The magnitude and pace of global change demand rapid assessment of nature and its contributions to people. We present a fine-scale global modeling of current status and future scenarios for several contributions: water quality regulation, coastal risk reduction, and crop pollination. We find that where people’s needs for nature are now greatest, nature’s ability to meet those needs is declining. Up to 5 billion people face higher water pollution and insufficient pollination for nutrition under future scenarios of land use and climate change, particularly in Africa and South Asia. Hundreds of millions of people face heightened coastal risk across Africa, Eurasia, and the Americas. Continued loss of nature poses severe threats, yet these can be reduced 3- to 10-fold under a sustainable development scenario.

The agricultural expansion and intensification required to meet growing food and agri-based product demand present important challenges to future levels and management of biodiversity and ecosystem services. Influential actors such as corporations, governments, and multilateral organizations have made commitments to meeting future agricultural demand sustainably and preserving critical ecosystems. Current approaches to predicting the impacts of agricultural expansion involve calculation of total land conversion and assessment of the impacts on biodiversity or ecosystem services on a per-area basis, generally assuming a linear relationship between impact and land area. However, the impacts of continuing land development are often not linear and can vary considerably with spatial configuration. We demonstrate what could be gained by spatially explicit analysis of agricultural expansion at a large scale compared with the simple measure of total area converted, with a focus on the impacts on biodiversity and carbon storage. Using simple modeling approaches for two regions of Brazil, we find that for the same amount of land conversion, the declines in biodiversity and carbon storage can vary two-to fourfold depending on the spatial pattern of conversion. Impacts increase most rapidly in the earliest stages of agricultural expansion and are more pronounced in scenarios where conversion occurs in forest interiors compared with expansion into forests from their edges. This study reveals the importance of spatially explicit information in the assessment of land-use change impacts and for future land management and conservation.ecosystem services | deforestation | agricultural expansion | fragmentation | edge effects

Carbon stock estimates based on land cover type are critical for informing climate change assessment and landscape management, but field and theoretical evidence indicates that forest fragmentation reduces the amount of carbon stored at forest edges. Here, using remotely sensed pantropical biomass and land cover data sets, we estimate that biomass within the first 500 m of the forest edge is on average 25% lower than in forest interiors and that reductions of 10% extend to 1.5 km from the forest edge. These findings suggest that IPCC Tier 1 methods overestimate carbon stocks in tropical forests by nearly 10%. Proper accounting for degradation at forest edges will inform better landscape and forest management and policies, as well as the assessment of carbon stocks at landscape and national levels.

BACKGROUND: Refractive surgery and videokeratography have allowed us to study the effects on visual performance of relatively large changes in corneal aberration structure induced by surgical changes in corneal shape. METHODS: We quantified in one eye of nine normal and 23 radial keratotomy patients, the area under the log contrast sensitivity function (AULCSF) and corneal first surface wavefront variance for two artificial pupil sizes (3 and 7 mm). Contrast sensitivity was measured with sine-wave gratings at six spacial frequencies. Wavefront variance was derived from videokeratographs using Zernike polynomials. RESULTS: For normals eyes there were no significant changes over time. For eyes that had radial keratotomy, there were significant pupil sizedependent changes. For the 3 mm pupil, there were significant surgery-induced changes in the corneal wavefront variance which became large (approximately 30 times preoperative values) at 7 mm. Significant correlated changes in AULCSF for the 7 mm pupil but not for the 3 mm pupil occurred immediately following surgery and remained. CONCLUSIONS: Radial keratotomy, like photorefractive keratectomy, shifts the distribution of aberrations from third order dominance (coma-like aberrations) to fourth order dominance (sphericallike aberrations). Radial keratotomy-induced aberrations and loss in contrast sensitivity are reduced with increasing clear zone diameter. Radial keratotomy induces an increase in the optical aberrations of the eye and the increase for large pupils (7 mm) but not small (3 mm) is correlated to a decrease in contrast sensitivity. [J Retract Surg 1998;14:397-4071

The inactivation of the retinoblastoma (Rb) tumor suppressor gene in mice results in ectopic proliferation, apoptosis, and impaired differentiation in extraembryonic, neural, and erythroid lineages, culminating in fetal death by embryonic day 15.5 (E15.5). Here we show that the specific loss of Rb in trophoblast stem (TS) cells, but not in trophoblast derivatives, leads to an overexpansion of trophoblasts, a disruption of placental architecture, and fetal death by E15.5. Despite profound placental abnormalities, fetal tissues appeared remarkably normal, suggesting that the full manifestation of fetal phenotypes requires the loss of Rb in both extraembryonic and fetal tissues. Loss of Rb resulted in an increase of E2f3 expression, and the combined ablation of Rb and E2f3 significantly suppressed Rb mutant phenotypes. This rescue appears to be cell autonomous since the inactivation of Rb and E2f3 in TS cells restored placental development and extended the life of embryos to E17.5. Taken together, these results demonstrate that loss of Rb in TS cells is the defining event causing lethality of Rb −/− embryos and reveal the convergence of extraembryonic and fetal functions of Rb in neural and erythroid development. We conclude that the Rb pathway plays a critical role in the maintenance of a mammalian stem cell population.[Keywords: Rb; development; placenta; stem cells] Supplemental material is available at http://www.genesdev.org. The retinoblastoma (Rb) tumor suppressor gene was identified more than two decades ago as the gene responsible for retinoblastoma, but has since been implicated in most human cancers. In contrast to retinoblastoma patients, inheritance of one deleted copy of Rb in mice did not induce retinoblastoma but did increase risk of pituitary and thyroid cancers (Jacks et al. 1992;Hu et al. 1994;Maandag et al. 1994;Williams et al. 1994;Robanus-Maandag et al. 1998;Yamasaki et al. 1998). Deletion of both copies of Rb in mice resulted in a broad range of severe abnormalities that lead to lethality by embryonic day 15.5 (E15.5) (Clarke et al. 1992;Jacks et al. 1992;Lee et al. 1992;Wu et al. 2003). Because Rb is normally expressed in all tissues of the mouse embryo, it was assumed that these developmental abnormalities were due to the absence of Rb protein in the tissues affected. Subsequent analysis of chimeric embryos suggested that Rb function is likely to be much more complex than initially suspected (Maandag et al. 1994;Lipinski et al. 2001). Indeed, recent findings showed that Rb-deficient embryos supplied with a wild-type placenta could develop to term and suggested a critical function of Rb in the placenta that might underlie many of the fetal developmental abnormalities observed in Rb −/− embryos Wu et al. 2003).Because Rb is involved in so many important pro-

A wide variety of tools aim to support decision making by modelling, mapping and quantifying ecosystem services. If decisions are to be properly informed, the accuracy and potential limitations of these tools must be well understood. However, dedicated studies evaluating ecosystem service models against empirical data are rare, especially over large areas. In this paper, we report on the national-scale assessment of a new ecosystem service model for nutrient delivery and retention, the InVEST Nutrient Delivery Ratio model. For 36 river catchments across the UK, we modelled total catchment export of phosphorus (P) and/or nitrogen (N) and compared model outputs to measurements derived from empirical water chemistry data. The model performed well in terms of relative magnitude of nutrient export among catchments (best Spearman's rank correlation for N and P, respectively: 0.81 and 0.88). However, there was wide variation among catchments in the accuracy of the model, and absolute values of nutrient exports frequently showed high percentage differences between modelled and empirically-derived exports (best median absolute percentage difference for N and P, respectively: ±64%, ±44%). The model also showed a high degree of sensitivity to nutrient loads and hydrologic routing input parameters and these sensitivities varied among catchments. These results suggest that the InVEST model can provide valuable information on nutrient fluxes to decision makers, especially in terms of relative differences among catchments. However, caution is needed if using the absolute modelled values for decision-making. Our study also suggests particular attention should be paid to researching input nutrient loadings and retentions, and the selection of appropriate input data resolutions and threshold flow accumulation values. Our results also highlight how availability of empirical data can improve model calibration and performance assessment and reinforce the need to include such data in ecosystem service modelling studies.

To support the assessments of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the IPBES Expert Group on Scenarios and Models is carrying out an intercomparison of biodiversity and ecosystem services models using harmonized scenarios (BES-SIM). The goals of BES-SIM are (1) to project the global impacts of land-use and climate change on biodiversity and ecosystem services (i.e., nature's contributions to people) over the coming decades, compared to the 20th century, using a set of common metrics at multiple scales, and (2) to identify model uncertainties and research gaps through the comparisons of projected biodiversity and ecosystem services across models. BES-SIM uses three scenarios combining specific Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs) and Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) -SSP1xRCP2.6, SSP3xRCP6.0, SSP5xRCP8.6 -to explore a wide range of land-use change and climate change futures. This paper describes the rationale for scenario selection, the process of harmonizing input data for land use, based on the second phase of the Land Use Harmonization Project (LUH2), and climate, the biodiversity and ecosystem services models used, the core simulations carried out, the harmonization of the model output metrics, and the treatment of uncertainty. The results of this collaborative modeling project will support the ongoing global assessment of IPBES, strengthen ties between IPBES and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenarios and modeling processes, advise the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) on its development of a post-2020 strategic plans and conservation goals, and inform the development of a new generation of nature-centred scenarios.

International corporations in an increasingly globalized economy exert a major influence on the planet's land use and resources through their product design and material sourcing decisions. Many companies use life cycle assessment (LCA) to evaluate their sustainability, yet commonly-used LCA methodologies lack the spatial resolution and predictive ecological information to reveal key impacts on climate, water and biodiversity. We present advances for LCA that integrate spatially explicit modelling of land change and ecosystem services in a Land-Use Change Improved (LUCI)-LCA. Comparing increased demand for bioplastics derived from two alternative feedstock-location scenarios for maize and sugarcane, we find that the LUCI-LCA approach yields results opposite to those of standard LCA for greenhouse gas emissions and water consumption, and of different magnitudes for soil erosion and biodiversity. This approach highlights the importance of including information about where and how land-use change and related impacts will occur in supply chain and innovation decisions.