Johannes Rüdisser | University of Innsbruck (original) (raw)

Papers by Johannes Rüdisser

A habitat model was developed to evaluate potential distribution patterns of the lynx ( Lynx lynx... more A habitat model was developed to evaluate potential distribution patterns of the lynx ( Lynx lynx) in western Austria. Ecological and anthropological conflicts connected with a possible re-colonisation were considered by combining this model with data about live stock, housing areas, streets, and other parameters. 58% (11,356 km2) of the study area could be identified as suitable lynx habitat. This area was divided into 6 Lynx Management Zones. Europäische Akademie Bozen Fachbereich Alpine Umwelt Roberta Bottarin, Ulrike Tappeiner (Editors) Interdisciplinary Mountain Research

The assessment of the burden of exposure to community noise is primarily based on the effects of ... more The assessment of the burden of exposure to community noise is primarily based on the effects of noise on annoyance. Although other more specific health effects exist (e.g. cognitive impairment, insomnia, hypertension) the less-specific general expression of community annoyance is assumed to provide the best estimate of the overall effect environmental noise exerts on society (CALM network 2007). Therefore, the European environmental noise directive (END) builts its actual strategy to combat noise upon the assessment of noise effects derived from standard noise annoyance curves (European Noise Directive 2002/49/EC). The claim made is that reliable estimates of community effects can be provided by linking the information of large-scale noise mapping efforts to the standard curves (Miedema & Vos 1998; Miedema & Oudshoorn 2001). This is clearly a step ahead for the implementation of a evidencebased policy at the national and supra-national level. It may, however, be not an appropriate ...

Traffic noise exposure in the community is generally considered as a weak risk factor for more se... more Traffic noise exposure in the community is generally considered as a weak risk factor for more severe health effects. Reported relative risks associated with noise exposure vary typically in the range of 1.0 to 1.5 (Babisch 2006, 2008) for cardio-vascular effects. As it is known from annoyance research that up to three quarters of the variance can be explained by non-acoustic factors (Job 1988) it is a major public health interest to gain equally insight into co-determinants/moderators for other health effects of noise which render people with certain personal or environmental characteristics at higher risk than others. Hitherto, only few studies reported the modifying effect on the noise-health relationship of personal and environmental factors.

Italian Journal of Public Health, 2008

Background: Environmental health studies often deal with health problems that are influenced by f... more Background: Environmental health studies often deal with health problems that are influenced by factors with a strong spatial component. However, most analyses of routinely collected health data (cancer register, medication data etc.) are performed at a spatially higher aggregated level. Analyses based on administrative units are frequently subject to confounding by different exposures or other factors and therefore possible effects may remain uncovered or effect estimates distorted. Methods: A medication prevalence study in the Tyrolean Wipptal, is presented as example for an address based analysis of public health data. To assess whether road or rail exposure is associated with the prescription of medicines the study population was divided in subgroups based on traffic source exposure levels at each address (exposure groups). The medication prevalence proportion for each exposure group was estimated using health insurance data. Results: Significant differences in medication for various exposure groups could be found. Mainly the railway and main road exposure groups showed higher medication prevalence in some age and medication groups. Conclusions: Address based spatial analysis of health register data is still an underutilized Public health technique. A persistent problem is the availability of important covariates (education, income etc.) on a more detailed level than municipalities. This situation might be improved if national statistics agencies provide such statistical data on the basis of the European wide raster system.

In order to understand the dynamics of the urbanization and suburbanization processes and hence t... more In order to understand the dynamics of the urbanization and suburbanization processes and hence to quantify the anthropogenic effects of the rapid growth of tropical cities, it is crucial to find and apply valuable methods. In this contribution, the transferability of the Rüdisser et al. (2012) “Distance to Nature” hemeroby assessment method to the landscapes surrounding the city of Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is evaluated. This methodology has the advantage of taking into account the structural connectivity of the landscape through the consideration of the distance to natural habitats. Since it has never been applied to an African city before, some adjustments (fitting of the local land use and cover types into the hemeroby levels designed for Austria; no final hemeroby level simplification) are proposed. Moreover, an analysis of the decennial (2002-2013) hemeroby dynamics is presented. The results suggest that the “Distance to Nature” methodology is transfe...

Sustainability, Apr 8, 2020

Ecological footprint analyses demonstrate that the world's more than 7.5 billion people consume m... more Ecological footprint analyses demonstrate that the world's more than 7.5 billion people consume multiple planets' worth of resources. To incite and evaluate societal changes for the sustainable use of the environment and its natural resources, the ecosystem service (ES) concept was developed more than 20 years ago. To ensure the sustainable provision of indispensable ES, the concept has been refined and enhanced, enabling its application across various temporal and spatial scales. However, evidence-based strategies and policies are needed to preserve biodiversity and natural capital in our changing world. This Special Issue comprises studies advancing the frameworks, concepts, and applications related to ES assessment, with a particular focus on social-ecological systems. To broadly apply the ES concept in different social-ecological systems, several key issues emerged: (1) ES-related definitions and procedures should be improved and standardized; (2) the complexity of the interactions in a social-ecological system must be recognized, and knowledge about spatial and temporal dynamics and interactions among multiple ESs must be deepened; and (3) communication about ES, considering cultural and stakeholder differences, must be increased.

Science of The Total Environment

Journal of Science Communication

Citizen science (CS) terms the active participation of the general public in scientific research ... more Citizen science (CS) terms the active participation of the general public in scientific research activities. With increasing amounts of information generated by citizen scientists, best practices to go beyond science communication and publish these findings to the scientific community are needed. This letter is a synopsis of authors' personal experiences when publishing results from citizen science projects in peer-reviewed journals, as presented at the Austrian Citizen Science Conference 2018. Here, we address authors' selection criteria for publishing CS data in open-access, peer-reviewed scientific journals as well as barriers encountered during the publishing process. We also outline factors that influence the probability of publication using CS data, including 1) funding to cover publication costs; 2) quality, quantity and scientific novelty of CS data; 3) recommendations to acknowledge contributions of citizen scientists in scientific, peer-reviewed publications; 4) ci...

Landscape Ecology

Context Biophony is the acoustic manifestation of biodiversity, and humans interact with biophony... more Context Biophony is the acoustic manifestation of biodiversity, and humans interact with biophony in many ways. However, quantifying biophony across urban landscapes has proven difficult in the presence of anthrophony, or sounds generated by humans. Improved assessment methods are required to progress our understanding of the processes influencing biophony across a variety of spatial-temporal scales. Objectives We aimed to identify how the landscape influences biophony, as well as the total acoustic environment, along an urban to rural gradient. We designed the study to quantify how soundscapelandscape relationships change across a variety of spatial-temporal scales. Methods We recorded the afternoon acoustic environment during the spring of 2016 at 30 locations in the city of Innsbruck, Austria using a spatially balanced random sampling design. We quantified the total acoustic environment with the sound exposure level (SEL) metric, and developed a new metric, percent biophony (PB), to quantify biophony while avoiding noise bias. We quantified relationships with land cover (LC) classes, as well as a landscape index, distance to nature (D 2 N), across 10 scales. Results D 2 N within 1280 m best predicted PB, while both the LC class trees and D 2 N within 40 m best predicted SEL. PB increased more throughout the spring at locations with more natural surrounding LC, while PB did not change significantly at locations with more urban surrounding LC. Conclusions LC and composite indices can serve as reasonable predictors for the acoustic environment; however, the relationships are scale dependent. Mapping soundscapes can help to illustrate possible driving mechanisms and provide a valuable tool for urban management and planning.

Ecological Indicators

Farmers are important actors for regional development and biodiversity protection. Agri-environme... more Farmers are important actors for regional development and biodiversity protection. Agri-environment-climate measures (AECM) are therefore a central tool of the European Union to support its biodiversity conservation policy. AECM generally reward farmers for fulfilling predefined management actions or avoiding specific practices. In contrast, result oriented AECM are intended to reward farmers for the outcome of nature friendly management practices. This approach gives more flexibility in management and hence promotes farmers engagement and autonomy. Besides educational activities and agricultural advisory services farmers need user friendly tools to assess biodiversity in order to meet result oriented AECM. Thus, we present a biodiversity assessment scheme for farmland using a set of indicators, which covers different aspects of biodiversity (flower colour index, butterfly abundance, landscape structuring degree, patch diversity index, aggregated biodiversity index) and can be applied at different spatial scales. The assessment scheme is applied on 44 farms in five countries (France, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and Austria). To evaluate its appropriateness the relationship between the indicators and land-use intensity and plant species richness is investigated. Grasslands with low land-use intensity are more colourful grasslands, have significantly more butterflies and a higher aggregated biodiversity index than moderately and intensively used grasslands. The influence of management intensity on the landscape structuring degree is not significant. All indicators correlate with plant species richness at all spatial scales. The proposed assessment scheme serves as a tool for the detection of differences in biodiversity resulting from land-use practices, and can assist the monitoring of ROMs.

Sustainability

A key challenge in the sustainable management of freshwater is related to non-stationary processe... more A key challenge in the sustainable management of freshwater is related to non-stationary processes and transboundary requirements. The assessment of freshwater is often hampered due to small-scale analyses, lacking data and with the focus on only its provision. Based on the ecosystem service (ES) concept, this study aims at quantitatively comparing potential water supply with the demand for freshwater in the European Alps and their surrounding lowlands. We propose an easy-to-use combination of different mapping approaches, including a large-scale hydrologic model to estimate water supply and the downscaling of regional data to the local scale to map demand. Our results demonstrate spatial mismatches between supply and demand and a high dependency of the densely populated lowlands from water providing mountain areas. Under expected climate variations and future demographic changes, our results suggest increasing pressures on freshwater in the south of the Alps. Hence, sustainable wat...

Ecosystems

The role of ecosystems as carbon (C) sinks or sources is intrinsically related to land-use intens... more The role of ecosystems as carbon (C) sinks or sources is intrinsically related to land-use intensity, which determines the land required for biomass production. Here, we systematically investigate the role of different land-use types including their land-use intensities on vegetation C-stocks (SC act) in the Stubai valley, located in the Austrian central Alps. After a period of high land-use impacts until 1954, indicated by massive C-depletion, land-use shifted to completely new courses. Polarization into high-intensity low-land areas and extensification at higher altitudes allowed for a tripling of SC act until 2003. The most important land-use change was the intensification of the livestock sector accompanied by abandonment of extensive grasslands and reduced harvest pressure on forests after WWII. Market integration, abundance of fossil energy carriers, as well as structural change of the economy were important underlying socioeconomic drivers of these trends. However, despite this remarkable SC act increase , SC act amounted to only 62% of the potential carbon stocks (SC pot) in 2003. Although conversion of forests to agriculture clearly contributed the lion's share to this SC-gap, forest management explains roughly one quarter of the SC-difference. We found that time-lags between land-use shifts and the establishment of a new C-climax had fundamental repercussions on recent C-dynamics in the study region. Apparently, the land system is still net-accumulating C, although land-use changes have peaked decades earlier. Our findings are crucial for the understanding of C-dynamics, including the role of land management and time-lags in mountainous regions, which are regarded key areas for terrestrial C-sequestration.

Die Qualität und Aussagekraft umweltepidemiologischer Studien wird stark von der räumlichen Auflö... more Die Qualität und Aussagekraft umweltepidemiologischer Studien wird stark von der räumlichen Auflösung der verwendeten Daten beeinflusst. Die Ausbreitung von Schadstoffen und Lärm unterliegt physikalischen Gesetzmäßigkeiten und besitzt somit eine starke Raumkomponente. Analysen auf Basis von administrativen Einheiten führen in vielen Fällen zu einer starken Vermischung unterschiedlichster Expositionen und mögliche Zusammenhänge können dadurch nicht oder nur eingeschränkt nachgewiesen werden. Am Beispiel einer im Tiroler Wipptal durchgeführten Medikations-Studie wird die Möglichkeit einer adressbasierten Analyse von flächendeckenden Gesundheits- und Verkehrsdaten vorgestellt und diskutiert.