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Improving Deliberative Environmental Management Under Uncertainty examined similarities and differences between expert and public understanding of uncertainty. This collection directly compares expert and layperson interpretations and understandings of different expressions of uncertainty, in the context of evaluating the consequences of proposed environmental management actions that influence economic, social, or health concerns. Data were collected via a Web-based survey where respondents were asked a series of questions after they were given four hypothetical scenarios on the following topics: wind farms, vegetation management, superfund site, and salmon. Each scenario described an environmental proposal along with pros and cons then respondents selected a response option with costs and benefits of the proposal in mind. The first scenario focused on a plan to manage forest vegetation in the northeastern United States, using either conventional methods involving aerial spraying of herbicides or more expensive hand spraying methods intended to reduce adverse impacts on local moose populations. The second scenario focused on a proposal to build a new windfarm in a western state, which would lower electricity rates to local communities but could have negative effects on resident songbird populations. The third scenario focused on a plan to clean up hazardous waste at a large industrial Superfund site. The waste was estimated to have caused 200 children to develop serious respiratory illness from exposure to contaminated drinking water; building a decontamination facility would reduce the number of sick children but would be very expensive and would take time to build. The fourth scenario focused on a plan to reduce the declining population of Chinook Salmon. In order to reduce the Chinook Salmon declines in the Seshon River, an advisory committee must find a balance between the protection of salmon and the use of water to generate electricity, which is a cause in salmon reduction. Participants responded to hypothetical but realistic scenarios involving trade-offs between options presented and other objectives, and were asked a series of questions about their comprehension of the uncertainty information, their preferred choice among the alternatives, and the associated difficulty and amount of effort. Respondents were asked general questions which ranged from how they felt about a particular issue to how easy or difficult it was to answer the questions associated with each scenario. Demographic information includes gender, age and education level. Public Sample: Nationally representative, convienence sample of Decision Research web-panel participants located throughout the United States. Expert Sample: Web site organized by United States Fish and Wildlife Services (USFWS) for employees who have undertaken some previous training in resource management and decision-making. Please refer to Original P.I. Documentation in the ICPSR Codebook for further information on sampling. Response Rates: The response rate for the public is 95 percent. The response rate for the expert sample is 27 percent. Please refer to the Original P.I. Documentation in the ICPSR Codebook for further information on response rates. web-based surveySpecial collaborators for Improving Deliberative Environmental Management Under Uncertainty, 2009-2010, include Nathan Dieckmann and Ellen Peters. Please refer to the Original P.I. Documentation in the ICPSR Codebook for further information on study design. Datasets: DS1: Improving Deliberative Environmental Management Under Uncertainty, 2009-2010 Decision Research Web-panel participants located throughout the United States. Presence of Common Scales: Two 10-item Numeracy Scales This collection contains 113 variables. none

Analyses of ancient food webs reveal important paleoecological processes and responses to a range of perturbations throughout Earth’s history, such as climate change. These responses can inform our forecasts of future biotic responses to similar perturbations. However, previous analyses of ancient food webs rarely accounted for key differences between modern and ancient community data, particularly selective loss of soft-bodied taxa during fossilization. To consider how fossilization impacts inferences of ancient community structure we (1) analyzed node-level attributes to identify correlations between ecological roles and fossilization potential and (2) applied selective information loss procedures to food web data for extant systems. We found that selective loss of soft-bodied organisms has predictable effects on the trophic structure of “artificially fossilized” food webs, because these organisms occupy unique, consistent food web positions. Fossilized food webs misleadingly appear less stable (i.e., more prone to trophic cascades), with less predation and an overrepresentation of generalist consumers. We also found that ecological differences between soft- and hard-bodied taxa—indicated by distinct positions in modern food webs—are recorded in an Early Eocene web, but not in Cambrian webs. This suggests that ecological differences between the groups have existed for ≥ 48 million years. Our results indicate that accounting for soft-bodied taxa is vital for accurate depictions of ancient food webs. However, the consistency of information loss trends across the analyzed food webs means it is possible to predict how the selective loss of soft-bodied taxa affects food web metrics, which can permit better modeling of ancient communities. Repository Contents: Supplementary Information: Containing Supplementary Text, Figures, Tables, and Data descriptions. Supplementary Data 1: Food web data (adjacency matrices and metadata; see publication; see Related Works). Supplementary Data 2: Additional references consulted for preservation group assignments. Supplementary Data 3: Data and R scripts to recreate analyses from this study. S3_AllWebTaxonomy_updated_200903.csv: Taxonomy data for all food web nodes. S3_AnalysisOfTaxonomicRanks.csv: Lowest taxonomic rank for each node. S3_MainFigures_CaimanComparison.R: Compare the three food webs contained in (Roopnarine and Hertog 2013). S3_MainFigures_ComparisonFunctions.R: Functions for calculating metrics and generating trophic species webs. S3_MainFigures_FossilizationFunctions.R: Functions for artificially fossilizing networks. S3_MainFigures_Setup_200826.R: Setup to import food webs. S3_MainFigures_Code.R: Code to apply functions. S3_pbdb_data_200504.csv: Data from the Paleobiology Database, excluding Lagerstätten (see publication). S3_PresGrAssignments_updated_200902.csv: Preservation group assignments for all nodes. Fossil faunal lists were downloaded from the PBDB on 17th January 2020. Any data processing steps are shown in R Scripts and described in publication. Paleobiology Database is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 International License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. We analyzed food webs for four modern marine systems, one modern freshwater system, two ancient marine systems, and one ancient lake system from previous publications. All webs have similar, broad higher-rank taxonomic compositions and contain at least 85 nodes (the size of the smallest ancient network considered). For comparisons with ancient diversity, we downloaded fossil occurrences from the Paleobiology Database (PBDB) on 17th January 2020. 

Ambient conditions shape microbiome responses to both short- and long-duration environment changes through processes including physiological acclimation, compositional shifts, and evolution. Thus, we predict that microbial communities inhabiting locations with larger diel, episodic, and annual variability in temperature and pH should be less sensitive to shifts in these climate-change factors. To test this hypothesis, we compared responses of surface ocean microbes from more variable (nearshore) and more constant (offshore) sites to short-term factorial warming (+3 °C) and/or acidification (pH -0.3). In all cases, warming alone significantly altered microbial community composition, while acidification had a minor influence. Compared with nearshore microbes, warmed offshore microbiomes exhibited larger changes in community composition, phylotype abundances, respiration rates, and metatranscriptomes, suggesting increased sensitivity of microbes from the less-variable environment. Moreover, while warming increased respiration rates, offshore metatranscriptomes yielded evidence of thermal stress responses in protein synthesis, heat shock proteins, and regulation. Future oceans with warmer waters may enhance overall metabolic and biogeochemical rates, but they will host altered microbial communities, especially in relatively thermally stable regions of the oceans. In order to allow full comparability with other ocean acidification data sets, the R package seacarb (Gattuso et al, 2019) was used to compute a complete and consistent set of carbonate system variables, as described by Nisumaa et al. (2010). In this dataset the original values were archived in addition with the recalculated parameters (see related PI). The date of carbonate chemistry calculation by seacarb is 2020-10-20.

In the Galvin Electricity Initiative, a microgrid is defined as a “small scale version of the central electricity system” 1. Renewable energy sources, such as photovoltaic (PV), are intermittent, which raises concern when considering their integration on a large scale 2. Through the creation of a self-sufficient, wireless weather sensor network, we present a step towards forming a method to track current weather conditions and predict future patterns. Each node in the network relays solar irradiance, barometric pressure, relative humidity and temperature to a server via a transceiver. Data is collected at approximately one sample per second and sent back to a server where it is stored into a relational database. Deployment on the University of Hawaii at Manoa campus has begun as a part of the Renewable Energy and Island Sustainability (REIS) initiative.

Among many, increasing the price of municipal water is considered to be the most effective mechanism for enhancing municipal water conservation, whether during times of drought or not. However, increasing the price of something that is considered to be, literally, a life-giving resource is politically taboo. This study follows two others that evaluate survey data with Likert scale responses, in determining whether or not constituents would outright reject the idea of using price to ration municipal water. But it goes several steps further--it controls for both community and respondent level variables, calculates and evaluates in-sample response probabilities, and most importantly, attempts to forecast the attitudes of constituents in communities that are not in our survey sample. In the end, our model produces both in-sample and out-of-sample response probabilities that are reasonable, and relatively stable across communities; it therefore provides communities and researchers with a means to gauge public support for pricing initiatives.

From 26 December 2012 to 21 January 2013 we measured relevant parameters for surface energy and mass exchange calculation at three closely collocated sites near the Ross Sea shore in the valley floor of lower Taylor Valley, McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica. At any time during the experiment, two surface energy balance stations were operated: One station was installed throughout the whole period at the investigated water track, referred to as WT. The other station was operated as a reference representing the dominant non-water track (NWT), bare soil surfaces in lower Taylor Valley; it was successively installed at two sites with different soil textures: PLD was located on a paleolake delta dominated by fine surficial sediments, while GT represented coarse glacial till. At each station the following instruments were installed: A net radiometer (NR01, Hukseflux Thermal Sensors B.V., Delft, NL) was used for measuring solar and terrestrial radiation, an ultrasonic anemometer (81000 VRE, R.M. Young Company, Traverse City, MI, USA) and an infrared gas analyzer (LI-7500, LI-COR Inc., Lincoln, NE, USA) recorded data for turbulent heat flux estimation via the eddy-covariance method. Thermistors and thermocouples recorded soil temperatures in several depths in the thawed layer. Additionally, we used a thermal properties analyzer (KD2 Pro, Decagon Devices, Pullman, WA, USA) for measuring soil thermal properties for several samples taken from the surface. Eddy-covariance processing was done with the bmmflux tool of the University of Bayreuth (see appendix in Thomas et al., 2009), including data quality assessment after Foken et al. (2004). Turbulent flux footprints were modeled with the TERRAFEX model of the University of Bayreuth (Göckede, 2001) which provided contributions of adjacent land cover types to the flux footprint. Further information on the experimental setup can be found in Linhardt et al. (2019).

Reconstructing the evolution of sea level during past warmer epochs such as the Pliocene provides insight into the response of sea level and ice sheets to prolonged warming. Although estimates of global mean sea level (GMSL) during this time do exist, they vary by several tens of metres, hindering the assessment of past and future ice-sheet stability. Here we show that during the mid-Piacenzian Warm Period, which was on average 2-3 degrees Celsius warmer than the pre-industrial period, the GMSL (sea-level equivalent changes in global ice volume) was about 16.2 metres higher than today. During the even warmer Pliocene Climatic Optimum (about 4 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial), our results show that GMSL was 23.5 metres above the present level (m.a.p.s.l.). We present six GMSL data points, ranging from 4.39 to 3.27 million years ago, that are based on overgrowths on phreatic (from water-filled caves) speleothems from the western Mediterranean Sea, near Mallorca, Spain. This record is unique owing to its clear relationship to sea level, its reliable U-Pb ages and its long timespan, which allows us to quantify uncertainties on potential uplift. Our data indicate that ice sheets are very sensitive to warming and provide important calibration targets for future ice-sheet models.

Using an extensive network of occurrence records for 293 plant species collected over the past 40 years across a climatically diverse geographic section of western North America, we find that plant species distributions were just as likely to shift upwards (i.e., towards higher elevations) as downward (i.e., towards lower elevations) – despite consistent warming across the study area. Although there was no clear directional response to climate warming across the entire study area, there was significant region-to region- variation in responses (i.e. from as many as 73% to as few as32% of species shifting upward or downward). To understand the factors that might be controlling region-specific distributional shifts, we explored the relationship between the direction of change in distribution limits and the nature of recent climate change. We found that the direction of distribution limit shifts was explained by an interaction between the rate of change in local summer temperatures and seasonal precipitation. Specifically, species shifted upward at their upper elevational limit when snowfall declined at slower rates and minimum temperatures increased. By contrast, species shifted upwards at their lower elevation limit when maximum temperatures increased or both temperature and precipitation decreased. Our results suggest that future species' elevational distribution shifts will be complex, depending on the interaction between seasonal temperature and precipitation change.

Supplementary data underlying the main figures presented in the publication "Climate change may induce connectivity loss and mountaintop extinction in Central American forests"