Investigations in relation to environmental information in the glacial system in Mt. Yulong,

Slow sweep rate voltammetric analysis of the Cu/Cu͑II͒ deposition reaction is shown to be an effective tool for examining aging effects associated with thiol and disulfide additives that are widely employed as brighteners. Sulfonate-terminated short chain thiols are spontaneously oxidized by Cu͑II͒ to form disulfide molecules with the conversion being complete within a few hours of electrolyte preparation. An additional aging effect occurs during electrolysis in conventional unseparated electrochemical cells. At the anode, the disulfide is reduced by Cu͑I͒ forming thiolate complexes which subsequently affect the copper deposition reaction occurring at the cathode. The latter effect may be avoided by using a cation selective membrane to isolate the anode compartment.

All global circulation models based on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenarios project profound changes, but there is no consensus on how to map their environmental consequences. Our multivariate representation of environmental space combines stable topographic and edaphic attributes with dynamic climatic attributes. We divide that environmental space into 500 unique domains and map their current locations and their projected locations in 2100 under contrasting emissions scenarios. The environmental domains found across half the study area today disappear under the higher emissions scenario, but persist somewhere in it under the lower emissions scenario. Locations affected least and those affected most under each scenario are mapped. This provides an explicit framework for designing conservation networks to include both areas at least risk (potential refugia) and areas at greatest risk, where novel communities may form and where sentinel ecosystems can be monitored for signs of stress.

Changes in climate as projected by state-of-the-art climate models are likely to result in novel combinations of climate and topo-edaphic factors that will have substantial impacts on the distribution and persistence of natural vegetation and animal species. We have used multivariate techniques to quantify some of these changes; the method employed was the Multivariate Spatio-Temporal Clustering (MSTC) algorithm. We used the MSTC to quantitatively define ecoregions for the People's Republic of China for historical and projected future climates. Using the Köppen-Trewartha classification system we were able to quantify some of the temperature and precipitation relationships of the ecoregions. We then tested the hypothesis that impacts to environments will be lower for ecoregions that retain their approximate geographic locations. Our results showed that climate in 2050, as 114 Climatic Change (2010) 98:113-131 projected from anthropogenic forcings using the Hadley Centre HadCM3 general circulation model, were sufficient to create novel environmental conditions even where ecoregions remained spatially stable; cluster number was found to be of paramount importance in detecting novelty. Continental-scale analyses are generally able to locate potentially static ecoregions but they may be insufficient to define the position of those reserves at a grid cell-by-grid cell basis.