts of sea level rise on ecosystems and natural resources are a major concern in Florida, especially in low-lying coastal areas such as south Florida. Sea level rise can impact many aspects of Florida’s economy, including urban development, agriculture, infrastructure, and natural areas. This 16-page document introduces, evaluates, and summarizes selected available online sources and tools to educate diverse stakeholders and concerned local residents on important aspects of sea level rise. Written by Young Gu Her, Ashley Smyth, Jiangxiao Qiu, Elias Bassil, Ulrich Stingl, and Laura Reynolds, and published by the UF/IFAS Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, June 2020.

Understanding how to scale up effects of biological diversity on ecosystem functioning and services remains challenging. There is a general consensus that biodiversity loss alters ecosystem processes underpinning the goods and services upon which humanity depends. Yet most of that consensus stems from experiments performed at small spatial scales for short time frames, which limits transferability of conclusions to longer-term, landscape-scale conservation policies and management. Here we develop quantitative scaling relationships linking 374 experiments that tested plant diversity effects on biomass production across a range of scales. We show that biodiversity effects increase by factors of 1.68 and 1.10 for each 10-fold increase in experiment temporal and spatial scales, respectively. Contrary to prior studies, our analyses suggest that the time scale of experiments, rather than their spatial scale, is the primary source of variation in biodiversity effects. But consistent with earlier research, our analyses reveal that complementarity effects, rather than selection effects, drive the positive space-time interactions for plant diversity effects. Importantly, we also demonstrate complex space-time interactions and nonlinear responses that emphasize how simple extrapolations from small-scale experiments are likely to underestimate biodiversity effects in real-world ecosystems. Quantitative scaling relationships from this research are a crucial step towards bridging controlled experiments that identify biological mechanisms across a range of scales. Predictions from scaling relationships like these could then be compared with observations for fine-tuning the relationships and ultimately improving their capacities to predict consequences of biodiversity loss for ecosystem functioning and services over longer time frames across real-world landscapes.

The Food-Energy-Water (FEW) nexus for urban sustainability needs to be analyzed via an integrative rather than a sectoral or silo approach, reflecting the ongoing transition from separate infrastructure systems to an integrated social-ecological-infrastructure system. As technology hubs can provide food, energy, water resources via decentralized and/or centralized facilities, there is an acute need to optimize FEW infrastructures by considering cost-benefit-risk tradeoffs with respect to multiple sustainability indicators. This paper identifies, categorizes, and analyzes global trends with respect to contemporary FEW technology metrics that highlights the possible optimal integration of a broad spectrum of technology hubs for possible cost-benefit-risk tradeoffs. The challenges related to multiscale and multiagent modeling processes for the simulation of urban FEW systems were discussed with respect to the aspects of scaling-up, optimization process, and risk assessment. Our review reveals that this field is growing at a rapid pace and the previous selection of analytical methodologies, nexus criteria, and sustainability indicators largely depended on individual FEW nexus conditions disparately, and full-scale cost-benefit-risk tradeoffs were very rare. Therefore, the potential full-scale technology integration in three ongoing cases of urban FEW systems in Miami (the United States), Marseille (France), and Amsterdam (the Netherlands) were demonstrated in due purpose finally.

Rising inequalities and accelerating global environmental change pose two of the most pressing challenges of the twenty-first century. To explore how these phenomena are linked, we apply a social-ecological systems perspective and review the literature to identify six different types of interactions (or “pathways”) between inequality and the biosphere. We find that most of the research so far has only considered one-directional effects of inequality on the biosphere, or vice versa. However, given the potential for complex dynamics between socioeconomic and environmental factors within social-ecological systems, we highlight examples from the literature that illustrate the importance of cross-scale interactions and feedback loops between inequality and the biosphere. This review draws on diverse disciplines to advance a systemic understanding of the linkages between inequality and the biosphere, specifically recognizing cross-scale feedbacks and the multidimensional nature of inequality.

Understanding the combined and separate effects of climate and land use change on the water cycle is necessary to mitigate negative impacts. However, existing methodologies typically divide data into discrete (before and after) periods, implicitly representing climate and land use as step changes when in reality these changes are often gradual. Here, we introduce a new regression-based methodological framework designed to separate climate and land use effects on any hydrological flux of interest continuously through time, and estimate uncertainty in the contribution of these two drivers. We present two applications in the Yahara River Watershed (Wisconsin, USA) demonstrating how our approach can be used to understand synergistic or antagonistic relationships between land use and climate in either the past or the future: (1) historical streamflow, baseflow, and quickflow in an urbanizing subwatershed; and (2) simulated future evapotranspiration, drainage, and direct runoff from a suite of contrasting climate and land use scenarios for the entire watershed. In the historical analysis, we show that ∼60% of recent streamflow changes can be attributed to climate, with approximately equal contributions from quickflow and baseflow. However, our continuous method reveals that baseflow is significantly increasing through time, primarily due to land use change and potentially influenced by long-term increases in groundwater storage. In the simulation of future changes, we show that all components of the future water balance will respond more strongly to changes in climate than land use, with the largest potential land use effects on drainage. These results indicate that diverse land use change trajectories may counteract each other while the effects of climate are more homogeneous at watershed scales. Therefore, management opportunities to counteract climate change effects will likely be more effective at smaller spatial scales, where land use trajectories are unidirectional.

Municipal water providers increasingly respond to drought by implementing outdoor water use restrictions to reduce urban water withdrawals and maintain water availability. However, restricting urban outdoor water use to support watershed-scale drought resilience may generate unanticipated cross-scale interactions, for example, by altering drought response and recovery in urban vegetation or urban streamflow. Despite this, urban water conservation is rarely conceptualized or modeled as endogenous to the water cycle. Here, we investigate cross-scale interactions among urban water conservation and water availability, water use, and sociohydrological response in Austin, TX (USA) during a recent anthropogenic (human-influenced) drought. Multi-scalar statistical analyses demonstrated that outdoor water conservation for reservoir management at the municipal scale produced responses that can cascade both ‘upwards' from the city to the watershed (e.g., decoupling streamflow patterns upstream and downstream of Austin at the watershed scale) and ‘downwards' to exert heterogeneous effects within the city (e.g., redistributing water along a socioeconomic gradient at sub-municipal scales, with effects on terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems). We suggest that adapting to anthropogenic drought through irrigation curtailment requires sustained engagement between hydrology and social sciences to integrate socioeconomic status and political feedbacks within and among irrigator groups into the water cycle. Findings from this cross-disciplinary study highlight the importance of a multi-scalar and spatially-explicit perspectives in urban sociohydrology research to uncover how water conservation as adaptation to anthropogenic drought links hydrological processes with issues of socioeconomic inequality and spatiotemporal scale in the Anthropocene.

Sustainability challenges for nature and people are complex and interconnected, such that effective solutions require approaches and a common theory of change that bridge disparate disciplines and sectors. Causal chains offer promising approaches to achieving an integrated understanding of how actions affect ecosystems, the goods and services they provide, and ultimately, human well-being. Although causal chains and their variants are common tools across disciplines, their use remains highly inconsistent, limiting their ability to support and create a shared evidence base for joint actions. In this article, we present the foundational concepts and guidance of causal chains linking disciplines and sectors that do not often intersect to elucidate the effects of actions on ecosystems and society. We further discuss considerations for establishing and implementing causal chains, including nonlinearity, trade-offs and synergies, heterogeneity, scale, and confounding factors. Finally, we highlight the science, practice, and policy implications of causal chains to address real-world linked human–nature challenges.

Urbanization is occurring at a dramatic rate, driving numerous unfavorable environmental effects. Urban designed ecosystems have been used to mitigate these impacts through the provisioning of ecosystem services. These services may be enhanced by manipulating the plant community composition and structure of designed ecosystems. Here we test this possibility by determining the degree to which plant diversity and structure in ornamental gardens are related to the ecosystem service of pest resistance, as inferred by the taxonomic richness (at the family level) and abundance of arthropod pests that harm plants and arthropod natural enemies that feed on pests. To do so, we quantified plant diversity and structure and collected arthropod pests and natural enemies in the winter and summer from 13 ornamental gardens nested within four residential communities in north-central Florida, United States. Pest abundance decreased exponentially as vegetation clumping and volume increased, but only in winter when pests were most abundant. Natural enemy abundance and family richness increased with the number of plant species present and spatial variability in plant species composition, again in the winter, but not summer. These relationships were likely driven by the direct effects of vegetation on arthropod habitat and not its indirect effects on temperature. Our results demonstrate the potential to enhance pest resistance in ornamental gardens by manipulating vegetation and reveal the need to expand these investigations into other designer ecosystems to enhance the ecosystem services they provide in urban landscapes.

Human demands for ecosystem services (ES) have tremendously changed the landscape and led to degradation of ecosystems and associated services. The resolving of current eco-environmental problems calls for better understanding of the spatially explicit ES interactions to guide targeted land-use policy-making. We propose a framework to map ES in continuous time-series, based on which we further quantify interactions among multiple ES. The supply of three key ES—soil conservation (SC), net primary production (NPP) and water yield (WY)—were quantified and mapped at fine-resolution from 2000 to 2013 using easily-accessible spatial data. Pairwise ES interactions were quantified using a spatio-temporal statistical method. Spatio-temporal analyses of ES dynamics illustrated that the supply of the three ES increased over the past 14 years in northern Shaanxi, where land cover dramatically changed owing to the wide-range ecological restoration projects. Our results also revealed that ES interactions varied across locations due to landscape heterogeneity and climate difference. In the arid and semi-arid area, synergies among ES (e.g., SC vs. WY) tended to dominate in grassland, while in artificial lands ES were prone to show trade-offs. In the semi-humid area, pairwise ES (e.g., NPP vs. WY) in woodland tended to present synergies. The spatio-temporal variation of ES and their interactions resulted from coupling effect of human-induced climate and land-use change. In the long-term, spatially explicit quantification of ES interactions can help identify spatial heterogeneity in ES trade-offs and synergies, and inform regional targeted land-use policy adjustment and sustainable ecosystem management.

Evidence-based approaches to sustainability challenges must draw on knowledge from the environment, development and health communities. To be practicable, this requires an approach to evidence that is broader and less hierarchical than the standards often applied within disciplines.

Eutrophication of freshwaters occurs in watersheds with excessive pollution of phosphorus (P). Factors that affect P cycling and transport, including climate and land use, are changing rapidly and can have legacy effects, making future freshwater quality uncertain. Focusing on the Yahara Watershed (YW) of southern Wisconsin, USA, an intensive agricultural landscape, we explored the relative influence of land use and climate on three indicators of water quality over a span of 57 years (2014–2070). The indicators included watershed-averaged P yield from the land surface, direct drainage P loads to a lake, and average summertime lake P concentration. Using biophysical model simulations of future watershed scenarios, we found that climate exerted a stronger influence than land use on all three indicators, yet land use had an important role in influencing long term outcomes for each. Variations in P yield due to land use exceeded those due to climate in 36 of 57 years, whereas variations in load and lake total P concentration due to climate exceeded those due to land use in 54 of 57 years, and 52 of 57 years, respectively. The effect of land use was thus strongest for P yield off the landscape and attenuated in the stream and lake aquatic systems where the influence of weather variability was greater. Overall these findings underscore the dominant role of climate in driving inter-annual nutrient fluxes within the hydrologic network and suggest a challenge for land use to influence water quality within streams and lakes over timescales less than a decade. Over longer timescales, reducing applications of P throughout the watershed was an effective management strategy under all four climates investigated, even during decades with wetter conditions and more frequent extreme precipitation events.

Scenarios are increasingly used for envisioning future social-ecological changes and consequences for human well-being. One approach integrates qualitative storylines and biophysical models to explore potential futures quantitatively and maximize public engagement. However, this integration process is challenging and sometimes oversimplified. Using the Yahara Watershed (Wisconsin, USA) as a case study, we present a transparent and reproducible roadmap to develop spatiotemporally explicit biophysical inputs climate, land use/cover (LULC), and nutrients that are consistent with scenario narratives and can be linked to a process-based biophysical modeling suite to simulate long-term dynamics of a watershed and a range of ecosystem services. Our transferrable approach produces daily weather inputs by combining climate model projections and a stochastic weather generator, annual narrative-based watershed-scale LULC distributed spatially using transition rules, and annual manure and fertilizer (nitrogen and phosphorus) inputs based on current farm and livestock data that are consistent with each scenario narrative. Novel approach to determine spatiotemporally explicit biophysical model inputs.Inputs include climate, land use/land cover, and land nutrient applications.Communication between scenario narrative writers and modeling team is critical.

Globally, ecosystem services are threatened by increasing urbanization and more variable precipitation patterns driven by climate change. However, how these drivers interact over long-time scales to affect underlying processes remains poorly understood, hindering our ability to predict their long-term consequences. Here, we use long-term data spanning nearly a century to investigate changes in hydrologic attributes for two lakes in the Upper Midwest with urbanizing watersheds. We quantified flashiness—the variability of runoff rate, volume, or stage-level of waterways—to investigate the concurrent impacts of urbanization and climate change on flashiness and flooding potential. Our results indicate that flashiness generally increased for both lakes over the period of 1916–2013, although this overall trend consists of sub-periods of increase and decrease. Increasing impervious surface area has been the stronger driver of flashiness historically; however, our results suggest that the impact of urbanization may reach a threshold, such that saturation effects would cause large magnitude precipitation events to become a relatively stronger driver of flashiness. Increasing flashiness indicates an increase in flooding potential, documented by increases in the 10- and 100-year flood threshold levels as large as 30 cm. Since flashiness is strongly related to the provisioning of multiple ecosystem services, the methodology and results presented here provide a unique approach to gain insight into how non-linear interactions between global change drivers, at multiple time scales, impact the simultaneous provision of multiple services.

Effects of invasive European earthworms in North America have been well documented, but less is known about ecological consequences of exotic Asian earthworm invasion, in particular Asian jumping worms (Amynthas) that are increasingly reported. Most earthworm invasion research has focused on forests; some Amynthas spp. are native to Asian grasslands and may thrive in prairies with unknown effects. We conducted an earthworm-addition mesocosm experiment with before–after control-impact (BACI) design and a complementary field study in southern Wisconsin, USA, in 2014 to investigate effects of a newly discovered invasion of two Asian jumping worms (Amynthas agrestis and Amynthas tokioensis) on forest and prairie litter and soil nutrient pools. In both studies, A. agrestis and A. tokioensis substantially reduced surface litter (84–95 % decline in foliage litter mass) and increased total carbon, total nitrogen, and available phosphorus in the upper 0–5 cm of soils over the 4-month period from July through October. Soil inorganic nitrogen (ammonium– and nitrate–N) concentration increased across soil depths of 0–25 cm, with greater effects on nitrate–N. Dissolved organic carbon concentration also increased, e.g., 71–108 % increase in the mesocosm experiment. Effects were observed in both forest and prairie soils, with stronger effects in forests. Effects were most pronounced late in the growing season when earthworm biomass likely peaked. Depletion of the litter layer and rapid mineralization of nutrients by non-native Asian jumping worms may make ecosystems more susceptible to nutrient losses, and effects may cascade to understory herbs and other soil biota.

Sustaining hydrologic ecosystem services is critical for human wellbeing but challenged by land use for agriculture and urban development. Water policy and management strive to safeguard hydrologic services, yet implementation is often fragmented. Understanding the spatial fit between water polices and hydrologic services is needed to assess the spatial targeting of policy portfolios at landscape scales. We investigated spatial fit between 30 different public water policies and four hydrologic services (surface and groundwater quality, freshwater supply, and flood regulation) in the Yahara Watershed (Wisconsin, USA)—a Midwestern landscape that typifies tensions between agriculture, urban development, and freshwater resources. Spatial extent of water policy implementation was mapped, and indicators of hydrologic services were quantified for subwatersheds using empirical estimates and validated spatial models. We found a spatial misfit between the overall spatial implementation of water policy and regions of water quality concern, indicating a need for better targeting. Water quality policies can also be leveraged to protect other hydrologic services such as freshwater supply and flood regulation. Individual policy application areas varied substantially in their spatial congruence with each hydrologic service, indicating that not all services are protected by a single policy and highlighting the need for a broad spectrum of policies to sustain hydrologic services in diverse landscapes. We also identified where future policies could be targeted for improving hydrologic services. Joint spatial analysis of policies and ecosystem services is effective for assessing spatial aspects of institutional fit, and provides a foundation for guiding future policy efforts.

Understanding the factors driving the variation in urban green space and plant communities in heterogeneous urban landscapes is crucial for maintaining biodiversity and important ecosystem services. In this study, we used a combination of field surveys, remote sensing, census data and spatial analysis to investigate the interrelationships among geographical and social-economic variables across 328 different urban structural units (USUs) and how they may influence the distributions of urban forest cover, plant diversity and abundance, within the central urban area of Beijing, China. We found that the urban green space coverage varied substantially across different types of USUs, with higher in agricultural lands (N = 15), parks (N = 46) and lowest in utility zones (N = 36). The amount of urban green space within USUs declines exponentially with the distance to urban center. Our study suggested that geographical, social and economic factors were closely related with each other in urban ecological systems, and have important impacts on urban forest coverage and abundance. The percentage of forest as well as high and low density urban areas were mainly responsible for variations in the data across all USUs and all land use/land cover types, and thus are important constituents and ecological indicators for understanding and modeling urban environment. Herb richness is more strongly correlated with tree and shrub density than with tree and shrub richness (r = −0.472, p

Understanding public perceptions of the importance of ecosystem services (ES) is crucial for the development and communication of sustainable management and policies. Yet public perspectives on ES and their sociocultural and geographic patterns are not well understood. This study asks: Which ES are perceived as more or less important by the general public?; Which ES are considered most similar when the public are asked to evaluate the importance of specific water, agricultural and natural resources ES?; And, what individual and geographic factors are associated with perceived importance of different ES? We conducted a survey of residents in an urban and agricultural watershed in the U.S. Upper Midwest (n = 1136). This study asked respondents about a wider range of ES than is typical, and examines how ecological worldviews influence the perceived importance of ES. Respondents rated regional provision of drinking and surface water quality, clean lakes and rivers for wildlife, and a reliable supply of drinking and surface water most important. Those with a stronger ecological worldview tended to rate natural areas and processes as more important and agricultural products as less important than respondents with a more anthropocentric worldview. Perceived importance of various ES was also predicted by other individual-level factors relating to livelihood, outdoor recreation, and proximity to lakes, forests and agriculture. For example, respondents with livelihoods dependent on agriculture rated agricultural products and rural character highly. These findings bolster the case for more context-specific assessments of public importance ratings for environmental benefits to inform planning and management.

As one of the most dominant ecosystems of urban green space, turfgrasses provide a wide range of ecosystem services. However, little is known about the interactions of microbial communities in turfgrass soils and how these interactions respond to expanding development of impervious surfaces during watershed urbanization. In this study, we analyzed bacterial communities and their co-occurrence patterns in turfgrass soils along an urbanization gradient as measured by the proportion of impervious surfaces in Jiulong River watershed in Fujian, China. Results show that the diversity and network size of bacterial communities negatively associated with impervious surfaces. The bacterial communities showed non-random co-occurrence patterns, with more intra-module connections observed for urbanized networks. The co-occurrence network with distinct modules of soil samples with contrasting land cover imperviousness suggested different functional organizations with altered microbial nitrogen processes. Structural equation modelling revealed that watershed impervious surfaces had indirect impacts on microbial connectivity by altering soil properties, including pH, temperature, moisture, C/N and nitrate (NO3-). Moreover, impervious surfaces affected microbial connectivity far more than human population density. Our study highlights the significance of human disturbances in affecting microbial interactions and assemblies in turfgrass ecosystems through impervious surfaces and provides benefits for sustainable urban planning and management at a watershed scale.