Search results for " law."
showing 10 items of 4351 documents
Artificial germination activation of Dialium corbisieri by imitation of ecological process.
2013
11 pages; International audience; Species of the gender Dialium commonly are trees found in Central African rainforests. They produce tasty sugary fruits, feeding numerous frugivores, but are, despite their valuable nutritional value, rarely exploited by humans. A potential reason for this could be the complexity of symbiotic dependence between trees and pollinators, germination activators, and dispersers causing problems in ancestral and contemporary domestication. We investigated Dialium corbisieri reproduction in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Bandundu Province. Here we give a key for an artificial activation of germination of these trees ecologically adapted to the digestive syst…
Sustainable Mixed Cropping Systems for the Boreal-Nemoral Region
2020
Mixed cropping, including intercropping, is the oldest form of systemized agricultural production and involves the growing of two or more species or cultivars of the same species simultaneously in the same field. However, mixed cropping has been little by little replaced by sole crop systems, especially in developed countries. Some of the advantages of mixed cropping are, for example, resource use efficiency and yield stability, but there are also several challenges, such as weed management and competition. The boreal-nemoral region lies within the region 55° to 70° N. In this area, for example in Finland, the length of the thermal growing season varies from less than 105 to over 185 days. …
A mixture of human and climatic effects shapes the 250-year long fire history of a semi-natural pine dominated landscape of Northern Latvia
2019
Abstract Fire has been shown to shape successional pathways and dynamics of forest vegetation. However, its role in European hemiboreal forests remains poorly understood. Here we provide the first annually resolved reconstruction of fire history from the Eastern Baltic Sea region, developed in the pine-dominated landscape of Slitere National Park (SNP), northwestern Latvia, over the last 250 years. Our results suggest that forest fires have been a common disturbance factor in the studied landscape. In total, we dated 62 single fire years, with the mean-point scale fire return interval of 46 years and the length of the fire cycle ranging from 45 to 80 years. We identified periods of high (17…
Litter quality, land-use history, and nitrogen deposition effects on topsoil conditions across European temperate deciduous forests
2019
Topsoil conditions in temperate forests are influenced by several soil-forming factors, such as canopy composition (e.g. through litter quality), land-use history, atmospheric deposition, and the parent material. Many studies have evaluated the effects of single factors on physicochemical topsoil conditions, but few have assessed the simultaneous effects of multiple drivers. Here, we evaluate the combined effects of litter quality, land-use history (past land cover as well as past forest management), and atmospheric deposition on several physicochemical topsoil conditions of European temperate deciduous forest soils: bulk density, proportion of exchangeable base cations, carbon/nitrogen-rat…
Managing the Historical Agricultural Landscape in the Sicilian Anthropocene Context. The Landscape of the Valley of the Temples as a Time Capsule
2021
The debate over whether we are entering the Anthropocene Epoch focuses on the unequal consumption of the Earth system’s resources at the expense of nature’s regenerative abilities. To find a new point of balance with nature, it is useful to look back in time to understand how the so-called “Great Acceleration”—the surge in the consumption of the planet’s resources—hastened the arrival of the Anthropocene. Some particular places—for various reasons—survived the Great Acceleration and, as time capsules, have preserved more or less intact some landscape features that have disappeared elsewhere. How can we enhance these living archives that have come down to us? Through the analysis of the case…
Cost-effective forest conservation and criteria for potential conservation targets: a Finnish case study
2008
International audience; Selecting reserves for forest biodiversity maintenance is often done by setting criteria for components of structural elements of biodiversity, such as a volume of decaying wood. We tested how the different threshold values for the components of structural elements affect the cost-effective site selection. Using Finnish National Forest Inventory information and remote sensing data, we determined a habitat quality index and economic value for each site in Satakunta region in Finland. Moreover, we defined several sets of potential conservation targets using alternative criteria for the habitat quality index developed for the Finnish case study. These figures were used …
Female brown bears use areas with infanticide risk in a spatially confined population
2020
Areas used by female brown bears (Ursus arctos) with cubs-of-the-year (hereafter, FCOY) during the first months after den exit are crucial for offspring survival, primarily because of the risk of infanticide by male bears. Therefore, FCOY may avoid areas frequented by adult males during the mating season. The main aim of this study was to identify landscape features (i.e., structure, composition, and human footprint) that may differentiate the habitat use of FCOY in the small bear population of the Cantabrian Mountains (northwestern Spain; 2001–2016) from (a) areas frequented by females with yearlings, because older cubs are at less risk of infanticide than cubs-of-the-year, and (b) bear ma…
Perception-Based Study on the Value of Nature to People and Land Sparing for Nature in Brazil and Poland
2020
Understanding perception about nature is paramount to understanding human behavior and decision making on the environment. We performed a survey-based study in Brazil and Poland to better understand the perception of land sparing for nature and the perceived value of nature. The countries were selected by intentional sampling and given their importance for local and global biodiversity conservation, and complex socio-ecological context of conservation versus agroforestry business. We performed an online questionnaire (N = 1030) in Brazil and face-to-face interviews in Poland (N = 322). We found that Brazilian respondents demonstrated more pro-environmental attitudes than Polish survey parti…
Studying illegal online trades in plants: market characteristics, organisational and behavioural aspects, and policing challenges
2020
AbstractIllegal commerce in plants and their derivatives threatens and destroys numerous species and important natural resources, and may cause phytosanitary and health problems. This illegal trade, which has been boosted by the commercialisation of the Internet, has been relatively overlooked in criminological research. Furthermore, the policing of illegal plant markets remains limited and poorly resourced, with law enforcement agencies lacking awareness and technical capacity in investigation and prosecution services. Based on semi-structured interviews with law enforcement officers and other relevant experts, this study, developed in the context of the ESRC-funded project “FloraGuard: Ta…
European Vegetation Archive (EVA): an integrated database of European vegetation plots
2015
Biurrun, Idoia/0000-0002-1454-0433; Rojo, Maria Pilar Rodriguez/0000-0001-5449-9386; Ermakov, Nikolai/0000-0001-7550-990X; De Sanctis, Michele/0000-0002-7280-6199; Svenning, Jens-Christian/0000-0002-3415-0862; Virtanen, Risto/0000-0002-8295-8217; Agrillo, Emiliano/0000-0003-2346-8346; Onyshchenko, Viktor/0000-0001-9079-7241; Marceno, Corrado/0000-0003-4361-5200; Willner, Wolfgang/0000-0003-1591-8386; Fernandez-Gonzalez, Federico/0000-0003-1234-4065; Jansen, Florian/0000-0002-0331-5185; Swacha, Grzegorz/0000-0002-6380-2954; Dengler, Jurgen/0000-0003-3221-660X; Guarino, Riccardo/0000-0003-0106-9416; Sopotlieva, Desislava/0000-0002-9281-7039; Venanzoni, Roberto/0000-0002-7768-0468; Chytry, Mil…