Search results for "Landscape"
showing 10 items of 1561 documents
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. …
Effects of habitat restoration on peatland bird communities
2020
Restoration of damaged ecosystems has become an important tool to slow down the biodiversity loss and to maintain ecosystem services. Peatland bird populations have shown a substantial decline during the recent decades in Northern Europe as a consequence of peatland drainage. We studied whether restoration of peatlands drained for forestry affects bird communities. We conducted bird surveys at 11 peatlands in Western Finland, where each of the restored and their pristine counterparts were surveyed before restoration and yearly after restoration during 2010–2018. We used linear mixed effect models to analyze whether restoration affected the number of species and territories of peatland speci…
Effects of Nile Tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus) on phytoplankton community structure and water quality: A short-term mesocosm study
2022
Nile tilapia is a highly invasive fish species, deliberately introduced into many lakes and reservoirs worldwide, sometimes resulting in significant ecosystem alterations. A short-term mesocosm experiment with and without Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus) was designed to test the hypotheses that the presence of tilapia may affect phytoplankton community structure, increase nutrients availability in water column and deteriorate water quality. Nutrients, total suspended solids (TSS) and biomass of phytoplankton in different size classes (as Chl a) were measured. We found that tilapia increased the total nitrogen (TN), total dissolved nitrogen (TDN), NH4 + and TSS concentrations, deteriorat…
Multiscale analysis of the effects of the landscape context and of the agricultural practices on the pest pressure and on the use of insecticides in …
2023
In the context of the need to reduce the dependence of agricultural systems on the use of plant protection products, the identification of factors affecting the capacity of farmers to reduce the use of pesticides is a central issue. It has now been shown that, in certain production contexts, this reduction is possible without economic loss for the farms, by modifying the cropping systems. It can be hypothesised that this capacity to reduce pesticides will depend on local pest pressure, which is itself potentially affected by the regional and local landscape context of cropping systems. In this thesis, we quantified the effects of landscape context on pest pressure and pesticide use levels i…
Two-state protein-like folding of a homopolymer chain
2010
Many small proteins fold via a first-order "all-or-none" transition directly from an expanded coil to a compact native state. Here we study an analogous direct freezing transition from an expanded coil to a compact crystallite for a simple flexible homopolymer. Wang-Landau sampling is used to construct the 1D density of states for square-well chains of length 128. Analysis within both the micro-canonical and canonical ensembles shows that, for a chain with sufficiently short-range interactions, the usual polymer collapse transition is preempted by a direct freezing or "folding" transition. A 2D free-energy landscape, built via subsequent multi-canonical sampling, reveals a dominant folding …
Plastic adjustments of biparental care behavior across embryonic development under elevated temperature in a marine ectotherm
2021
Abstract Phenotypic plasticity in parental care investment allows organisms to promptly respond to rapid environmental changes by potentially benefiting offspring survival and thus parental fitness. To date, a knowledge gap exists on whether plasticity in parental care behaviors can mediate responses to climate change in marine ectotherms. Here, we assessed the plasticity of parental care investment under elevated temperatures in a gonochoric marine annelid with biparental care, Ophryotrocha labronica, and investigated its role in maintaining the reproductive success of this species in a warming ocean. We measured the time individuals spent carrying out parental care activities across three…
Geographical assemblages of European raptors and owls
2008
Abstract In this work we look for geographical structure patterns in European raptors (Order: Falconiformes) and owls (Order: Strigiformes). For this purpose we have conducted our research using freely available tools such as statistical software and databases. To perform the study, presence–absence data for the European raptors and owl species (Class Aves) were downloaded from the BirdLife International website. Using the freely available “pvclust” R-package, we applied similarity Jaccard index and cluster analysis in order to delineate biogeographical relationships for European countries. According to the cluster of similarity, we found that Europe is structured into two main geographical…
Ground states of ultrasoft particles with attractions: a genetic algorithm approach
2009
International audience; We analyze in detail the ground-state structure of model systems of athermal star polymers with an additional, tunable attraction that may result from dispersion or depletion forces. To perform a free, unbiased search in the space spanned by the crystal parameters, we employ genetic algorithms, which are enhanced with respect to previous versions in their ability to find stable structures that occupy very narrow basins of attraction in the energy landscape. Application of this method brings about a very large variety of ground states for star polymers with attractions, in particular for the case of intermediate functionalities and strong, short-range attractive force…
Spin stiffness of vector spin glasses
2011
Abstract We study domain-wall excitations for O ( m ) vector spin glasses in the limit m → ∞ , where the energy landscape is simplified considerably compared to XY or Heisenberg models due to the complete disappearance of metastability. Using numerical ground-state calculations and appropriate pairs of complementary boundary conditions, domain-wall defects are inserted into the systems and their excitation energies are measured. This allows us to determine the stiffness exponents for lattices of a range of spatial dimensions d = 2 , … , 7 . Compiling these results, we can finally determine the lower critical dimension of the model. The outcome is compared to estimates resulting from field-t…
Inherent structure entropy of supercooled liquids
1999
We present a quantitative description of the thermodynamics in a supercooled binary Lennard Jones liquid via the evaluation of the degeneracy of the inherent structures, i.e. of the number of potential energy basins in configuration space. We find that for supercooled states, the contribution of the inherent structures to the free energy of the liquid almost completely decouples from the vibrational contribution. An important byproduct of the presented analysis is the determination of the Kauzmann temperature for the studied system. The resulting quantitative picture of the thermodynamics of the inherent structures offers new suggestions for the description of equilibrium and out-of-equilib…