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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (2 results)

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Frontiers of Biogeography, Volume 13, Issue 1 (2021)

With a growing emphasis on the societal benefits gained through recreation outdoors, a method is needed to identify which spaces are most valuable for providing those benefits. Social media platforms offer a wealth of useful information on where people prefer to enjoy the outdoors. We combined geotagged images from Flickr with several environmental metrics in a Maxent model to calculate the probability of a photograph being taken (the potential supply of recreational amenity). We then built a set of population density kernels to express the potential demand of recreational amenity. Linear regression was used to compare supply and demand layers to visitation records from 540 recreation sites across Europe. The result was a map estimating the number of visitors/km2/year. Our analysis showed that natural areas near population centres deliver more recreational benefit than attractive sites in remote locations. The former should therefore be prioritised by planners and policymakers seeking to protect or improve recreational amenity.

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Cover page: Devising a method to remotely model and map the distribution of natural landscapes in Europe with the greatest recreational amenity value (cultural services)Creative Commons 'BY' version 4.0 license
  • Article
  • Peer Reviewed
UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2023)
The mean state of the tropical Pacific ocean-atmosphere climate, in particular its east-west asymmetry, has profound consequences for regional climates and for the El Niño/Southern Oscillation variability. Here we present a new high-resolution paleohydrological record using the stable-hydrogen-isotopic composition of terrestrial-lipid biomarkers (δDwax) from a 1,400-year-old lake sedimentary sequence from northern Philippines. Results show a dramatic and abrupt increase in δDwax values around 1630 AD with sustained high values until around 1900 AD. We interpret this change as a shift to significantly drier conditions in the western tropical Pacific during the second half of the Little Ice Age as a result of a change in tropical Pacific mean state tied to zonal sea surface temperature (SST) gradients. Our findings highlight the prominent role of abrupt shifts in zonal SST gradients on multidecadal to multicentennial timescales in shaping the tropical Pacific hydrology of the last millennium, and demonstrate that a marked transition in the tropical Pacific mean state can occur within a period of a few decades.
    Creative Commons 'BY' version 4.0 license
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