Search results for "finland"
showing 10 items of 1724 documents
Quantifying and easing conflicting goals between interest groups in natural resource planning
2019
Management of natural resources at the regional level is a compromise between a variety of objectives and interests. At the local level, management of the forests depends upon the ownership structure, with forest owners using their forests as they see fit. A potential conflict occurs if the forest owners’ management decisions are counter to the interests of society in general or the industry that relies on the forest resource as their raw material. We explore the intensity of this conflict at the regional level in several large boreal forest production landscapes. To explore the conflict, we investigate three main interest groups: (i) economically oriented forest owners; (ii) industry grou…
Land Use Affects Carbon Sources to the Pelagic Food Web in a Small Boreal Lake
2016
Small humic forest lakes often have high contributions of methane-derived carbon in their food webs but little is known about the temporal stability of this carbon pathway and how it responds to environmental changes on longer time scales. We reconstructed past variations in the contribution of methanogenic carbon in the pelagic food web of a small boreal lake in Finland by analyzing the stable carbon isotopic composition (δ13C values) of chitinous fossils of planktivorous invertebrates in sediments from the lake. The δ13C values of zooplankton remains show several marked shifts (approx. 10 ‰), consistent with changes in the proportional contribution of carbon from methane-oxidizing bacteri…
The (de)politicisation of nuclear power: The Finnish discussion after Fukushima
2017
When the Fukushima accident occurred in March 2011, Finland was at the height of a nuclear renaissance, with the Government’s decision-in-principle in 2010 to allow construction of two new nuclear reactors. This article examines the nuclear power debate in Finland after Fukushima. We deploy the concepts of (de)politicisation and hyperpoliticisation in the analysis of articles in the country’s main newspaper. Our analysis indicates that Finnish nuclear exceptionalism manifested in the safety-related depoliticising and the nation’s prosperity-related hyperpoliticisation arguments of the pro-nuclear camp. The anti-nuclear camp used politicisation strategies, such as economic arguments, to sho…
More is more? : Forest management allocation at different spatial scales to mitigate conflicts between ecosystem services
2017
Context: Multi-objective management can mitigate conflicts among land-use objectives. However, the effectiveness of a multi-objective solution depends on the spatial scale at which land-use is optimized. This is because the ecological variation within the planning region influences the potential for site-specific prioritization according to the different objectives. Objectives: We optimized the allocation of forest management strategies to maximize the joint production of two conflicting objectives, timber production and carbon storage, at increasing spatial scales. We examined the impacts of the extent of the planning region on the severity of the conflict, the potential for its mitigation…
Conflicting objectives in production forests pose a challenge for forest management
2017
Conflicts among different ecosystem services have been shown to be common and potentially exacerbated by management interventions. In order to improve the sustainability of natural resource use, the occurrence of these conflicts and the effects that management actions have on them need to be understood. We studied the conflicts between ecosystem services and the potential to solve them by management choices in boreal production forests. Our study area consisted of nearly 30,000 forest stands which were simulated for 50 years into the future under alternative management scenarios. The study included four ecosystem services – timber production, bilberry production, carbon storage, and pest re…
Influence of littoral periphyton on whole-lake metabolism relates to littoral vegetation in humic lakes
2017
The role of littoral habitats in lake metabolism has been underrated, especially in humic lakes, based on an assumption of low benthic primary production (PP) due to low light penetration into water. This assumption has been challenged by recent recognition of littoral epiphyton dominance of whole-lake PP in a small highly humic lake and of epiphyton as an important basal food source for humic lake biota. However, as these studies have mostly concerned single lakes, there is a need to test their wider generality. We studied the whole-lake PP and community respiration (CR) in eight small humic lakes in southern Finland during July 2015 using 14 C incorporation to measure pelagic PP and the c…
Forest multifunctionality is not resilient to intensive forestry
2021
AbstractThere is ample evidence that intensive management of ecosystems causes declines in biodiversity as well as in multiple ecosystem services, i.e., in multifunctionality. However, less is known about the permanence and reversibility of these responses. To gain insight into whether multifunctionality can be sustained under intensive management, we developed a framework building on the concept of resilience: a system’s ability to avoid displacement and to return or transform to a desired state. We applied it to test the ability of forest multifunctionality to persist during and recover from intensive management for timber production in a boreal forest. Using forest growth simulations and…
Give me a sample of air and I will tell which species are found from your region : Molecular identification of fungi from airborne spore samples
2017
Fungi are a megadiverse group of organisms, they play major roles in ecosystem functioning and are important for human health, food production and nature conservation. Our knowledge on fungal diversity and fungal ecology is however still very limited, in part because surveying and identifying fungi is time demanding and requires expert knowledge. We present a method that allows anyone to generate a list of fungal species likely to occur in a region of interest, with minimal effort and without requiring taxonomical expertise. The method consists of using a cyclone sampler to acquire fungal spores directly from the air to an Eppendorf tube, and applying DNA barcoding with probabilistic specie…
Ultraviolet radiation accelerates photodegradation under controlled conditions but slows the decomposition of senescent leaves from forest stands in …
2019
Depending on the environment, sunlight can positively or negatively affect litter decomposition, through the ensemble of direct and indirect processes constituting photodegradation. Which of these processes predominate depends on the ecosystem studied and on the spectral composition of sunlight received. To examine the relevance of photodegradation for litter decomposition in forest understoreys, we filtered ultraviolet radiation (UV) and blue light from leaves of Fagus sylvatica and Bettda pendula at two different stages of senescence in both a controlled-environment experiment and outdoors in four different forest stands (Picea abies, Pagus sylvatica, Acer platanoides, Betula pendula). Co…
Standardised spider (Arachnida, Araneae) inventory of Lammi, Finland
2020
In June 2019, an ecology field course of the University of Helsinki was held at Lammi Biological Station, Southern Finland. Within this course, the students familiarised themselves with field work and identification of spiders and explored the diversity of species in the area. Three sampling plots were chosen, one in grassland and two in boreal forest, to demonstrate the sampling techniques and, by applying a standardised protocol (COBRA), contribute to a global spider biodiversity project. The collected samples contained a total of 3445 spiders, of which 1956 (57%) were adult. Only adult spiders were accounted for in the inventory due to the impossibility of identification of juveniles. A …