Search results for "ekosysteemit"
showing 10 items of 146 documents
A Brief History of the Peer-Group Mentoring Model in Finland: Struggling for Space in a Contested Niche
2020
The aim of this article is to introduce and reflect on the development of mentoring in Finland as implemented in the form of the Peer-Group Mentoring (PGM) model. Firstly, the main characteristics and principles of the PGM model are introduced, after which experiences from implementing the model are analysed based on a literature review. We examine the following research questions: (1) How have the mentoring practices of newly qualified teachers developed towards the PGM model within the educational ecosystem in Finland? (2) How has the PGM model found its relational space (‘ecological niche’) in this ecosystem? and (3) How has PGM been experienced by mentors and mentees in terms of profess…
Effect of river restoration on life-history strategies in fish communities
2019
Assessments of river restoration outcomes are mostly based on taxonomic identities of species, which may not be optimal because a direct relationship to river functions remains obscure and results are hardly comparable across biogeographic borders. The use of ecological species trait information instead of taxonomic units may help to overcome these challenges. Abundance data for fish communities were gathered from 134 river restoration projects conducted in Switzerland, Germany and Finland, monitored for up to 15 years. These data were related to a dataset of 22 categories of ecological traits describing fish life-history strategies to assess the outcome of the restoration projects. Restora…
Top consumer abundance influences lake methane efflux
2015
Lakes are important habitats for biogeochemical cycling of carbon. The organization and structure of aquatic communities influences the biogeochemical interactions between lakes and the atmosphere. Understanding how trophic structure regulates ecosystem functions and influences greenhouse gas efflux from lakes is critical to understanding global carbon cycling and climate change. With a whole-lake experiment in which a previously fishless lake was divided into two treatment basins where fish abundance was manipulated, we show how a trophic cascade from fish to microbes affects methane efflux to the atmosphere. Here, fish exert high grazing pressure and remove nearly all zooplankton. This re…
Vulnerability of the North Water ecosystem to climate change
2021
High Arctic ecosystems and Indigenous livelihoods are tightly linked and exposed to climate change, yet assessing their sensitivity requires a long-term perspective. Here, we assess the vulnerability of the North Water polynya, a unique seaice ecosystem that sustains the world’s northernmost Inuit communities and several keystone Arctic species. We reconstruct mid-to-late Holocene changes in sea ice, marine primary production, and little auk colony dynamics through multi-proxy analysis of marine and lake sediment cores. Our results suggest a productive ecosystem by 4400–4200 cal yrs b2k coincident with the arrival of the first humans in Greenland. Climate forcing during the late Holocene, l…
Growth form matters – Crustose lichens on dead wood are sensitive to forest management
2022
Lichens have a vital role in forest ecosystems and they are a threatened group in boreal forests. However, the conservation ecology of the total lichen community has very rarely been studied. Here we studied lichen species and communities, including macrolichens (=foliose and fruticose growth forms) and rarely studied crustose li-chens, on decaying wood in boreal spruce-dominated forests in Finland. We also studied obligate lignicoles that grow only on dead wood and are mostly crustose in growth form. Species richness and community composition were examined on decaying logs and natural or cut stumps of Picea abies at different decay stages (2-5) in 14 stands, half of which were natural or s…
Poor nutritional quality of primary producers and zooplankton driven by eutrophication is mitigated at upper trophic levels
2022
Eutrophication and rising water temperature in freshwaters may increase the total production of a lake while simultaneously reducing the nutritional quality of food web components. We evaluated how cyanobacteria blooms, driven by agricultural eutrophication (in eutrophic Lake Köyliöjärvi) or global warming (in mesotrophic Lake Pyhäjärvi), influence the biomass and structure of phytoplankton, zooplankton, and fish communities. In terms of the nutritional value of food web components, we evaluated changes in the ω-3 and ω-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) of phytoplankton and consumers at different trophic levels. Meanwhile, the lakes did not differ in their biomasses of phytoplankton, zoo…
Titmice are a better indicator of bird density in Northern European than in Western European forests
2022
Publisher Copyright: © 2022 The Authors. Ecology and Evolution published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Population sizes of many birds are declining alarmingly and methods for estimating fluctuations in species’ abundances at a large spatial scale are needed. The possibility to derive indicators from the tendency of specific species to co-occur with others has been overlooked. Here, we tested whether the abundance of resident titmice can act as a general ecological indicator of forest bird density in European forests. Titmice species are easily identifiable and have a wide distribution, which makes them potentially useful ecological indicators. Migratory birds often use information on the densit…
Automatic image-based identification and biomass estimation of invertebrates
2020
1. Understanding how biological communities respond to environmental changes is a key challenge in ecology and ecosystem management. The apparent decline of insect populations necessitates more biomonitoring but the time-consuming sorting and expert-based identification of taxa pose strong limitations on how many insect samples can be processed. In turn, this affects the scale of efforts to map and monitor invertebrate diversity altogether. Given recent advances in computer vision, we propose to enhance the standard human expert-based identification approach involving manual sorting and identification with an automatic image-based technology. 2. We describe a robot-enabled image-based ident…
Contrasting structural complexity differentiate hunting strategy in an ambush apex predator.
2021
AbstractStructural complexity is known to influence prey behaviour, mortality and population structure, but the effects on predators have received less attention. We tested whether contrasting structural complexity in two newly colonised lakes (low structural complexity lake—LSC; high structural complexity—HSC) was associated with contrasting behaviour in an aquatic apex predator, Northern pike (Esox lucius; hereafter pike) present in the lakes. Behaviour of pike was studied with whole-lake acoustic telemetry tracking, supplemented by stable isotope analysis of pike prey utilization and survey fishing data on the prey fish community. Pike displayed increased activity, space use, individual …
Generalist invasion in a complex lake food web
2023
Invasive species constitute a threat not only to native populations but also to the structure and functioning of entire food webs. Despite being considered as a global problem, only a small number of studies have quantitatively predicted the food web-level consequences of invasions. Here, we use an allometric trophic network model parameterized using empirical data on species body masses and feeding interactions to predict the effects of a possible invasion of Amur sleeper (Perccottus glenii), on a well-studied lake ecosystem. We show that the modeled establishment of Amur sleeper decreased the biomasses o ftop predator fishes by about 10%–19%. These reductions were largely explained by inc…