Purpose of Review Climate warming may bear a penalty on future ozone air quality, even in the absence of changes in anthropogenic activities. This penalty has important implications for policy-making, but its quantification involves complex meteorological, chemical, and biological processes and feedbacks that are not well understood. We examined how climatesensitive processes may affect surface ozone, identified key knowledge gaps uncovered by recent studies, and summarized latest assessments of the climate change penalty on ozone air quality. Recent Findings Recent analyses have challenged earlier paradigms on how climate change may affect surface ozone. The widely accepted associations of high ozone events with stagnation and heat waves require re-examination. Emission responses of natural precursors to climate warming may be significantly modulated by CO 2 levels and ecosystem feedbacks, such that the direction of emission changes cannot be robustly determined at this time. Climate variability may drive fluctuations in surface ozone, which has implications for near-term air quality management. Recent studies have generally projected a climate change penalty on ozone air quality, although the magnitudes are smaller than those projected by earlier studies. Summary This review examined the latest understanding on the climate change penalty to surface ozone. Critical uncertainties are associated with the meteorological, chemical, and biological processes linking climate warming and ozone, and many of the known feedbacks are not yet included in models. Further research is needed to examine those processes in order to better quantify the climate change penalty on surface ozone to inform policy-making.
Understanding the relationship between landscape patterns and ecological processes has been a central yet challenging research theme in landscape ecology. Over the past decades, many landscape metrics have been proposed but few directly incorporated ecological processes. In this paper, we developed a landscape index, namely, location-weighted landscape index (LWLI) to highlight the role of landscape type in ecological processes, such as nutrient losses and soil erosion. Within the framework of the Lorenz curve theory, we develop this index by integrating landscape pattern and point-based measurements at a watershed scale. The index can be used to characterize the contribution of landscape pattern to ecological processes (e.g. nutrient losses) with respect to a specific monitoring point in a watershed. Through a case study on nutrient losses in an agricultural area in northeastern China, we found that nutrient losses tended to be higher for a watershed with a higher LWLI value, and vice versa. It implied that LWLI can be used to evaluate the potential risk of nutrient losses or soil erosion by comparing their values across watersheds. In addition, this index can be extended to characterize ecological processes, such as the effect of landscape pattern on wildlife inhabitation and urban heat island effect. Finally, we discuss several problems that should be paid attention to when applying this index to a heterogeneous landscape site.
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