Since the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), decision-makers have realised that periodic assessments were needed to closely monitor climate change. Studies on it became widespread and include the science of greenhouse gas emissions, the composition of these gases and the extent to which humans have been responsible for climate change. In this sense, the United Nations summit has made significant progress since the Rio Conference (Eco 92), with the creation of the Conference of the Parties (COPs). However, governments should not solely focus on curbing greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. In a society with broad and deep environmental problems, governments, the private sector and non-governmental organisations’ (NGOs) efforts should include biodiversity conservation in their agenda. Solving a single problem, the climate crisis is honourable and urgently needed, but to constrain our ever-increasing land-use footprints on the planet needs the tackling of another equally challenging problem, the loss of biodiversity. The destruction of ecosystems undermines nature’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and protect against extreme weather, thus accelerating climate change and increasing our vulnerability to it. Therefore, tackling environmental challenges means more than building electric cars, investing in “clean” energy and imposing fines on those who burn forests. To save the environment, scientists, industry, policy-makers and the wider society urgently need to look at other aspects of ecosystem conservation and restoration in the same way they look at the climate agenda.
Mangrove forests, as an essential component of the coastal zones in tropical and subtropical areas, provide a wide range of goods and ecosystem services that play a vital role in ecology. Mangroves are globally threatened, disappearing, and degraded. Consequently, knowledge on mangroves distribution and change is important for effective conservation and making protection policies. Developing remote sensing data and classification methods have proven to be suitable tools for mapping mangrove forests over a regional scale. Here, we scrutinized and compared the performance of pixel-based and object-based methods under Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Random Forest (RF) algorithms in mapping a mangrove ecosystem into four main classes (Mangrove tree, mudflat, water, and sand spit) using resampled and fused Sentinel-2 images. Additionally, landscape metrics were used to identify the differences between spatial patterns obtained from different classification methods. Results showed that pixel-based classifications were influenced heavily by the effect of salt and pepper noise, whereas in object-based classifications, boundaries of land use land cover (LULC) polygons were smoother and visually more appealing. Object-based classifications, with an excellent level of kappa, distinguished mudflat and sand spit from each other and from mangrove better than the pixel-based classifications which obtained a fair-to-good level of kappa. RF and SVM performed differently under comparable circumstances. The results of landscape metrics comparison presented that the classification methods can be affected on quantifying area and size metrics. Although the results supported the idea that fused Sentinel images may provide better results in mangrove LULC classification, further research needs to develop and evaluate various image fusion approaches to make use of all Sentinel’s fine resolution images. Our results on the mapping of mangrove ecosystems can contribute to the improvement of management and conservation strategies for these ecosystems being impacted by human activities.
The sei whale (Balaenoptera borealis) was intensively exploited throughout its range, with about 110.000 individuals hunted by pelagic fleets in Antarctic waters between 1960 and 1970. In addition, basic information on its distribution, migratory routes, and feeding grounds in the southeastern Pacific, has been poorly documented. In the case of Chile, recent information consists mainly of accidental records. This research presents the first sei whale photo-identification catalog for south-central Chile. From November 2019 to January 2020, 88 individuals were recorded from land-based and boat surveys at Caleta Chome. Of these, 12 individuals were photo-identified through scars or distinctive notches in the dorsal fins. The peak of sightings occurred during December 2019; two individuals were sighted on more than one occasion.
This study was conducted to investigate genetic and some morphometric and meristic characteristics of garfish Belone belone from Nesebar in the Bulgarian Black Sea coast. Twelve morphometric characters were measured, and six meristic characters were counted for each individual. Based on both sexes’ morphological and meristic analyses, no statistically significant sexual differences were observed. Additionally, DNA barcoding was done. The fragment of the cytochrome oxidase subunit I (COI) gene of mitochondrial DNA was sequenced to supplement the species identification and population diversity study. Two haplotypes were found out of 39 sequences, indicating a low level of haplotype diversity (0.146±0.072). Nucleotide diversity was also found to be low (0.00023±0.00011). The Nesebar population of B. belone requires conservation efforts, due to the highly decreased mtDNA genetic diversity.
Mexico is a megadiverse country with high amphibian and reptile richness. Understanding how Mexico’s herpetofauna is shared among Mexican states can contribute to developing conservation plans by figuring out which states may need to coordinate conservation actions. We generated species lists for the herpetofauna for all Mexican states, and used hierarchical clustering analyses to identify clusters of states on the basis of amphibian and reptile species separately. We also calculated pair-wise Jaccard distances for all Mexican states for amphibians, reptiles, and physiographic provinces and estimated the length of shared borders between states and the geographic (straight-line) distance between the centroids of pairs of states. We used these data to explore potential drivers of the cluster analysis results. Our cluster analysis for amphibians identified five clusters with nine subclusters, and for reptiles, resulted in four clusters with six subclusters. In general, the clusters for Mexican amphibians and reptiles have a similar composition of states. However, for amphibians, the states of Veracruz and Puebla form a cluster separate from a large cluster of northeastern Mexican states, whereas in reptiles Veracruz and Puebla cluster with northeastern Mexican states. Jaccard distances of amphibians and reptiles were highly, positively correlated. Both amphibian and reptile Jaccard distances were positively correlated with the physiographic provinces’ Jaccard distance and shared border length and negatively correlated with the distance between centroids. Taken together, our results suggest that the pattern of the sharing of herpetofaunal species among Mexican states is a consequence of the states’ proximity. Such a pattern is consistent with the underlying driver being the similarity of physiographic provinces (i.e., habitats and ecosystems) of these states (i.e., geographic proximity likely reflects, at least in large part, ecological similarity). Our results suggest clusters of states that should coordinate the conservation and management of their herpetofaunas. For example, clusters of states in southern Mexico share a high number of threatened amphibian species and clusters of states in northern Mexico share a high number of threatened reptile species. Oaxaca is also a state that has a unique herpetofauna and a high number of threatened species of both amphibians and reptiles.
