Tobias Lung

European Environment Agency (EEA) | EEA · Integrated Environmental Assessments Programme

The need for sustainability transitions is widely recognised, along with a concurrent need for the evolution of knowledge systems to inform more effective policy action. Although there are many new policy targets relating to net zero emissions and other sustainability challenges, cities, regional and national governments are struggling to rapidly d...

https://www.oecd.org/gov/pcsd/understanding-the-spillovers-and-transboundary-impacts-of-public-policies-862c0db7-en.htm

'Perspectives on transitions to sustainability' presents a variety of analytical perspectives on systemic change, exploring what insights they collectively offer for policy, governance and knowledge creation. The report includes five academic papers drafted by internationally recognised experts in the field of sustainability transitions. For each o...

Background Dengue fever is the most prevalent mosquito-borne viral disease worldwide. Dengue transmission is critically dependent on climatic factors and there is much concern as to whether climate change would spread the disease to areas currently unaffected. The occurrence of autochthonous infections in Croatia and France in 2010 has raised conce...

Large-scale modifications of natural ecosystems lead to mosaics of natural, semi-natural and intensively used habitats. To improve communication in conservation planning, managers and other stakeholders need spatially explicit projections at the landscape scale of future biodiversity under different land-use scenarios. For that purpose, we visualiz...

Despite ambitious biodiversity policy goals, less than a fifth of the European Union's (EU) legally protected species and habitats show a favorable conservation status. The recent EU biodiversity strategy recognizes that climate change adds to the challenge of halting biodiversity loss, and that an optimal distribution of financial resources is nee...

The EU Structural and Cohesion Funds (SCF) are potentially important instruments for supporting climate policy-related efforts and addressing unevenly distributed capacities for successful mitigation and adaptation across the EU. This paper reports on the level of climate mainstreaming in EU regional development policy in the 2007–2013 programming...

Despite an increasing understanding of potential climate change impacts in Europe, the associated uncertainties remain a key challenge. In many impact studies, the assessment of uncertainties is underemphasised, or is not performed quantitatively. A key source of uncertainty is the variability of climate change projections across different regional...

Monitoring tropical rain forests via remotely sensed imagery has become very useful in understanding land use/cover change over time for three East Africa rain forest areas: Kakamega-Nandi forests area in Kenya, Mabira and Budongo Forest areas in Uganda. Landsat imagery, provided free of charge by the U.S. Geological Survey Center for Earth Resourc...

Modelling the distribution of human population based on satellite-derived information has become an important field of research, providing valuable input e.g. for human impact assessments related to the management of threatened ecosystems. However, few regional-scale studies have been conducted in developing countries, where detailed land cover dat...

The JRC PESETA II study integrates the consequences of several separate climate change impacts into a macroeconomic CGE model. This enables comparison of the different impacts based on common metrics (household welfare and economic activity). The study uses a large set of climate model runs (twelve) and impact categories (agriculture, energy demand...

The JRC PESETA II study integrates the consequences of several separate climate change impacts into a macroeconomic CGE model. This enables comparison of the different impacts based on common metrics (household welfare and economic activity). The study uses a large set of climate model runs (twelve) and impact categories (agriculture, energy demand...

Invertebrate communities of the tropical rain forest floor are highly diverse, characterized by patchy species distribution patterns and high variation in species density. Spatial variation in the foraging activity of swarm raiding army ants, prime invertebrate predators in tropical rain forests, is discussed as a mechanism contributing to these pa...

The considerable scientific and conservation interest in Kakamega Forest, and to a lesser extent the neighbouring forests, over the last two decades has generated a multitude of apparently conflicting statistics on forest cover. Here we rationalise the figures that have already been published and by their presentation in tabular form we enable comp...

Over the coming decades, Europe is expected to be confronted with major impacts due to anthropogenic climate change, with an increase in the frequency of some extreme weather events. Across the different European regions, impacts and vulnerability will vary in intensity and effect, according to changes in exposure to specific climatic stimuli and c...

Combining spatially explicit land cover data from remote-sensing and faunal data from field observations is increasingly applied for landscape-scale habitat and biodiversity assessments, but without modelling changes quantitatively over time. In a novel approach, we used a long-term time series including historical map data to predict the influence...

Species turn-over among Biodiversity Observatories (BDOs) in six functional groups of animals in Kakamega Forest, Kenya. Shown are ordination plots from non-metric multi-dimensional scaling (NMDS) on Bray-Curtis distances of the species abundances in each BDO; stress values of each NMDS are given. Effects of forest size on community composition wer...

Forest size, intensity of selective logging, management authority and ecosystem processes studied in each of the 11 Biodiversity Observatories (BDOs) in Kakamega Forest, Kenya. BDOs are ordered by forest size into study sites in forest fragments and main forest block; please refer to Fig. 1 for the exact location of each BDO. The intensity of selec...

Relationships between human disturbance, species richness or community composition and ecosystem processes in Kakamega Forest. The same path model was fitted for each ecosystem process affected by human disturbance (Fig. 3). Human disturbance increases from low to high values (forest size was multiplied by −1). Given are the number of study sites (...

Forest fragmentation and selective logging are two main drivers of global environmental change and modify biodiversity and environmental conditions in many tropical forests. The consequences of these changes for the functioning of tropical forest ecosystems have rarely been explored in a comprehensive approach. In a Kenyan rainforest, we studied si...

For 473 km² of farmland surrounding Kakamega Forest in western Kenya, QuickBird satellite imagery has been analyzed by an object-based image analysis approach. Preprocessing involved atmospheric/orographic correction as well as mosaicing and was followed by ground truthing and visual interpretation. Segmentation was optimized using a newly introduc...

1. It is important to document changes in the population sizes of species to justify and implement conservation programmes. This is often hampered by the absence of historical population count data, particularly for tropical animal species. 2. Here, we developed a predictive habitat distribution model (PHDM) for the army ant Dorylus wilverthi, a ke...

In this paper we present the outline for a regional atlas on rainforest change over time focusing on three forest areas located in Kenya and Uganda. The atlas visualizes the results of nine years of research applying geo-spatial data within the BIOTA East Africa project. A total of 37 map themes have been identified, ranging from overview maps on e...

Processes of deforestation, known to threaten tropical forest biodiversity, have not yet been studied sufficiently in East Africa. To shed light on the patterns and causes of human influences on protected forest ecosystems, comparisons of different study areas regarding land cover dynamics and potential drivers are needed. We analyze the developmen...

Within the third and last phase of the BIOTA East Africa project, Kakamega Forest (western Kenya) has become the 'laboratory' for providing the requested recommendations for a sustainable biodiversity management. After almost eight years of research, a broad range of detailed geospatial data and information is available regarding the biodiversity a...

Biodiversity in tropical rainforests is heavily influenced by land use/cover change (LUCC), but so far there have been few LUCC studies conducted in Africa. We present several methods that make use of remotely sensed data and landscape metrics and allow for assessment of the development of land cover and thus forest fragmentation and disturbance ov...

In order to understand causes and effects of disturbance and fragmentation on flora and fauna, a time series on land cover change is needed as basis for the BIOTA-East Africa project partners working in western Kenya. For 7 time steps over the past 30 years Land- sat data were collected for Kakamega Forest and its associated forest areas. Preproces...

Within the BIOTA East Africa project the influence of fragmentation and human use on the biodiversity of East-African rainforests is investigated following an interdisciplinary and integrated research approach. In order to provide information on land use/cover change to the biologists, ecologists and socio-economists involved, subproject E02 is ass...