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- Downing, Andrea S., et al.
(författare)
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Coupled human and natural system dynamics as key to the sustainability of Lake Victoria's ecosystem services
- 2014
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Ingår i: Ecology and Society. - 1708-3087. ; 19:4, s. 31-
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- East Africa's Lake Victoria provides resources and services to millions of people on the lake's shores and abroad. In particular, the lake's fisheries are an important source of protein, employment, and international economic connections for the whole region. Nonetheless, stock dynamics are poorly understood and currently unpredictable. Furthermore, fishery dynamics are intricately connected to other supporting services of the lake as well as to lakeshore societies and economies. Much research has been carried out piecemeal on different aspects of Lake Victoria's system; e.g., societies, biodiversity, fisheries, and eutrophication. However, to disentangle drivers and dynamics of change in this complex system, we need to put these pieces together and analyze the system as a whole. We did so by first building a qualitative model of the lake's social-ecological system. We then investigated the model system through a qualitative loop analysis, and finally examined effects of changes on the system state and structure. The model and its contextual analysis allowed us to investigate system-wide chain reactions resulting from disturbances. Importantly, we built a tool that can be used to analyze the cascading effects of management options and establish the requirements for their success. We found that high connectedness of the system at the exploitation level, through fisheries having multiple target stocks, can increase the stocks' vulnerability to exploitation but reduce society's vulnerability to variability in individual stocks. We describe how there are multiple pathways to any change in the system, which makes it difficult to identify the root cause of changes but also broadens the management toolkit. Also, we illustrate how nutrient enrichment is not a self-regulating process, and that explicit management is necessary to halt or reverse eutrophication. This model is simple and usable to assess system-wide effects of management policies, and can serve as a paving stone for future quantitative analyses of system dynamics at local scales.
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- Shameer, S., et al.
(författare)
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TrypanoCyc: a community-led biochemical pathways database for Trypanosoma brucei
- 2015
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Ingår i: Nucleic Acids Research. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0305-1048 .- 1362-4962. ; 43:D1, s. D637-D644
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The metabolic network of a cell represents thecatabolic and anabolic reactions that interconvertsmall molecules (metabolites) through the activity ofenzymes, transporters and non-catalyzed chemicalreactions. Our understanding of individual metabolicnetworks is increasing as we learn more aboutthe enzymes that are active in particular cells underparticular conditions and as technologies advanceto allow detailed measurements of the cellularmetabolome. Metabolic network databases areof increasing importance in allowing us to contextualisedata sets emerging from transcriptomic,proteomic and metabolomic experiments. Here wepresent a dynamic database, TrypanoCyc (http://www.metexplore.fr/trypanocyc/), which describesthe generic and condition-specific metabolic networkof Trypanosoma brucei, a parasitic protozoan responsiblefor human and animal African trypanosomiasis.In addition to enabling navigation through the BioCyc-based TrypanoCyc interface, we have alsoimplemented a network-based representation of theinformation through MetExplore, yielding a novel environmentin which to visualise the metabolism ofthis important parasite.
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- Eriksson, Gunilla M., et al.
(författare)
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Occupations of Older Adults : A Cross Cultural Description
- 2011
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Ingår i: OTJR (Thorofare, N.J.). - : SAGE Publications. - 1539-4492 .- 1938-2383. ; 31:4, s. 182-192
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Participation in everyday occupations influences people's health and well-being. To enable individuals to do the activities they want and need to do is the main concern of occupational therapy practice. Many daily occupations are universal, but they also depend on culture. The development of the Activity Card Sort in eight countries has offered the opportunity to describe occupations across cultures. In the developmental process of culturally relevant versions of the Activity Card Sort by occupational therapists in each country, the instrument versions included samples of older adults (N = 468). These data are used in the current description with the aim of identifying central activities across cultures and central activities for Asian and Western cultures. Ten activities were identified as being central across cultures (i.e., more than half of the older adults in all eight countries performed them). They were the following: shopping in a store, doing grocery shopping, doing dishes, doing laundry, reading books or magazines, sitting and thinking, watching television, listening to radio or music, visiting with friends and relatives, and talking on the telephone. Further, 16 additional activities central to Asian culture and 18 activities central to Western culture were identified. The identification of central activities deepens knowledge of activities with cultural significance. This knowledge is needed in clinical practice and multicultural research. This description provides a starting point for further exploration of everyday occupations among older adults.
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| 7. |
- Staal, Arie, et al.
(författare)
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Hysteresis of tropical forests in the 21st century
- 2020
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Ingår i: Nature Communications. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2041-1723. ; 11:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Tropical forests modify the conditions they depend on through feedbacks at different spatial scales. These feedbacks shape the hysteresis (history-dependence) of tropical forests, thus controlling their resilience to deforestation and response to climate change. Here, we determine the emergent hysteresis from local-scale tipping points and regional-scale forest-rainfall feedbacks across the tropics under the recent climate and a severe climate-change scenario. By integrating remote sensing, a global hydrological model, and detailed atmospheric moisture tracking simulations, we find that forest-rainfall feedback expands the geographic range of possible forest distributions, especially in the Amazon. The Amazon forest could partially recover from complete deforestation, but may lose that resilience later this century. The Congo forest currently lacks resilience, but is predicted to gain it under climate change, whereas forests in Australasia are resilient under both current and future climates. Our results show how tropical forests shape their own distributions and create the climatic conditions that enable them. Tropical rainforests partly create their own climatic conditions by promoting precipitation, therefore rainforest losses may trigger dramatic shifts. Here the authors combine remote sensing, hydrological modelling, and atmospheric moisture tracking simulations to assess forest-rainfall feedbacks in three major tropical rainforest regions on Earth and simulate potential changes under a severe climate change scenario.
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| 8. |
- Downing, Andrea S., et al.
(författare)
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Was Lates Late? : A Null Model for the Nile Perch Boom in Lake Victoria
- 2013
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Ingår i: PLOS ONE. - : Public Library of Science (PLoS). - 1932-6203. ; 8:10, s. e76847-
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Nile perch (Lates niloticus) suddenly invaded Lake Victoria between 1979 and 1987, 25 years after its introduction in the Ugandan side of the lake. Nile perch then replaced the native fish diversity and irreversibly altered the ecosystem and its role to lakeshore societies: it is now a prised export product that supports millions of livelihoods. The delay in the Nile perch boom led to a hunt for triggers of the sudden boom and generated several hypotheses regarding its growth at low abundances - all hypotheses having important implications for the management of Nile perch stocks. We use logistic growth as a parsimonious null model to predict when the Nile perch invasion should have been expected, given its growth rate, initial stock size and introduction year. We find the first exponential growth phase can explain the timing of the perch boom at the scale of Lake Victoria, suggesting that complex mechanisms are not necessary to explain the Nile perch invasion or its timing. However, the boom started in Kenya before Uganda, indicating perhaps that Allee effects act at smaller scales than that of the whole Lake. The Nile perch invasion of other lakes indicates that habitat differences may also have an effect on invasion success. Our results suggest there is probably no single management strategy applicable to the whole lake that would lead to both efficient and sustainable exploitation of its resources.
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