Search results for "forest"
showing 10 items of 3780 documents
Soil moisture changes after land abandonment in the Central Spanish Pyrenees
2001
14 páginas, 3 tablas, 6 figuras.
Evaluación de los recursos naturales para un uso y gestión sostenible de la producción agraria en una cuenca del centro-sur de Córdoba (Argentina)
2001
The economical and social development in the Center-South of Cordoba, (Argentina) depends on the agriculture. However, due to low production and severe soil erosion, the farms are not longer economically feasible. This situation implies that the agriculture in the region might not be sustainable in the long run. This study assessed the potential production of the natural resources in the Santa Catalina basin, in order to improve their use and management. The estimated potential production is 300 % higher than the actual production. In addition, the basin is severely affected by water erosion. A new and more sustainable production structure was proposed for the basin, which increases from tr…
Ecological risks of an old wood impregnation mill: application of the triad approach.
2010
Although many studies deal with the distribution and mobility of chromated copper arsenate (CCA) metals in soil, the ecotoxicity of CCA-contaminated soils is rarely studied. The Triad approach was applied to determine the ecological risks posed by a CCA mixture at a decommissioned wood impregnation mill in southern Finland. A combination of (1) chemical analyses; (2) toxicity tests with plants (aquatic: Lemna minor; terrestrial: Lactuca sativa), earthworms (Lumbricus rubellus), and enchytraeids (Enchytraeus albidus) conducted on contaminated soils, their aqueous extracts, and well water collected from the site; and (3) determination of the abundance of enchytraeids and nematodes and the bio…
High rates of short-term dynamics of forest ecosystem services
2021
Currently, the main tools for assessing and managing ecosystem services at large scales are maps providing snapshots of their potential supply. However, many ecosystems change over short timescales; thus, such maps soon become inaccurate. Here we show high rates of short-term dynamics of three key forest ecosystem services: wood production, bilberry production and topsoil carbon storage. Almost 85% of the coldspots and 65% of the hotspots for these services had changed into a different state over a ten-year period. Wood production showed higher rates of short-term dynamics than bilberry production and carbon storage. The high rates of dynamics mean that static snapshot ecosystem service map…
Effects of Biochar Addition on Rill Flow Resistance
2021
The development of rills on a hillslope whose soil is amended by biochar remains a topic to be developed. A theoretical rill flow resistance equation, obtained by the integration of a power velocity distribution, was assessed using available measurements at plot scale with a biochar added soil. The biochar was incorporated and mixed with the arable soil using a biochar content BC of 6 and 12 kg m−2. The developed analysis demonstrated that an accurate estimate of the velocity profile parameter Гv can be obtained by the proposed power equation using an exponent e of the Reynolds number which decreases for increasing BC values. This result pointed out that the increase of biochar content dump…
High boreal forest multifunctionality requires continuous cover forestry as a dominant management
2021
Intensive extraction of forest resources lowers biodiversity and endangers the functioning of forest ecosystems. As such, alternative management regimes have emerged, aspiring to promote forest biodiversity and nature protection in managed forests. Among them, continuous cover forestry, (i.e. selective logging), has received considerable attention and is being promoted by some researchers and NGOs. Yet, the full consequences of banning clear-cuts (i.e. rotation forestry) and replacing it entirely with continuous cover forest remains uncertain. We explore how restricting forest management alternatives (either rotation forestry or continuous cover forestry) will affect landscape-scale forest …
Geobotanical approach to detect land-use change of a Mediterranean landscape: a case study in Central-Western Sicily
2018
A landscape is a palimpsest of the interactions between human activities and ecological dynamics. In an interdisciplinary perspective of dialogue between the ‘Two Cultures’ (Natural Sciences and Humanities), a study of a rural area has been carried out through a reading of plant ecosystems as signs of human impact. The purpose of this paper—as part of the project ‘Harvesting Memories’: Ecology and landscape archaeology of Castro/Giardinallo Valley and Mt. Barrau district (Corleone, Palermo, Sicily)—is to analyse the formative-processes of a Sicilian rural landscape and its changes in the last century. A key element in the reconstruction of the formation of the present landscape is the serie…
Forest road planning to improve tourism accessibility: a comparison of different methods applied in a real case study
2022
Forest road planning with the available tools, e.g. PEGGER and GIS, still requires a lot of time of an expert, and the designed roads are not guaranteed to be efficient in terms of the cost or suitability of the road. In this article, we propose a novel Genetic Algorithm (GA) based method for forest road planning. To do so, each road is represented as a sequence of fixed and variable (control) points. A novel objective (fitness) function is defined based on the length, gradient, and suitability of the roads (individuals). The proposed algorithm is applied to the Arasbaran forest area and the resulted roads are compared with PEGGER-designed roads regarding length, Bachmund index, accessibili…
Determining Soil Hydraulic Properties Using Infiltrometer Techniques: An Assessment of Temporal Variability in a Long-Term Experiment under Minimum- …
2020
Conservation agriculture is increasingly accepted by farmers, but the modeling studies on agro-environmental processes that characterize these agricultural systems require accurate information on the temporal variability of the soil&rsquo