ALBERT

Beschreibung: People have long been interested in the history of weather, particularly extremes, and chronologies of past events drawing on information from written records have been compiled and published throughout history. In recent years, concern over current and future weather and climate has triggered a new level of interest in past weather events and their impacts. This interest, alongside the development of digital humanities research methods, has resulted in a rapid growth in the number of online databases relating to historic weather and climate around the world. This paper documents the design, creation and content of one such database, TEMPEST, an online repository for extreme weather history in the UK. TEMPEST has been created as the major output of the AHRC funded project ‘Spaces of Experience and Horizons of Expectation: The Implications of Extreme Weather in the UK, Past, Present and Future’ (2013-2017). Unlike the majority of existing databases that rely on published materials, TEMPEST's records are drawn from primary research into original documentary sources held in archives around the UK. The c. 18,000 records that TEMPEST currently contains offer personalised and geo-referenced insights into the relationship between society and extreme weather in the UK spanning a period of over 400 years. In this paper we outline potential applications for TEMPEST and suggest directions for future research and resources in historical weather. We also consider broader issues for the digital humanities relating to the storage, archiving, ownership, and usage of data and the need to ensure connectivity between complementary datasets. After briefly reviewing existing historical weather and climate databases, this paper documents the design, creation and content of the TEMPEST database, an online repository for extreme weather history in the UK. We outline potential applications for TEMPEST and suggest directions for future research and resources exploring historical weather. We also consider broader issues for the digital humanities. e00039

Beschreibung: The main purpose of this paper is to develop a new method for visualizing knowledge production which is attentive to the multiple elements embedded in research processes. In particular, we seek to problematise the representation of scholarship indicators by depicting theoretical contributions and field sites along a spectrum, rather than as discrete points, recursively and relationally constituted. The primary aim of our visualisations is to capture text and context, and codified and tacit knowledge. First, we offer a conventional representation of the location of selected dominant critical theories in Geography, arguing that current methods reinforce ‘lopsided’ geographies of knowledge production. Normative practices of data visualisation and representation captured in our two examples privilege certain elements centred on authorship and tend to silence the contexts informing research. Second, we borrow the term and method of chromatography, a tool used in the natural sciences but here conceived in its more literal sense of ‘writing the separations’. Our ‘chromatographical’ representations attempt to unbundle components currently absorbed by formal indicators of knowledge production. Such counter mappings attempt to convey the relational aspect of research between countries imbricated in the propagation of exemplary critical geographic theories. We conclude with a discussion of the implications that the disaggregation of value has for scholars and their research. A central objective in this paper is to develop a new method for visualizing knowledge production. Our argument is that current methods obscure the multiple processes involved in academic research production. We illustrate this through a conventional mapping of two critical geography theories and offer a way to unbundle components currently absorbed in formal indicators through the development of ‘chromatographical’ representations. e00038

Beschreibung: The size-at-age of one million Brevoortia tyrannus and B. patronus, harvested from Maine to Texas over 65 years, were analysed to determine if there was evidence of changes consistent with the well documented temperature size rules. The average annual weight and length for age 3-, 4- and 5-year-old fish declined on both the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico (GOM) coasts. For example, the average size of a 4-year-old fish captured in 2010 from the Atlantic and GOM, relative to an average 4-year-old fish captured in 1987, is 15 per cent and 11 per cent lighter, respectively. Small changes in the year-to-year size of same-aged fish were closely related to variations in the annual air temperature (used as a proxy for water temperature) for fish on both coasts. The size-at-age of GOM fish are also smaller during overfished periods compared with underfished periods by 10–24 per cent, and decrease by about the same proportion as indicated by temperature changes. The most plausible explanation for these size changes is that they are a consequence of recent coastal and oceanic warming. These reductions in size-at-age by temperature and fishing pressure affect egg production, oil yield and prey community for one-half of the US Atlantic and GOM fish harvest. The future of menhaden fish size-at-age will be, it seems, smaller as oceanic temperatures rise. The size of menhaden, a commercially-fished species on the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coasts (half of the fisheries harvest) is declining. A warming coastal environment is the plausible cause, with additional shrinkage from fishing pressure. e00044

Beschreibung: To understand how the benefits of outdoor physical activity in urban green spaces are transferred to human populations, consideration must be given to when people are using them, what they are using them for and what factors may affect the use of space. This paper critically evaluates the use of crowdsourced Twitter data in an assessment of physical activity engagement in urban green spaces in an attempt to investigate the potential of these data in investigating urban socio-ecological interactions. A case study is presented in which Twitter data are used to assess the variance of physical activity engagement between two seasons (summer and winter). A number of factors including meteorology, park characteristics and amenities, and the role of organised sports events are explored in order to explain the observed findings. Understanding how physical activity engagement in urban green space varies seasonally is important in ensuring policy interventions to increase physical activity are targeted most effectively. Urban green space provides an important resource for outdoor physical activity and engagement with this behaviour has significant benefits for human health and well-being. Understanding variance in engagement with this behaviour is of importance to urban policy makers and enables the development of the most effective initiatives. This paper demonstrates and critically evaluates the use of crowdsourced Twitter data in investigating seasonal variation of physical activity in urban green spaces and examines a number of factors in order to explain the seasonal variation identified. e00041

Beschreibung: El Niño denotes a periodical warm water stream in the Pacific Ocean. But who knew about this phenomenon, where and how? El Niño ‘the boy’ emerged as a fabric of local experiences and stories of extreme weather events: tropical winter storms, floods, droughts and famines in the coastal states of South America, Indonesia and Southeast Asia. In the Northern Hemisphere this rich cultural history went largely unnoticed. Only in the 1980s and 1990s did El Niño acquire global recognition as an effect of the oceanic and atmospheric currents in the tropical Pacific region. As the oceans moved from a marginal to a central position in the discourse on the Earth's climate cycles, ENSO – the ‘El Niño Southern Oscillation’ – became part of a global climate pattern. This paper explores El Niño ‘the boy’ and ENSO El Niño Southern Oscillation as juxtaposed and superposed environmental perceptions. While El Niño the boy conveyed horrific weather experiences on the human scale, ENSO became known through terrific scientific views of Earth from space. Earth observation by remote sensing satellites collected vast arrays of local measurements into new data fabrics. Studying the case of the US–French orbital satellite mission of TOPEX/Poseidon, this paper examines both the imagery from satellite data and the forecasting efforts preceding the strong El Niño winter of 1997–8. From the data and image sets of remote sensing satellites, recurring local disruptions emerged as a periodic global climate condition. Local experiences of El Niño and scientific perceptions of ENSO as a global climate cycle did not translate easily into each other. The paper discusses some of the epistemological tensions across spatial scales. While El Niño's shift from exception to regularity fed into the framing of ‘climate change’ as a global disaster, the emerging ENSO regime obscured disaster locally. This paper explores El Niño the boy and ENSO, the El Niño Southern Oscillation as juxtaposed environmental experiences. While El Niño the boy has been connected to catastrophic weather experiences on the human scale, ENSO became known through satellite views of earth from space. From the data and image sets of remote sensing satellites, recurring local weather disruptions emerged as a periodic global climate condition. e00034

Beschreibung: This paper provides an account of the environmental history of a landlocked coastal wetland and the surrounding nature space (Lake Claremont) located within a large Australian city (Perth, Western Australia). We document the processes and behaviour that led to significant negative change over time and report on recent work to restore the lake and its surrounding ecosystem. The reported community-initiated actions reflect changing human values and add to the accumulating evidence that the increasing trend of restoring greenspace to native ecosystems (nature space) brings about social and conservation benefits within the urban fabric. Moreover, this narrative also indicates that significant progress can be made in recovering and expanding ecological components and natural values within a relatively short period. Implications for city planners and land managers are self-evident with regard to what can be achieved and the values that communities now place on naturally functioning urban wetlands. Furthermore, the presence of wetlands such as Lake Claremont in the urban fabric is seen to enhance the liveability of the surrounding city by offering a convenient way for residents and tourists to connect with nature and the outdoors and realise the health benefits that the lake can provide. This case study adds to the body of work that identifies and describes the growing importance of urban wetlands in urban landscapes and provides a clear example of what can be achieved at the local community level and with local government support. We report on the environmental degradation and restoration history of Lake Claremont, Western Australia. The reported community-initiated actions reflect changing human values and add to the accumulating evidence that the increasing trend of restoring natural greenspace brings about social and conservation benefits within city environments. Moreover, this narrative also indicates that significant progress can be made in recovering and expanding ecological components and natural values of a degraded wetland within a relatively short period of time. e00030

Beschreibung: Over the past decade, the green economy has emerged as an important policy framework for sustainable development in both developed and developing countries. It presents an attractive framework to deliver more resource efficient, lower carbon, less environmentally damaging, more socially inclusive societies. There are tensions between competing green economy discourses and a number of different definitions exist, all of which have major shortcomings. This is further complicated by the different underlying concepts of the ‘weak’, ‘transformational’ and ‘strong’ green economy. Several important definitions focus on the aspirational ‘transformational green economy’. To enable and to track this ‘transformation’, economic and environmental measurement is essential. Current approaches are still in development, lack available data or show inconsistencies with proposed definitions, and thus may neither support effective decision-making nor efforts to transform economies. This review identifies these current shortcomings and makes four overarching recommendations for improving measurement for green economy transformations, including cheaper, faster and more widely available data, and broader frameworks for measuring economy–society–environment interactions. We suggest that proper measurement of the green economy needs to move beyond GDP as the central measure of progress and to better track the ‘transformational green economy’. This will enable the green economy to become relevant again at national and international levels, given the emerging Sustainable Development Goals and post-COP 21 frameworks. The green economy has emerged as an important policy framework for sustainable development, but tensions and shortcomings exist within green economy discourses and definitions. For a green economy ‘transformation’, economic and environmental measurement is essential; current approaches are still in development, lack available data or show inconsistencies with proposed definitions. This review identifies these current shortcomings and makes four recommendations for improving measurement of green economy transformation, to enable the green economy to become relevant again under the emerging Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and post-COP 21 framework.

Beschreibung: This special issue on the visual cultures of global environmental issues proposes innovative research directions by introducing new methodological frameworks and profoundly rethinking the crucial role of the visual in environmental research. The five papers gathered here were written by researchers coming from various disciplinary and cultural backgrounds, thus helping bridge the divides between different disciplinary traditions. Each essay examines the notion of the ‘global environment’, and of ‘global environmental images’ in particular, from a different theoretical perspective. From these emerge shared concerns about underlying aesthetics and politics, and reflections on the tensions that arise when visualising the environment, especially when objects and theories are at a global scale. In this introduction, I reflect upon two aspects across the five papers exploring tensions between the ‘local’ and the ‘global’, as well as the politics of images within global environmental research. Considered as an ensemble , this special issue calls for sustained interdisciplinary inquiry into global environmental images, paying close attention to the nature of this new type of global knowledge, the imaginaries mobilised, as well as the politics, power struggles, asymmetries and marginalisation processes which are inevitably involved when talking about the global environment.

Beschreibung: Several biogeographic studies of salamanders have described relationships between salamander body size and climate. We specifically selected Plethodon cinereus as a widely distributed species that was well represented in museum collections to investigate the effects of warming climate on adult body size. We found a positive correlation between mean maximum July temperature and body size, and a negative correlation between precipitation of the driest month and body size. Surface-collected adult P. cinereus were 2.3% larger in warmer counties on the coastal plain compared with cooler counties in the Appalachian Mountains. We compared salamanders collected between 1950 and 1970 versus those collected between 1980 and 2000 and found that body size increased 1.8% in counties on the coastal plain where mean maximum July temperatures had also increased by 0.5–1.2 °C. Warming temperatures alone, however, did not adequately account for the observed size increases, because body size also increased 1.3% in places that experienced less than 0.25 °C warming, but that difference was not statistically significant. We compared adult redback salamander body sizes using extensive museums collections and found that salamanders were larger with warmer, drier conditions. These effects were most pronounced on the coastal plain compared to counties in the central Appalachians. e00031

Beschreibung: No abstract is available for this article.

Beschreibung: Interdisciplinary research with geographic information systems (GIS) can be rewarding as researchers from different disciplines have the opportunity to create something novel. GIS, though, is known to be difficult to use and learn. It is imperative for its successful use in projects that those who need to use GIS are able to learn it quickly and easily. To better support interdisciplinary research with GIS, it is necessary to understand what researchers with interdisciplinary experience wanted to use it for and how they learned it. The aim would be to advise geography educators on creating learning resources that could compliment or supplement existing learning approaches used by interdisciplinary researchers to improve the learning experience and uptake of GIS. This article explores the results from an online survey and interviews conducted between July 2014 and August 2015 with participants from the UK, the US and Europe on how interdisciplinary researchers learned GIS and which resources and platforms were utilised. Guidelines and a framework are presented, modifying the Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge framework, incorporating informal and context-based learning and GIS concepts from the Geographic Information Science and Technology Body of Knowledge. Findings show that interdisciplinary researchers want to use GIS to capture, analyse and visualise information; they largely use informal learning approaches (e.g. internet searches, watching a video, ask a more experienced person); and they predominantly use ArcGIS, QGIS and web GIS platforms. Future work suggests resources use contextually relevant learning activities and bear in mind nuances of disciplinary language. Geography is quite complimentary to interdisciplinary research as is one of its most powerful tools - geographic information systems (GIS); however, such systems are known to be difficult to use. To better support interdisciplinary research initiatives that use GIS, it is first necessary to understand how those involved in previous similar projects have gone about learning GIS. Based on those findings, the article outlines a framework and guidelines, reinforced by educational theory and GIS curriculum, on how to support interdisciplinary researchers when they are learning GIS. e00046

Beschreibung: This article applies socio-technical transitions theory (STTT), with the aim of identifying how the barriers and opportunities that exist to implementing sustainable building are socio-spatially embedded at a residential scale in Sydney, NSW. This is done through a series of semi-structured interviews conducted with a range of professionals in relevant industries. The research concludes that barriers and opportunities to sustainable residential buildings in Sydney exist within a landscape context of housing provision in developed countries. However, the conceptual application of these barriers to Sydney, through the multi-level perspective of STTT with a geographical conceptualisation of the socio-spatial embeddedness of transitions, highlights the necessity of working within the Sydney and NSW context to facilitate genuine and meaningful transitions. Furthermore, a key finding of this article was the necessity of including socio-economic factors in a STTT analysis in order to transition to a residential built environment which is both sustainable and affordable.

Beschreibung: Design of the built environment for navigability and walkability is an increasingly important aspect of urban planning. This focus derives in part from increasing interest in lifestyles and behaviours, including level of physical activity and health outcomes. Geographical information systems and virtual realities are playing a significant role in advancing this agenda: examples exist of integrating qualitative data (words about or visual images of places) and quantitative data (numerical descriptions of places). However, there remain opportunities for exploring alternative ways of linking different types of data (physiological measurements, emotional response, street walkability and urban design quality) to address issues of urban planning and renewal. Using a case study approach this paper explores the application of geographic information science and systems to participatory approaches in built environment planning with the aim of exploring older people's response to an unfamiliar urban environment. It examines different ways of combining temporally and spatial referenced qualitative and quantitative data. The participants in the study were a group of 44 older people (60+) from Swansea, Wales, who viewed a filmed walking route around Colchester, England. While viewing the film they gave an oral commentary and physiological readings were made, which have been integrated with primary data collected on the built environment along the walking route. Proximity and inverse distance weighting approaches for combining these datasets produce complementary results in respect of older people's physiological and emotive response to variation in the walkability and design quality of a walking route through an unfamiliar town centre. The results reveal participants experienced an elevated average heart rate close to Colchester Town railway station and expressed a comparatively negative emotional response to this location. Conversely participants experienced lower average heart rate, indicating reduced stress, in Brook Street where the overall Urban Design Quality score was relatively low. This article shows the results of combining walkability and urban design audit data with physiological measures and coded oral narratives in order to provide a holistic assessment of unfamiliar urban environments by older people. It uses spatial analysis techniques to identify and visualise hot and cold spots around a circular walking route. e00037

Beschreibung: Brazil is home to the largest tracts of tropical vegetation in the world, harbouring high levels of biodiversity and carbon. Several biomass maps have been produced for Brazil, using different approaches and methods, and for different purposes. These maps have been used to estimate historic, recent, and future carbon emissions from land use change (LUC). It can be difficult to determine which map to use for what purpose. The implications of using an unsuitable map can be significant, since the maps have large differences, both in terms of total carbon storage and its spatial distribution. This paper presents comparisons of Brazil's new ‘official’ carbon map; that is, the map used in the third national communication to the UNFCCC in 2016, with the former official map, and four carbon maps from the scientific literature. General strengths and weaknesses of the different maps are identified, including their suitability for different types of studies. No carbon map was found suitable for studies concerned with existing land use/cover (LULC) and LUC outside of existing forests, partly because they do not represent the current LULC sufficiently well, and partly because they generally overestimate carbon values for agricultural land. A new map of aboveground carbon is presented, which was created based on data from existing maps and an up-to-date LULC map. This new map reflects current LULC, has high accuracy and resolution (50 m), and a national coverage. It can be a useful alternative for scientific studies and policy initiatives concerned with existing LULC and LUC outside of existing forests, especially at local scales when high resolution is necessary, and/or outside the Amazon biome. We identify five ongoing climate policy initiatives in Brazil that can benefit from using this map. Carbon maps are essential for estimating historic, current, or future carbon emissions from land use, land use change and forestry–for scientific studies as well as annual national communication to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The use of maps with poor accuracy–or maps developed for other purposes, regardless of accuracy–can lead to misleading results, which in turn can lead to decisions that have unintended consequences, e.g., unrealised greenhouse gas emissions reduction. This paper evaluates existing carbon maps for Brazil–home of the largest tracts of tropical vegetation in the world–including the new “official” carbon map used for the third national communication to the UNFCCC, and combines carbon map data with detailed land use/cover data to construct a new high-resolution map of aboveground carbon with national coverage. e00045

Beschreibung: No abstract is available for this article.

Beschreibung: Global environmental images have become part of our everyday life experience. We encounter them in news reports, scientific articles and artistic interventions. Yet so far, only the most iconic of these images have received close critical attention from scholars coming mostly from two related fields, science studies and cultural geography. Some of those studies, as for instance research carried out on the famous Apollo photographs, have revealed that the icons of our environmental age do not provide simple readings, that they carry multiple, often contradicting messages, and that they can be vectors of highly ambiguous and even conflicting political beliefs. However, historically informed interdisciplinary research on visual cultures from an environmental perspective is still at its beginning. This essay thus calls for a systematic exploration of the crucial role the visual plays in the creation, circulation, interpretation and adaptation of global environmental knowledge. It is argued that this inquiry cannot be left solely to historians or geographers but calls for a truly interdisciplinary engagement. One central claim is that we need to better understand the constitutive role the visual and associated knowledge practices, conventions and infrastructures play in mediating global environmental phenomena. One possibility, it is argued, is to develop a broader historical framework for understanding how the visual actively shaped scientific and environmental discourse, and how it stimulated the rise of holistic and dynamic understandings of the environment from the nineteenth century onwards. A second important research area that is suggested concerns the crucial role global environmental images play at the interface of science discourse and environmental policy and governance. The essay concludes by suggesting three basic theses which seem particularly promising for future interdisciplinary inquiries into global environmental images. The paper calls for a historically informed interdisciplinary inquiry into global environmental images. e00020

Beschreibung: A growing body of work has explored the effects of visual imagery on shifting forms of environmental consciousness and politics. Circulating images of, for example, the ‘whole Earth’ have been ascribed agency in the emergence of new forms of planetary awareness and political globalism. This essay identifies a new form of global environmental image, in the shape of photographic montage depictions of future places transformed by the effects of climate change. Montage enables artists and designers to import the spatial formations of distant places into more familiar locations, in the process producing novel renderings of the interconnections of global environmental change. The future-conditional – ‘if x, then y’ – has become a key register of scientific and artistic engagement with climate change, and practices of visual montage have offered means of reconciling the transformations of space and time in the imagination of putative futures. The essay situates such images within a longer lineage of depictions of the tropical and the ruined, and focuses on contemporary montage depictions of climate-change-induced migration. It argues that many of these ‘global montages’ problematically reinforce extant notions of geographical otherness. Yet montage, as a technique, also renders visible the choices, cuts, juxtapositions and arguments which lie behind any representation, thus offering the seed of a more reflexive mode of future-conditional image-making. This article explores photomontage depictions of future cities under climate change as a novel form of global environmental image. Montages assemble new viewpoints through the juxtaposition of photographic fragments from diverse spaces, in a fashion which can reify conceptions of geographical otherness, but which also contains the seed of a more reflexive mode of future-conditional image-making. Montage makes the choices which underpin any image an object of representation itself, and therefore has a radical potential which is yet to be fully realised in imagings of climatic futures. e00019

Beschreibung: The contemporary tea industry in China is associated with high tea production and high nitrous oxide (N 2 O) emissions, due to the application of large quantities of nitrogen (N) fertilisers, and the intrinsic characteristics of tea field soils. In total, the Chinese tea plantations may have emitted 40.9 Gg N year –1 of N 2 O for 2013, accounting for 85% of emissions from global tea plantations. Such emissions are significant, unneglectable and need to be incorporated into the national greenhouse gas inventory. The current average N 2 O emission rate and emission intensity of tea plantations in China are as high as 16.6 kg N 2 O-N ha –1 year –1 and 21.3 g N 2 O-N per kg tea production (several times greater than in other croplands), respectively, severely damaging the ‘green’ signature of Chinese green teas. To reduce the risk of a sudden collapse of the currently booming tea industry, due to the dramatic decline of economic profit in the event of an agricultural carbon tax scheme being implemented in the near future, investigations of the mechanisms for the high rate of N 2 O emissions and the effective N 2 O mitigation practices in tea plantations are urgently needed. Of the counties with large tea plantations, only China, India and Japan have contributed data. The measurement and research of N 2 O emissions from other large tea plantations in Africa, South and Central Asia should be alerted by this report to close the global gap of N 2 O emissions from tea plantations. This paper raised an issue on the significant contribution of Chinese contemporary tea industry to greenhouse gas emissions, which has not yet been incorporated into the current national greenhouse gas inventory. It reported that the average nitrous oxide emission rate and emission intensity of tea plantations in China are as high as 16.6 kg N ha -1 yr -1 and 21.3 g N per kg tea production, respectively, suggesting that the current Chinese tea industry is not on the right track for “green” or sustainable development, and therefore steps need to be taken to decrease its nitrous oxide emissions. e00021

Beschreibung: No abstract is available for this article.

Beschreibung: This commentary highlights problems of inequity in academic publishing in geography that arise from the increasing use of metrics as a measure of research quality. In so doing, we examine patterns in the ranking of geographical journals in the major global databases (e.g. Web of Science, Scopus) and compare these with a more inclusive database developed by the International Geographical Union. The shortcomings of ranking systems are examined and are shown to include, inter alia , linguistic bias, the lack of representation of books and chapters in books, the geographical unevenness of accredited journals, problems of multi-authorship, the mismatch between ranking and social usefulness and alternative or critical thinking, as well as differences between physical and human geography. The hegemony of the global commercial publishing houses emerges as problematic for geography in particular. It is argued that the global community of geographers should continue to challenge the use of bibliometrics as a means of assessing research quality.

Beschreibung: Interdisciplinary research between social and environmental sciences can meet difficulties when attempting to combine qualitative and quantitative field methods. Natural history, largely sidelined from professional science, may have value as a practice with elements common to the social and environmental sciences. In this commentary, I reflect on my own natural history knowledge and practice related to my primary research habitat in central Chile, and how natural history has helped me to generate interdisciplinary approaches. I propose that three key elements of natural history practice in an interdisciplinary context are observation, interpretation, and the human context of engagement with nature. Natural history practice can help to build consensual knowledge and trust within interdisciplinary teams. It can also generate novel research directions through a return to direct engagement with nature. Interdisciplinary research between social and environmental sciences can meet difficulties when attempting to combine qualitative and quantitative field methods. Natural history, largely sidelined from professional science, may have value as a practice with elements common to the social and environmental sciences. In this commentary, I reflect on my own natural history practice related to my primary research habitat in central Chile, and how it has helped me to generate interdisciplinary approaches. e00015

Beschreibung: Societies' growing global footprint is causing a rapid increase in the demand for natural resources (i.e. ecosystem services), while also reducing the capacity of ecosystems to provide them. Freshwater ecosystems contribute disproportionately to ecosystem services but are also particularly vulnerable to global environmental change. The provisioning of freshwater services, such as water and food production, is especially important in developing countries. Here, we review the evidence which demonstrates the impacts of key environmental stressors on these two important provisioning services in southern Africa. Land use change, species invasions and climate change can all be linked to a loss of the provisioning services provided by freshwater ecosystems in southern Africa. Water resources for drinking, agriculture, sanitation and power are expected to decline as a result of both climate and land use change. Fish production may be negatively or positively affected by the different stressors, highlighting the high context-dependency associated with their impacts. Evidence also suggests that these stressors can interact to alter one another's impacts or promote the proliferation of further stressors. For instance, land use change can promote aquatic plant invasions and, subsequently, the stressors may interact synergistically to cause fish kills. Stressors may also interact to mitigate one another's impact, for instance fish invasions may enhance total fish catch following a pollution event. Since stressors are unlikely to occur in isolation and multiple stressors frequently result in complex ‘ecological surprises’, it is urgent that we increase research effort on the links between multiple stressors and the loss of ecosystem services. Future research should, therefore, focus on the combined impacts of multiple environmental, social, and economic stressors on natural resources and provisioning ecosystem services in southern Africa. Freshwater ecosystem services are under threat from multiple environmental stressors. Here we review the evidence for their independent and combined impacts across southern Africa. e00026

Beschreibung: Sustainable climate change adaptation requires an understanding of people's place attachments, so that potential impacts and trade-offs are illuminated when making adaptation decisions. Methods are needed that elucidate these important, but often intangible, place attachments at risk. A study was undertaken to explore place attachment, and how these person–place bonds might be impacted by flooding and sea-level rise. It engaged with a small town in coastal Australia that is already highly vulnerable to flooding, and which has been subject to numerous policy directives intended to reduce climate change-induced flood risk. The town therefore acts as an analogue for climate change adaptation in other semi-rural coastal communities. Photo-elicitation was found to be highly effective at elucidating multifarious dimensions of residents' place attachment. The attachments that were likely to be affected by flooding (and adapting to flood risk) were encapsulated in: the personal and communal identities associated with the tourism and fishing industries, the sense of belonging from living and re-living family connections to local places, and the sense of community and enjoyment derived from diverse recreational activities. The photo-elicitation process provided different outcomes to conventional interviews, focus groups and questionnaires. Participants sought to both vision (by elucidating their current experiences) and re-envision (in advocating for different futures) their everyday experiences of adapting to flooding through their photographs and accompanying narratives. A video introduction to this paper is available at: https://vimeo.com/83484905 . We demonstrate how participants used photo-elicitation to both vision (by elucidating their current experiences) and re-envision (in advocating for different futures) their everyday experiences of adapting to flooding and sea-level rise through their photographs and accompanying narratives. We discuss what this means for carrying out climate adaptation policy and planning. e00028

Beschreibung: Climate science today makes use of a variety of red globes to explore and communicate findings. These transform the iconography which informs this image: the idealised, even mythical vision of the blue, vulnerable and perfect marble is impaired by the application of the colours yellow and red. Since only predictions that employ a lot of red seem to exist, spectators are confronted with the message that the future Earth that might turn out as envisaged here is undesirable. Here intuitively powerful narrations of the end of the world may connect. By employing methods of art history and visual analysis, and building on examples from current Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports and future scenario maps, this article explores how burning world images bear – intentionally or not – elements of horror and shock. My question explored here is as follows: should ‘burning world’ images be understood as a new and powerful cosmology? This article analyses contemporary world maps of climate change futures from a visual studies perspective, comparing the red temperature maps with the photograph of the Blue Marble with a special focus on color symbolism. The so called ‘burning world’ cartographies are understood as a current worldview based on maps and data visualisation. e00027

Beschreibung: Oceans and seas have long been considered as distinct areas, different from one another. At the end of the eighteenth century the idea began to appear (among romantic painters and poets) that they all formed a single space that would be a ‘global ocean’. Humboldt was the first scientist to take this idea seriously and to study oceans as a ‘whole’. He drew the first map (with isotherms) which could explain why oceans had to be understood as a global climatic machine. Since then the global behaviour of the ocean has become an undisputed scientific fact and many artists have produced paintings which ‘represent’ this state of knowledge. During the same period the coast lines were not considered as a global scientific object but as a discrete series of sites, all different from one another. Tourism was partly responsible for this division of coasts as each tourist place had to show it was unique and worth being visited. Many painters helped to highlight certain sites (Hudson River, Normandy, south coast of England). Then, at the end of the twentieth century some new equations dealing with sea level allowed the idea there was something like a global coastline, responding to a global climatic forcing. Few artists today tend to work with this global idea of local coasts but some of them, taking part in scientific cruises or fieldwork, do produce a new type of image for a global coastline. This paper explores how artists helped scientists to think of the ocean as a global object and, in turn, how scientists helped artists to think of coasts as a global object. e00029

Beschreibung: This paper stages a dialogue between a human geographer and a physical geographer about the concept of the Anthropocene. The aim of the dialogue is not to arrive at an agreement about how the Anthropocene should be defined, but rather to open up the question of the politics of the concept and its definition. The dialogue revolves around three issues: (1) the politics of the debate about the geoscientific definition of the Anthropocene Epoch; (2) the relation between the geoscientific debate about the Anthropocene and the burgeoning literature on the Anthropocene in the social sciences and humanities, including human geography; (3) the relation between geoscientific and political concepts.

Beschreibung: Geodemographic classifications are categorical measures representing salient multidimensional population and built environment attributes of small areas. The UK Output Area Classification (OAC) is one such classification, created on behalf of the Office for National Statistics, and was built with an open methodology and entirely from 2011 Census variables. However, one criticism of national classifications such as OAC is that they do not adequately accommodate local or regional structures that diverge from national patterns. In this paper we explore this issue with respect to Greater London. We develop a London classification based upon the OAC methodology, and explore the extent to which these patterns are divergent from the national classification.

Beschreibung: Information has always had geography. It is from somewhere; about somewhere; it evolves and is transformed somewhere; it is mediated by networks, infrastructures, and technologies: all of which exist in physical, material places. These geographies of information about places matter because they shape how we are able to find and understand different parts of the world. Places invisible or discounted in representations are invisible in practice to many people. In other words, geographic augmentations are much more than just representations of places: they are part of the place itself; they shape it rather than simply reflect it. This fusing of the spatial and informational augmentations that are immutable means that annotations of place emerge as sites of political contestation: with different groups of people trying to impose different narratives on informational augmentations. This paper therefore explores how information geographies have their own geographic distributions: geographies of access, of participation, and of representation. The paper offers a deliberately broad survey of a range of key platforms that mediate, host, and deliver different types of geographic information. It does so using a combination of existing statistics and bespoke data not previously mapped or analysed. Through this effort, the paper demonstrates that in addition to the geographies of uneven access to contemporary modes of communication, uneven geographies of participation and representation are also evident and in some cases are being amplified rather than alleviated. In other words, the paper comprehensively shows one important facet of contemporary information geographies: that geographic information itself is characterised by a host of uneven geographies. The paper concludes that there are few signs that global informational peripheries are achieving comparable levels of participation or representation with traditional information cores, despite the hopes that the fast-paced spread of the internet to three billion people might change this pattern.

Beschreibung: Numerous exegeses have been written about the epistemologies of volunteered geographic information (VGI). We contend that VGI is itself a socially constructed epistemology crafted in the discipline of geography, which when re-examined, does not sit comfortably with either GIScience or critical GIS scholarship. Using insights from Albert Borgmann's philosophy of technology we offer a critique that, rather than appreciating the contours of this new form of data, truth appears to derive from traditional analytic views of information found within GIScience. This is assisted by structures that enable VGI to be treated as independent of the process that led to its creation. Allusions to individual emancipation further hamper VGI and problematise participatory practices in mapping/geospatial technologies (e.g. public participation geographic information systems). The paper concludes with implications of this epistemological turn and prescriptions for designing systems and advancing the field to ensure nuanced views of participation within the core conceptualisation of VGI.

Beschreibung: Field size distributions and their changes have not been studied over large areas as field size change datasets are not available. This study quantifies agricultural field size changes in a consistent manner using Landsat satellite data that also provide geographic context for the observed decadal scale changes. Growing season cloud-free Landsat 30 m resolution images acquired from 9 to 25 years apart were used to extract field object classifications at seven sites located by examination of a global agricultural yield map, agricultural production statistics, literature review, and analysis of the imagery in the US Landsat archive. High spatial resolution data were used to illustrate issues identifying small fields that are not reliably discernible at 30 m Landsat resolution. The predominant driver of field size change was attributed by literature review. Significant field size changes were driven by different factors, including technological advancements (Argentina and USA), government land use and agricultural policies (Malaysia, Brazil, France), and political changes (Albania and Zimbabwe). While observed local field size changes were complex, the reported results suggest that median field sizes are increasing due to technological advancements and changes to government policy, but may decrease where abrupt political changes affect the agricultural sector and where pastures are converted to arable land uses. In the limited sample considered, median field sizes increased from 45% (France) to 159% (Argentina) and decreased from 47% (Brazil) to 86% (Albania). These changes imply significant impacts on landscape spatial configuration and land use diversity with ecological and biogeochemical consequences.

Beschreibung: Small-scale decentralised facilities and household-level water purification technologies (HWTs) have become unconventional modes of delivering potable water. This paper examines how HWTs transformed from a temporary solution to unsanitary drinking water conditions in the global South to a legitimised technological fix for communities that experience chronic household water insecurity in the United States. We examine the discursive and material processes through which HWTs are applied in periurban and rural subdivisions on the Texas–Mexico border, called colonias. HWTs, through the intervention of social entrepreneurs, experts, and the state, mediate water governance by rearticulating the individual solution and foreclosing a collective or political process to improve community water systems for colonia residents.

Beschreibung: Seabirds play an important role in coastal environments, serving as key indicators of marine ecosystem variability as well as biovectors that influence terrestrial productivity and carbon storage. Long-term estimates of seabird populations remain rare, but lakes that support large seabird populations in their watersheds can archive a history of seabird activity in their sediment records. Here we present a seabird guano-influenced sediment record from Genovesa Crater Lake, Galápagos Islands, home to the world's largest reported colony of red-footed boobies ( Sula sula ) and smaller populations of other species. Influx of seabird guano into Genovesa Crater Lake produces high sedimentary δ 15 N values, and temporal variability in sediment δ 15 N primarily reflects changes in guano influx through time. Two abrupt increases in sedimentary δ 15 N occurred at 1835 AD and 1965 AD, and variance increased following the 1965 AD shift. The largest of these abrupt shifts at 1835 AD coincided, within age model error, with an abrupt increase in marine productivity indicators in sediment records off the coast of Perú and Chile. In the latter part of the twentieth century, δ 15 N values increased during periods of higher landings of Peruvian anchoveta and sardines. We hypothesise that seabird presence and activity on Genovesa increased during periods of higher regional marine productivity. Enhanced variance in Genovesa δ 15 N following the 1965 AD shift may reflect a modern population more susceptible to climate and environmental variability than at any other time in the last 400 years.

Beschreibung: During the warmest time of the last 10 000 years (Holocene Thermal Maximum), approximately 6000–4000 cal yr BP in the western Pacific, sea level is known to have reached as much as 2.1 m above its present mean level before declining subsequently. Records throughout the region show that sea level fell an average 0.7 m in the period 3500–2000 cal yr BP during which the earliest (culturally distinct) period of human occupation occurred in five western Pacific island groups [Bismarck Archipelago (Papua New Guinea), Fiji, Mariana Islands, New Caledonia, Vanuatu]. In the interest of testing whether there is evidence for climate forcing of cultural change in this region, dates are presented for the archaeologically conspicuous termination of early-period settlement in these island groups which show that it ended in each around 2570 cal yr BP . From the contemporaneity of this, it is argued that sea-level fall was the principal driver of this cultural transformation, forcing coastal peoples who had previously depended (largely) on foraging from nearshore-marine ecosystems to reconfigure their subsistence economy, something that invariably involved moving their settlements to places where horticulture and agriculture could be practiced more successfully. This research provides an example of where insights into causation of cultural change can be gleaned from comparing precise chronologies of human occupation to equally precise palaeoclimate chronologies.

Beschreibung: Geographers and Geography has long been acquainted with the idea of climate. For much of the last century, climatology was one of the canonical sub-fields of physical geography and interactions between climate and the human world have proved fruitful sites of geographical inquiry. Although much contemporary scholarship and applied science is concerned with the idea of climate change , I believe there is important work still to be done on enriching the idea of climate. The argument put forward in this essay is that climate – as it is imagined and acted upon – needs to be understood, first and foremost, culturally. Rather than framing climate as an interconnected global physical system or as a statistical artefact of weather measurements, climate should be understood equally as an idea that takes shape in cultures and can therefore be changed by cultures. Climate has a cultural history, which is interwoven with its physical history. It is a history which forms the substrate out of which today's beliefs, claims and disputes about climate change emerge. This essay develops two core arguments. First, climate can be understood culturally, as an idea that humans use to stabilise relationships between weather and their patterned lives. In its various manifestations around the world, the idea of climate enables humans to live with their weather through a widening and changing range of cultural resources, practices, artefacts and rituals. Second, I argue that such a cultural understanding of climate alters the way the contemporary idea of climate change should be conceived; not primarily as a physical process which must be stopped, but as the latest stage in the cultural evolution of the idea of climate.