Hydrology is reflected in the functioning and community composition of methanotrophs in the littoral wetland of a boreal lake

2010

In lake ecosystems a major proportion of methane (CH4) emissions originate from the littoral zone, which can have a great spatial variability in hydrology, soil quality and vegetation. Hitherto, spatial heterogeneity and the effects it has on functioning and diversity of methanotrophs in littoral wetlands have been poorly understood. A diagnostic microarray based on the particulate methane monooxygenase gene coupled with geostatistics was used to analyse spatial patterns of methanotrophs in the littoral wetland of a eutrophic boreal lake (Lake Kevaton, Eastern Finland). The wetland had a hydrology gradient with a mean water table varying from −8 to −25 cm. The wettest area, comprising the h…

Iron and pH regulating the photochemical mineralization of dissolved organic carbon

2017

Solar radiation mineralizes dissolved organic matter (DOM) to dissolved inorganic carbon through photochemical reactions (DIC photoproduction) that are influenced by iron (Fe) and pH. This study addressed as to what extent Fe contributes to the optical properties of the chromophoric DOM (CDOM) and DIC photoproduction at different pH values. We created the associations of Fe and DOM (Fe-DOM) that cover the range of loadings of Fe on DOM and pH values found in freshwaters. The introduced Fe enhanced the light absorption by CDOM independent of pH. Simulated solar irradiation decreased the light absorption by CDOM (i.e., caused photobleaching). Fe raised the rate of photobleaching and steepened…

Predicting valuable forest habitats using an indicator species for biodiversity

2020

Intensive management of boreal forests impairs forest biodiversity and species of old-growth forest. Effective measures to support biodiversity require detection of locations valuable for conservation. We applied species distribution models (SDMs) to a species of mature forest, the northern goshawk (Accipiter gentilis, goshawk), that is often associated with hotspots of forest biodiversity. We located optimal sites for the goshawk on a landscape scale, assessed their state under intensified logging operations and identified characteristics of goshawks' nesting sites in boreal forests. Optimal sites for the goshawk covered only 3.4% of the boreal landscape and were mostly located outside pro…

Computationally intelligent methods for qualitative data analysis

2002

This study focuses on computationally intelligent methods, which are applied to the analysis of survey data in educational research. The methods can be used with complex data sets, which contain several data types. Each data type is analyzed in a separate subanalysis, and the results from these subanalyses can be combined. The methodology makes it possible to locate groups of similar answers from the subanalyses, and to identify these groups using background information. It also allows one to compare groups that are selected from different subanalyses, from different populations, and to locate and identify similar textual answers. In connection to this study, a software application has been…

The Influence of Solar Power Plants on Microclimatic Conditions and the Biotic Community in Chilean Desert Environments

2016

The renewable energy sector is growing at a rapid pace in northern Chile and the solar energy potential is one of the best worldwide. Therefore, many types of solar power plant facilities are being built to take advantage of this renewable energy resource. Solar energy is considered a clean source of energy, but there are potential environmental effects of solar technology, such as landscape fragmentation, extinction of local biota, microclimate changes, among others. To be able to minimize environmental impacts of solar power plants, it is important to know what kind of environmental conditions solar power plants create. This study provides information about abiotic and biotic conditions i…

Does stump removal affect early growth and mycorrhizal infection of spruce (Picea abies) seedlings in clear-cuts?

2012

Abstract Stump removal procedure increases the extent of exposed mineral soil in the clear felled areas. In this study, our aim was to find out whether the early growth and mycorrhization of Norway spruce (Picea abies (L.) Karst.) seedlings differ between stump removal and mounding sites. Stumps were harvested from five one-hectare study sites and other five sites were mounded after clear felling. Twenty seedlings were planted on mounds at each study site. Although the height of spruce seedlings did not differ between the treatments after three growing periods, their mean growth was ca. 10% higher at the stump removal sites. The community of ectomycorrhizal (ECM) in the seedling roots did n…

What makes segmentation good? A case study in boreal forest habitat mapping

2013

Segmentation goodness evaluation is a set of approaches meant for deciding which segmentation is good. In this study, we tested different supervised segmentation evaluation measures and visual interpretation in the case of boreal forest habitat mapping in Southern Finland. The data used were WorldView-2 satellite imagery, a lidar digital elevation model (DEM), and a canopy height model (CHM) in 2 m resolution. The segmentation methods tested were the fractal net evolution approach (FNEA) and IDRISI watershed segmentation. Overall, 252 different segmentation methods, layers, and parameter combinations were tested. We also used eight different habitat delineations as reference polygons agains…

Oxygen and carbon isoscapes for the Baltic Sea : Testing their applicability in fish migration studies

2017

Conventional tags applied to individuals have been used to investigate animal movement, but these methods require tagged individuals be recaptured. Maps of regional isotopic variability known as “isoscapes” offer potential for various applications in migration research without tagging wherein isotope values of tissues are compared to environmental isotope values. In this study, we present the spatial variability in oxygen (δ18OH2O) and dissolved inorganic carbon (δ13CDIC) isotope values of Baltic Sea water. We also provide an example of how these isoscapes can reveal locations of individual animal via spatial probability surface maps, using the high-resolution salmon otolith isotope data fr…

Winter climate signal in boreal clastic-biogenic varves : a comprehensive analysis of three varved records from 1890 to 1990 AD with meteorological a…

2017

Clastic-biogenic varves are widely used for reconstructing past climate: in boreal environments, the accumulation of minerogenic clasts on the lake floor is generally considered a proxy for past variations in spring floods reflecting previous winter conditions. However, the physical mechanisms behind this winter climate sensitivity and the influence of catchment type on the varve formation are not fully investigated. Here, we present a winter climate record inferred from the clastic laminae of three lakes located on the region of fine-grained tills in Eastern Finland spanning from AD 1890 to 1990. The minerogenic varve data are compared with instrumental meteorological and hydrological time…

Landowners’ willingness to promote bioenergy production on wasteland − future impact on land use of cutaway peatlands

2017

Landowners are the key players in bioenergy production on wasteland; such as cutaway peatlands. In this study, the landowner's interest to use cutaway peatlands for bioenergy production was investigated using a survey and GIS (Geographic Information Systems) methods in an area in South Ostrobothnia, Finland. The focus was to identify which different bioenergy production chains are preferred by the respondents: combustion, gasification or biogas production from agriculture, energy-willow short-rotation forestry or forestry based energy crops. Also, the influence of personal environmental values on the selection was measured and the future impacts and barriers for the land use were assessed. …

The relevance of ecological status to ecosystem functions and services in a large boreal lake

2014

Summary Environmental conventions aim to protect ecosystem structures and functions to provide goods and services for mankind. The degree of aquatic ecosystem naturalness, or ecological status as it is defined in the Water Framework Directive (WFD) of the European Union, is notionally linked to supplies of ecosystem services. In practice, these links have rarely been documented or even investigated, and to justify conservation and management objectives based on the status indicators, it is essential to demonstrate their relationships to ecosystem functions and services. The WFD requires member states to classify their surface waters aiming to achieve good ecological status of water bodies. …

Coupling high-resolution satellite imagery with ALS-based canopy height model and digital elevation model in object-based boreal forest habitat type …

2014

We developed a classification workflow for boreal forest habitat type mapping. In object-based image analysis framework, Fractal Net Evolution Approach segmentation was combined with random forest classification. High-resolution WorldView-2 imagery was coupled with ALS based canopy height model and digital terrain model. We calculated several features (e.g. spectral, textural and topographic) per image object from the used datasets. We tested different feature set alternatives; a classification accuracy of 78.0 % was obtained when all features were used. The highest classification accuracy (79.1 %) was obtained when the amount of features was reduced from the initial 328 to the 100 most imp…

Parent-Child Similarity in Environmental Attitudes: A Pairwise Comparison

2012

Are adolescents’ environmental attitudes similar to their parents’ attitudes? The main objective of this study is to examine what quantitative associations, if any, exist in parent-child environmental attitudes within the family. The survey data was collected assessing attitudes toward the environment and nature from 15-year-old students (n = 237) and their parents (n = 212) in Finland. A significant positive correlation emerged in environmental attitudes between mothers and fathers. Interestingly, the results revealed some indicative evidence that girls’ environmental attitudes could relate more to their father's than mother's attitudes. Girls were as positive in their environmental attitu…

Organic lacustrine sediment varves as indicators of past precipitation changes: a 3,000-year climate record from Central Finland

2015

Annually laminated (varved) sediments from Lake Kallio-Kourujärvi, Central Finland, provide high-resolution sedimentological data for the last three millennia. These varves consist of two laminae that represent (1) deposition during the spring-to-autumn growing season, composed of degraded organic matter and a variety of microfossils, and (2) deposition during winter, composed of fine-grained homogenous organic matter. Because of the absence of a clastic lamina, these varves differ from the typical, well-described, clastic-organic varve sequences in Fennoscandian lakes. Such organic varves in Finnish lakes have not been studied in detail before. Three thousand varves were counted and their …

Planning land use for biogas energy crop production: The potential of cutaway peat production lands

2016

Each year, thousands of hectares of peatland that had been harvested are being released in Finland, which can offer an opportunity to increase energy crops and attain the bioenergy targets for non-agriculture lands. In this study, the Geographic Information System (GIS) method was used to improve the assessment of decentralized renewable energy resources. The amount of peat production lands and future cutaway areas for energy crop production was calculated as a case study by using ArcGIS and the Finnish Topographic database. There are almost 1000 km2 of peat production lands in Finland, and theoretically, approximately 300 km2 of cutaway peatlands could be used for energy crops after 30 yea…

Assessing the Impact of Road and Land Use on Species Diversity of Trees, Shrubs, Herbs and Grasses in the Mountain Landscape in Southern Africa

2022

Mountain landscape, described as a global biodiversity hotspot due to high endemism, is threatened by land-use change, including management and modification of vegetation. However, there is little knowledge about how road and land use affect plant diversity in mountains landscapes, particularly in southern Africa. Previous studies have studied the impact of the road or land use on plant species diversity separately and have concentrated on a single plant species. Here we compare the plant diversity of regenerated trees, shrubs, herbaceous plant, and grasses among Forest, Fallow, Agriculture, and Road in the Moribane Forest Reserve (MFR), in Eastern Chimanimani Mountain landscape in Mozambiq…

Development of microbial populations in the anaerobic hydrolysis of grass silage for methane production

2010

Six batch leach bed (LB) reactors, installed in parallel and connected to a common upflow anaerobic sludge blanket reactor, were fed with grass silage and operated at 35 (+/-1) degrees C. The development and distribution of microorganisms, which firmly and loosely attached to solid materials, and presented in the leachate in the LB reactors, were investigated by 16S rRNA gene-based terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism and clone library analyses. The phylotypes and their relative abundance changed in the respective bacterial community throughout the 49-day run and showed differences between the communities. Large numbers of phylotypes were detected from day 10 onwards. On day 17…

Methane oxidation at a surface-sealed boreal landfill.

2009

Abstract Methane oxidation was studied at a closed boreal landfill (area 3.9 ha, amount of deposited waste 200,000 tonnes) equipped with a passive gas collection and distribution system and a methane oxidative top soil cover integrated in a European Union landfill directive-compliant, multilayer final cover. Gas wells and distribution pipes with valves were installed to direct landfill gas through the water impermeable layer into the top soil cover. Mean methane emissions at the 25 measuring points at four measurement times (October 2005–June 2006) were 0.86–6.2 m 3  ha −1  h −1 . Conservative estimates indicated that at least 25% of the methane flux entering the soil cover at the measuring…

Design of a Cleaning Program for a PV Plant Based on Analysis of Energy Losses

2015

Solar photovoltaic (PV) energy has grown significantly over the past few years. However, despite the increase in installed capacity, this energy source still raises important concerns related to the variability of power production. The short-term effects such as cloud shadowing and supply interruptions, as well as long-term effects such as dust accumulation, seasonal variation, and ageing of PV modules, can cause variability of power production. Therefore, the analysis of all the variability sources in order to provide statistically consistent power production data is an important challenge. This study presents a methodology to analyze data from a PV plant in order to have an independent ev…

GIS-data related route optimization, hierarchical clustering, location optimization, and kernel density methods are useful for promoting distributed …

2019

Currently, geographic information system (GIS) models are popular for studying location-allocation-related questions concerning bioenergy plants. The aim of this study was to develop a model to investigate optimal locations for two different types of bioenergy plants, for farm and centralized biogas plants, and for wood terminals in rural areas based on minimizing transportation distances. The optimal locations of biogas plants were determined using location optimization tools in R software, and the optimal locations of wood terminals were determined using kernel density tools in ArcGIS. The present case study showed that the utilized GIS tools are useful for bioenergy-related decision-maki…

A practical approach to improve the statistical performance of surface water monitoring networks

2019

The representativeness of aquatic ecosystem monitoring and the precision of the assessment results are of high importance when implementing the EU’s Water Framework Directive that aims to secure a good status of waterbodies in Europe. However, adapting monitoring designs to answer the objectives and allocating the sampling resources effectively are seldom practiced. Here, we present a practical solution how the sampling effort could be re-allocated without decreasing the precision and confidence of status class assignment. For demonstrating this, we used a large data set of 272 intensively monitored Finnish lake, coastal, and river waterbodies utilizing an existing framework for quantifying…

Consequences of forest landscape changes on the availability of winter pastures for reindeer (Rangifer tarandus tarandus) from 1953 to 2003 in Kuusam…

2013

Complexity Selection of the Self-Organizing Map

2002

This paper describes how the complexity of the Self-Organizing Map can be selected using the Minimum Message Length principle. The use of the method in textual data analysis is also demonstrated.

A Parallel Implementation of the Tree-Structured Self-Organizing Map

2002

This paper presents how Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs)can be trained efficiently using several, simultaneously executing threads on a shared memory Symmetric MultiProcessing (SMP)computer. The training method is a batch version of the Tree-Structured Self-Organizing Map. We note that SMP type of parallel training is very useful for large data sets obtained from nature, the process industry or large document collections, since we do not encounter similar model size limitations as with hardware SOM implementations.

An Empirical Evaluation of the Utility of Convex Hull and Standard Ellipse Areas for Assessing Population Niche Widths from Stable Isotope Data

2013

Stable isotope analyses are increasingly employed to characterise population niche widths. The convex hull area (TA) in a δ¹³C–δ¹⁵N biplot has been used as a measure of isotopic niche width, but concerns exist over its dependence on sample size and associated difficulties in among-population comparisons. Recently a more robust method was proposed for estimating and comparing isotopic niche widths using standard ellipse areas (SEA), but this approach has yet to be tested with empirical stable isotope data. The two methods measure different kind of isotopic niche areas, but both are now widely used to characterise isotopic niche widths of populations. We used simulated data and an extensive e…

Comparing Conservation Value Maps and Mapping Methods in a Rural Landscape in Southern Finland

2015

We tested to what extent conservation value maps are different if the valuation and mapping method is changed. We compared 66 different conservation value and 4 different ecosystem service maps. Using remote sensing and other georeferenced data, we produced 2 different habitat type maps, which were 50 % similar. We valued each mapped habitat type based on rarity corrected potential number of vascular plant species and naturalness using 6 different valuation alternatives. We mapped habitat type connectivity and complementarity using 2 main approaches. The habitat type valuation alternatives were quite similar, but if the habitat type naturalness was taken into account, differences were large…

Optimization of photovoltaic solar power plant locations in northern Chile

2017

The optimization of photovoltaic solar power plants location in Atacama Desert, Chile, is presented in this study. The study considers three objectives: (1) Find sites with the highest solar energy potential, (2) determine sites with the least impact on the environment, and (3) locate the areas which produce small social impact. To solve this task, multi-criteria decision analyses (MCDAs) such as analytical hierarchy process and ordered weighted averaging were applied in a GIS environment. In addition, survey results of social impacts were analyzed and included into the decision-making process, including landscape values. The most suitable sites for solar energy projects were found near roa…

The role of landscape, topography, and geodiversity in explaining vascular plant species richness in a fragmented landscape

2016

We explained vascular plant species richness patterns in a 286 km(2) fragmented landscape with a notable human influence. The objective of this study was two-fold: to test the relative importance of landscape, topography and geodiversity measures, and to compare three different landscape-type variables in species richness modeling. Moreover, we tested if results differ when only native species are considered. We used generalized linear modeling based variation partitioning and generalized additive models with different explanatory variable sets. Landscape and topography explained the majority of the variation but the relative importance of topography and geodiversity was higher in explainin…

Analysis of Multi-Choice Questionnaires through Self-Organizing Maps

1998

This paper describes how Self-Organizing Maps can be used to analyse multi-choice gallups. In this method, the use of a single SOM for all available data is replaced with the use of multiple SOMs trained with subsets of gallup questions. The subgroupings located from these maps are then used to train a new concluding SOM that is more readable than any single SOM analysis would be.

An automatic quality system for injection molding

2007

This paper describes a fully automatic quality system for injection molding. The proposed system includes an on-line measurement platform with a digital camera, a methodology for adaptive design of experiments (DOE), statistical modeling, process monitoring, and a closed loop process control. The system has been tested in the manufacturing of plastic parts for mobile phones.

Data from: The relevance of ecological status to ecosystem functions and services in a large boreal lake

2015

1. Environmental conventions aim to protect ecosystem structures and functions to provide goods and services for mankind. The degree of aquatic ecosystem naturalness, or ecological status as it is defined in the Water Framework Directive (WFD) of the European Union, is notionally linked to supplies of ecosystem services. In practice these links have rarely been documented or even investigated and, to justify conservation and management objectives based on the status indicators, it is essential to demonstrate their relationships to ecosystem functions and services. 2. The WFD requires member states to classify their surface waters aiming to achieve good ecological status of water bodies. How…

Data from: Oxygen and carbon isoscapes for the Baltic Sea: testing their applicability in fish migration studies

2018

Conventional tags applied to individuals have been used to investigate animal movement, but these methods require tagged individuals be recaptured. Maps of regional isotopic variability known as “isoscapes” offer potential for various applications in migration research without tagging wherein isotope values of tissues are compared to environmental isotope values. In this study, we present the spatial variability in oxygen (math formula) and dissolved inorganic carbon (δ13CDIC) isotope values of Baltic Sea water. We also provide an example of how these isoscapes can reveal locations of individual animal via spatial probability surface maps, using the high-resolution salmon otolith isotope da…

Using GIS tools to identify conservation hot spots in large boreal lakes

2018

Balancing the growing demands of human population and sustainable use of natural resources is a great challenge for humankind and the target of several international environmental conventions. Water Framework Directive (WFD) of the European Union aims at perceiving ecosystem services provided by aquatic ecosystems, while EU Habitats Directive (HD) along with the Natura 2000 network is to ensure the long-term survival of valuable habitats in aquatic as well as terrestrial environments. Both WFD and HD treat boreal lakes as large entities. In large lake systems, the assessment of lake bodies’ ecological and conservation status is determined over tens or even hundreds of square kilometres and …