Andrea Ghermandi

University of Haifa | haifa · School of Environmental Sciences

The ecosystems of coastal lakes and wetlands are dynamic and they offer humans a wide range of critical ecosystem services (ESs), such as regulating habitat and cultural services. Regrettably, the undervaluation of these ESs, particularly in tropical nations, results in underinvestment in and deterioration of these natural resources. In this paper,...

Coastal lakes are confronting a spectrum of threats arising from both natural processes and human activities. This study presents an investigation into the nutrient and trophic status of the Ramsar-designated (Ramsar site No. 1204) Ashtamudi Lake (ASL; area= 56 km2), situated along the southwest coast of India. To establish a comprehensive hydroche...

This research studies soil-compacted bricks using Phosphogypsum (PG) in their dosage. PG is the subproduct of the primary raw material used by the fertilizer industry, and its disposal is a challenge for the industry because of its large generation. Laboratory tests were performed to assess these bricks' physical characteristics. To obtain the bric...

This paper presents a global synthesis of economic values for ecosystem services provided by 15 terrestrial and marine biomes. Information from over 1,300 studies, yielding over 9,400 value estimates in monetary units, has been collected and organised in the Ecosystem Services Valuation Database (ESVD). This is a substantial expansion of data since...

Rapid technological development opens up new opportunities for assessing ecosystem services (ES), which may help to overcome current knowledge gaps and limitations in data availability. At the same time, emerging technologies, such as mobile devices, social media platforms, and artificial intelligence, give rise to a series of challenges and limita...

The Routledge Handbook of Geospatial Technologies and Society provides a relevant and comprehensive reference point for research and practice in this dynamic field. It offers detailed explanations of geospatial technologies and provides critical reviews and appraisals of their application in society within international and multi-disciplinary conte...

Emerging forms of mobile phone data generated from the use of mobile phone applications have the potential to advance scientific research across a range of disciplines. However, there are risks regarding uncertainties in the socio-demographic representativeness of these data, which may introduce bias and mislead policy recommendations. This paper a...

Social media (SM) include Internet applications that allow users to upload photographs, texts, and other information, for rich qualitative and quantitative datasets. SM data is gaining increasing importance in sustainability research due to the large amount of accessible data, available at large spatial and temporal scale, at detailed spatial resol...

This research studies soil-compacted bricks using phosphogypsum (PG) in their dosage. Laboratory tests were performed to assess these bricks’ physical characteristics. To obtain the bricks, two dosages were used: 4 and 7% of phosphogypsum (PG) concentration. Bricks with no phosphogypsum (PG) in their mixture were also assessed as a benchmark. The b...

Social media data are transforming sustainability science. However, challenges from restrictions in data accessibility and ethical concerns regarding potential data misuse have threatened this nascent field. Here, we review the literature on the use of social media data in environmental and sustainability research. We find that they can play a nove...

Environmental governance is highly sensitive to temporal dynamics, due to the ever-accelerating rate of technological changes, the cumulative nature of environmental impacts and the complexity of multi-level environmental policy processes. Yet, temporality is generally only implicitly included in frameworks used for describing or assessing policy r...

Coastal lakes and estuaries are considered economic drivers for coastal communities by delivering invaluable economic and ecosystem services. The coastal ecosystems are facing recurrent hypoxia events (dissolved oxygen; DO < 2.0 mg L⁻¹) and are emerging as a major threat to ecosystem structure and functioning. The Ashtamudi Lake, (area = 56 km²), i...

Determining seaweed protein concentration and the associated phenotype is critical for food industries that require precise tools to moderate concentration fluctuations and attenuate risks. Algal protein extraction and profiling have been widely investigated, but content determination involves a costly, time-consuming and high-energy, laboratory-ba...

Geolocated social media data counts are increasingly used as proxy for number of visits in natural areas, including their spatial and temporal distribution. This paper synthesizes the empirical evidence concerning the correlation of social media data counts and visits through multi-level meta-analytical models. Analysis of 355 correlations from 41...

New forms of mobile phone data offer enormous potential for the advancement of our understanding of human activity and mobility. However, uncertainty in the representativeness of data creates ethical risks that underlying biases could impact results and mislead policy recommendations, limiting their usefulness. This paper assesses the spatial and s...

Protected areas offer unique opportunities for recreation, but the non-market nature of these benefits presents a significant challenge when trying to represent value in the decision-making processes. The most common techniques to value recreation are based on resource-intensive primary surveys which are difficult to perform at a large scale or in...

Determining seaweed protein concentration and the associated phenotype is critical for food industries that require precise tools to moderate concentration fluctuations and attenuate risks. Algal protein extraction and profiling have been widely investigated, but content determination involves a costly, time-consuming, and high-energy, laboratory-b...

This research studies soil-compacted bricks using Phosphogypsum (PG) in their dosage. Aiming to assess the physical characteristics of these bricks, laboratory tests were performed. To obtain the bricks, two dosages were used: 4 and 7% of Phosphogypsum (PG) concentration. Bricks with no Phosphogypsum (PG) in their mixture were also assessed as a be...

Purpose This research aims at studying the influence of a classroom’s inner environmental conditions on undergraduate students’ performance using an experimental methodology. Design/methodology/approach The Uchida-Kraepelin test (U-K test) was applied to measure the performance of a group of 47 students in a selected classroom that was arranged ac...

Big data from photo-sharing platforms offer unique opportunities for the study of human-nature interactions and landscape planning. Research increasingly relies on computer vision in artificial intelligence to identify elements of interest in photographs and user preferences and sentiment towards them. Studies largely rely on pre-trained models fro...

The success of river restoration projects regarding its effects on cultural ecosystem services (CES) and contributions to human well-being is not frequently evaluated. Here, we recorded CES and associated values of a restored river site based on social media posts of visitors. We analysed 605 photographs from three social networking sites (Flickr,...

Cultural ecosystem services (CES) are important components of urban quality of life. Public participation GIS (PPGIS) is widely used to assess and map these services. However, it is often a time-consuming exercise with which only small spatial and temporal scales can be addressed. Assessments based on geolocated, passively crowdsourced data from so...

Valuation of ecosystem services can play an important role in guiding decision-making concerning the restoration of natural ecosystems which is particularly important in tropical coastal wetlands due to their widespread deterioration. This study investigates the environmental status and provision of key ecosystem services of the Ashtamudi lake Rams...

The investigation of the views of the stakeholders involved in the municipal solid waste separate collection programme (CP) performed in the East Zone of the city of São Paulo is presented in this paper. Aiming to obtain the necessary information to be analysed, interviews with the manager of the Municipal Urban Cleaning Authority (MUCA) of the cit...

Recent advances in geotagging, sharing and automatically analyzing online content from Social Networking Sites (SNS) offer unprecedented opportunities for the analysis of human-nature interactions. Previous studies in this field, however, offer limited insights regarding the benefits of automated content analysis especially at large scales, biases...

Representing the economic value of recreation generated by natural ecosystems can provide a powerful incentive for their conservation. Demonstrating value, however, requires resource-intensive surveys or reliance on techniques which transfer value from other sites. Recent technological developments have contributed to an abundance of georeferenced...

Social media data are increasingly utilised as a low-cost alternative to visitor surveys in characterising nature-based recreation. However, the information available on individual users is limited and typically does not include provenance, restricting the potential applications and impact of the data. Here we investigate a methodology to estimate...

The Ecosystem Services Valuation Database (ESVD) is a follow-up to the “The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity” (TEEB) database which contained over 1,300 data points from 267 case studies on monetary values of ecosystem services across all biomes. The TEEB database had not been updated since 2010 and naturally many gaps exist across biomes,...

Over the last decade, utilities, governments, and businesses have increasingly come to realize that financial considerations are not the only factors driving consumer behavior; rather, social and psychological factors play a significant role as well. For example, water demand management strategies rely on customers understanding how to reduce their...

The Usumacinta floodplain is an exceptional area for biodiversity with important ecosystem services for local people. The main objective of this paper was to estimate reference values and define local perceptions of ecosystem services provided by wetlands and overlapping them with spatially explicit socioeconomic and biodiversity indicators. We use...

Understanding spatial patterns of visitation and benefits accrued to different types of natural and cultural heritage tourists may have important implications for the sustainable management of their destinations. We investigate cultural services accrued to local, domestic and international visitors to the Usumacinta floodplain, a coastal region wit...

We integrate the combined agricultural production effects of forecasted changes in CO2, temperature and precipitation into a multi-regional, country-wide partial equilibrium positive mathematical programming model. By conducting a meta-analysis of 2103 experimental observations from 259 agronomic studies we estimate production functions relating yi...

Tourism and recreational activities may play an important role in the conservation and sustainable management of natural ecosystems and cultural heritage sites. Local, domestic and international visitors, however, often differ in their cultural preferences as well as in the spatial distribution of their visitation patterns. The investigation of suc...

Here we test an application, based on the analysis of the metadata of geotagged photographs, to investigate the provision of recreational services by the network of wetland ecosystems in the state of Kerala, India. We estimate visitation to individual wetlands state-wide and extend, for the first time to a developing region, the emerging applicatio...

The analysis of data from social media and social networking sites may be instrumental in achieving a better understanding of human-environment interactions and in shaping future conservation and environmental management. In this study, we systematically map the application of social media data in environmental research. The quantitative review of...

Cultural ecosystem services (CES) are non-material benefits people obtain from ecosystems, through cultural, spiritual and religious enrichment, education and research, recreation and tourism, and aesthetic experiences. The direct benefits people obtain from CES play an important role in motivating the public for nature protection and restoration....

The understanding of the regional and local dimensions of vulnerability due to climate change is essential to develop appropriate and targeted adaptation efforts. We assessed the local dimensions of vulnerability in the tropical state of Kerala, India, using a purposely developed vulnerability index, which accounts for both environmental and socio-...

The Northern Mozambique Channel hosts one of the world's most outstanding terrestrial and marine biodiversity rich areas. So far, the region has been only moderately impacted by human activities but rapidly evolving socioeconomic pressures call for sustainable management of the region's ecosystem service flows, which play a key role in supporting c...

Consideration of the spatial dimension in the provision of ecosystem services is fundamental for the calculation of the economic value of ecosystem services and the distribution across beneficiaries and ecosystems. In the context of Small Island Developing States, the islands of Trinidad and Tobago are characterized by a rich natural capital, which...

Online social media represent an extensive, opportunistic source of behavioral data and revealed preferences for ecosystem services (ES) analysis. Such data may allow to advance the approach, scale and timespan to which ES are assessed, mapping and valued. This is especially relevant in the context of developing regions whose decision support tools...

Green buildings (GBs) bring multiple benefits to homebuyers. However, the lack of knowledge or uncertainty about these benefits, combined with a nominal price premium (PP) for GBs, may prevent prospective homebuyers from entering the GB market. Therefore, governmental incentives may be needed. The present study serves the dual purpose of examining...

Marine and coastal ecosystems provide a wide variety of recreational opportunities that are highly valued by society. For the purposes of conducting a meta-analysis we build an extensive global dataset of marine recreational ecosystem service values from the literature. Using this database we developed a number of meta-regression specifications wit...

Social media provide a wealth of behavioral data that can be used to investigate the provision of environmental services. In this study, the preferences revealed by photo-sharing social media users are analyzed through travel cost modeling to infer the monetary value of recreation in 115 man-made wetland ecosystems. Photographs' metadata and other...

Global demand for freshwater is increasing as human population grows, climate changes and water resources are being overexploited. Consequently, many freshwater ecosystems, particularly in water-stressed regions, are severely degraded. Here we present a unique case of an Interbasin Water Transfer (IWT) project aiming at ecosystem rehabilitation and...

Agriculture is a major source of livelihood for rural communities in the Middle East. Lacking freshwater resources, brackish aquifers are often exploited as sources of irrigation water, but the practice is unsustainable. The " Solar-powered desalination of brackish water with nanofiltration membranes for intensive agricultural use in Jordan, the Pa...

Desalination has been proposed as a more sustainable alternative to brackish water irrigation in arid areas such as the Arava Valley in Israel. We explore the perception of 128 farmers in the Central and Northern Arava Valley regarding limiting factors in desalination, policies to address them, and willingness to irrigate with desalinated water. Mo...

This volume contains the main results of the EC FP7 “The Ocean of Tomorrow” Project CoCoNet, divided in two sections: 1) a set of guidelines to design networks of Marine Protected Areas in the Mediterranean and the Black Seas; 2) a smart wind chart that will allow evaluating the possibility of installing Offshore Wind Farms in both seas. The concep...

Land use and land cover changes play an important role in the occurrence of vector-borne diseases. It is highly essential to identify the prominent changes responsible for its occurrence so that suitable measures can be adopted. An attempt was made to identify the prominent land use and land cover changes responsible for the spread of chikungunya,...

The trans-disciplinary thematic areas of oceans management and policy require stocktaking of the state of knowledge on ecosystem services being derived from coastal and marine areas. Recently adopted Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) especially Goals 14 and 15 explicitly focus on this. This Handbook brings together a carefully chosen set of worl...

Policy demand for ecosystem service values in developing countries results in a growing use of value transfer techniques, even in the absence of primary valuations from highly comparable study sites. Current techniques provide limited guidance on how to quantitatively assess the similarity between study and policy sites and control for the effect t...

Patterns of public use in 273 natural treatment systems worldwide are investigated by means of geotagged data from two popular photo-sharing websites, using spatial analysis and regression techniques. Standardized Major Axis (SMA) regression is found to perform better than other univariate calibration models in terms of goodness of fit with reporte...

Natural water treatment systems have long been recognized as sources of ancillary benefits in the form of cultural ecosystem services. To date, there is a lack of quantitative understanding of the extent and welfare impact of such benefits. This paper investigates 166 natural treatment systems worldwide and provides the first quantitative assessmen...

Ocean and marine ecosystems provide a range of valuable services to humans, including benefits such as carbon sequestration, whose economic value are as yet poorly understood. This paper presents a novel contribution to the valuation of carbon sequestration services in marine ecosystems with an application to the Mediterranean Sea. We combine a sta...

Valuation and accounting of island ecosystem services is fundamental to our ability to achieve sustainable green growth in Small Island Developing States (SIDS), also known as large ocean states. SIDS are characterized inter alia by (a) a well-defined set of in situ socio-economic-cultural and governance conditions; (b) a population’s clear percept...

ABSTRACT Valuation and accounting of island ecosystem services is fundamental to our ability to achieve sustainable green growth in Small Island Developing States (SIDS), also known as large ocean states. SIDS are characterized inter alia by (a) a well-defined set of in situ socio-economic-cultural and governance conditions; (b) a population’s clea...

Manual de orientación sobre la valoración y contabilización de los servicios de los ecosistemas para los pequeños Estados insulares en desarrollo Resumen Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Medio Ambiente El PNUMA promueve las prácticas favorables al medio ambiente en todo el mundo y en sus propias actividades. Esta publicación está impresa en...

Le PNUE encourage les bonnes pratiques environnementales dans le monde comme dans ses propres activités. Cette publication est imprimée sur du papier issu de forêts gérées de manière durable, comprenant des fibres recyclées. Le papier est blanchi sans chlore et les encres sont végétales. Notre politique d'impression vise à limiter l'empreinte écolo...

A global study to estimate the ecosystem service value of specific coastal ecosystems is developed. Specific variables are identified and used to develop a global multivariate regression function that supports the identification of important drivers of the value of ecosystem service of coastal protection around the world, and the Caribbean is exami...

Jellyfish outbreaks in the Mediterranean Sea are part of an anthropogenic alteration of the marine ecosystem and have been documented as health hazards and threats to tourism. Their impacts on human welfare have, however, been poorly quantified. A socioeconomic survey, carried out in summer 2013, captures the impacts of an outbreak of Rhopilema nom...

Changes in the coastal landscape of Southern Sinaloa (Mexico), between 2000 and 2010, were analyzed to relate spatial variations in wetlands extent with the provision and economic value of the ecosystem services (ES). Remote sensing techniques applied to Landsat TM imagery were used to evaluate land use/land cover changes while the value transfer m...

This paper uses GIS-based mapping tools and economic valuation of ecosystem goods and services to explore the social dimension of biodiversity policy. We investigate the linkages between biodiversity, ecosystem service values, and socio-economic vulnerability indicators in a spatially explicit framework and at different geographic scales. Our focus...

An agricultural facility aimed at sustainable production of crops in arid environments was built and tested in Hatzeva, Israel. The facility relies on solar-powered desalination with nanofiltration membranes to treat the local brackish water (EC=2.32dSm(-1)) and produce high-quality irrigation water (EC=0.71dSm(-1)). Red beet, a salt-tolerant crop,...