Search results for "long-term"
showing 10 items of 436 documents
Out of sight : Profiling soil characteristics, nutrients and bacterial communities affected by organic amendments down to one meter in a long-term ma…
2019
Common soil characteristics, nutrients and microbial activity at deeper soil depths are topics seldom covered in agricultural studies. Biogeochemical cycles in deep soils are not yet fully understood. This study investigates the effect of different mineral and organic fertilisation on soil organic matter dynamics, nutrients and bacterial community composition in the first meter of the soil profiles in the long-term maize cropping system experiment Tetto Frati, near the Po River in northern Italy. The following treatments have been applied since 1992: 1) crop residue removal (CRR), 2) crop residue incorporation (CRI), 3) crop residue removal with bovine slurry fertilisation (SLU), 4) crop re…
Relationship between N-cycling communities and ecosystem functioning in a 50-year-old fertilization experiment.
2009
The relative importance of size and composition of microbial communities in ecosystem functioning is poorly understood. Here, we investigated how community composition and size of selected functional guilds in the nitrogen cycle correlated with agroecosystem functioning, which was defined as microbial process rates, total crop yield and nitrogen content in the crop. Soil was sampled from a 50-year fertilizer trial and the treatments comprised unfertilized bare fallow, unfertilized with crop, and plots with crop fertilized with calcium nitrate, ammonium sulfate, solid cattle manure or sewage sludge. The size of the functional guilds and the total bacterial community were greatly affected by …
Mesures, développement : le statut de la créativité en question
2016
Les particularités inhérentes à la créativité en tant que compétence transversale, analysées à partir d’une revue de littérature en psychologie et sociologie sur la mesure, le développement et les effets de la créativité, semblent lui conférer un statut restreint au sein du système éducatif français. D’une part, les incertitudes autour des effets à long terme de la créativité, tout comme la logique adéquationniste structurant l’organisation scolaire, maintiennent cette compétence à l’écart des principales finalités assignées au système éducatif français. D’autre part, celui-ci n’est pas outillé pour la mesurer, étant donné que ses méthodes d’évaluation ne permettent pas d’appréhender cette …
Care facilities for Germans in Thailand and Poland: making old age care abroad legitimate
2019
This article looks at old age care facilities abroad that target people who live in Germany. Such facilities have been established in Southeast Asia (mainly Thailand) and in Eastern Europe (mainly Poland). Given that they challenge central guiding orientations for old age care in Germany, considerable criticisms are levelled at them, and their use is viewed with distinct scepticism. Nevertheless, some of these facilities succeed in sustaining considerable demand from Germany over quite a few years. In this article, we therefore ask what strategies and arguments they use to make them a legitimate option for people in Germany and to be established on the German market. Based on two case studi…
Live-in migrant care worker arrangements in Germany and the Netherlands. Motivations and justifications in family decision-making
2019
Private households in ageing societies increasingly employ live-in migrant carers (LIMCs) to care for relatives in need of 24/7 care and supervision. Whilst LIMC arrangements are a common practice in Germany, they are only recently emerging in the Netherlands. Taking this development as a starting point, this study uses the countries’ different long-term care (LTC) regimes as the analytical framework to explore and compare the motivations and justifications of German and Dutch family carers who opt for an LIMC arrangment. Findings show that Dutch and German LTC regimes impact differently the decision-making processes of families, as well as on patterns of justification, through a combinatio…
Integrating fire-scar, charcoal and fungal spore data to study fire events in the boreal forest of northern Europe
2019
Fire is a major disturbance agent in the boreal forest, influencing many current and future ecosystem conditions and services. Surprisingly few studies have attempted to improve the accuracy of fire-event reconstructions even though the estimates of the occurrence of past fires may be biased, influencing the reliability of the models employing those data (e.g. C stock, cycle). This study aimed to demonstrate how three types of fire proxies – fire scars from tree rings, sedimentary charcoal and, for the first time in this context, fungal spores of Neurospora – can be integrated to achieve a better understanding of past fire dynamics. By studying charcoal and Neurospora from sediment cores f…
BioTIME: A database of biodiversity time series for the Anthropocene
2018
Abstract Motivation The BioTIME database contains raw data on species identities and abundances in ecological assemblages through time. These data enable users to calculate temporal trends in biodiversity within and amongst assemblages using a broad range of metrics. BioTIME is being developed as a community-led open-source database of biodiversity time series. Our goal is to accelerate and facilitate quantitative analysis of temporal patterns of biodiversity in the Anthropocene. Main types of variables included The database contains 8,777,413 species abundance records, from assemblages consistently sampled for a minimum of 2 years, which need not necessarily be consecutive. In addition, th…
Streamwater responses to reduced nitrogen deposition at four small upland catchments in Norway
2020
AbstractReduced emissions of nitrogen (N) in Europe have resulted in decreasing atmospheric deposition since 1990. Long-term data (1988–2017) from four small Norwegian catchments located along gradients in N deposition, rainfall, and organic carbon (C) show different responses to 25–30% reductions in N deposition during the same period. At three sites the decreased N deposition caused reduced leaching of nitrate to surface water, whereas the westernmost site showed no decrease, probably due to thin soils with low C:N ratio, poor vegetation cover and high precipitation. The loss of total N to streamwater constituted 30–50% of the N deposition. Losses via denitrification are unknown but assum…
Chapter 4</br>Will our children have the chance to do research on today’s digital books?
2016
In this chapter, I will first position my considerations about the sustainability of ebooks for future research in the context of book history; moreover, I will introduce basic concepts of (migration and emulation) as well as challenges to the long-term preservation of digital data in greater generality. After that and taking current research on past (printed) books as an analogy, I shall try to outline which kinds of (digital) material will be indispensable in the future to do research on today's digital book production: published digital materials and unique (digital) artefacts. Finally, I shall present the results of my exemplary studies to find out which precautions for the future avail…
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…