Dynamic of Posidonia oceanica seagrass meadows in the northwestern Mediterranean: Could climate change be to blame?

The distribution and the vitality of the P. oceanica meadow were monitored in the western Mediterranean at 15 sites along the coasts of Corsica (1000 km of coastline) using two monitoring systems, the Posidonia Monitoring Network and SeagrassNet, between 2004 and 2013. While the vitality of the meadow is satisfactory overall, due to the low impact of human pressure along these coasts, patterns of change over time show a slight degradation of the main descriptors of the meadow. The meadow's vitality index had declined on average by 8.6%, the BiPo index by 9.8%, and there was a regression of the lower limit at six sites. While this pattern of change may reflect local alterations in the environment (increase or decline in human pressure), the regressive dynamic of the meadow observed at the lower limit at several reference sites (e.g., Marine Protected Areas, sites distant from sources of human impact) is more worrying. Two hypotheses might explain the regression observed: (i) the rise in mean sea level during the study period, which may have resulted in a significant regression in sectors where the slope is relatively slight, and (ii) the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), which declined from 2002 to reach very low values in 2010.

Performance of a protected wireless sensor network in a fire. Analysis of fire spread and data transmission.

The paper deals with a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) as a reliable solution for capturing the kinematics of a fire front spreading over a fuel bed. To provide reliable information in fire studies and support fire fighting strategies, a Wireless Sensor Network must be able to perform three sequential actions: 1) sensing thermal data in the open as the gas temperature; 2) detecting a fire i.e., the spatial position of a flame; 3) tracking the fire spread during its spatial and temporal evolution. One of the great challenges in performing fire front tracking with a WSN is to avoid the destruction of motes by the fire. This paper therefore shows the performance of Wireless Sensor Network when the motes are protected with a thermal insulation dedicated to track a fire spreading across vegetative fuels on a field scale. The resulting experimental WSN is then used in series of wildfire experiments performed in the open in vegetation areas ranging in size from 50 to 1,000 m(2).