Search results for "mit"
showing 10 items of 11910 documents
De novo genome assembly of the land snail Candidula unifasciata (Mollusca: Gastropoda)
2021
Abstract Among all molluscs, land snails are a scientifically and economically interesting group comprising edible species, alien species and agricultural pests. Yet, despite their high diversity, the number of genome drafts publicly available is still scarce. Here, we present the draft genome assembly of the land snail Candidula unifasciata, a widely distributed species along central Europe, belonging to the Geomitridae family, a highly diversified taxon in the Western-Palearctic region. We performed whole genome sequencing, assembly and annotation of an adult specimen based on PacBio and Oxford Nanopore long read sequences as well as Illumina data. A genome draft of about 1.29 Gb was gene…
Evaluating structural and compositional canopy characteristics to predict the light-demand signature of the forest understorey in mixed, semi-natural…
2020
Questions: Light availability at the forest floor affects many forest ecosystem processes, and is often quantified indirectly through easy-to-measure stand characteristics. We investigated how three such characteristics, basal area, canopy cover and canopy closure, were related to each other in structurally complex mixed forests. We also asked how well they can predict the light-demand signature of the forest understorey (estimated as the mean Ellenberg indicator value for light [“EIVLIGHT”] and the proportion of “forest specialists” [“%FS”] within the plots). Furthermore, we asked whether accounting for the shade-casting ability of individual canopy species could improve predictions of EIV…
Airborne-laser-scanning-derived auxiliary information discriminating between broadleaf and conifer trees improves the accuracy of models for predicti…
2020
Managing forests for ecosystem services and biodiversity requires accurate and spatially explicit forest inventory data. A major objective of forest management inventories is to estimate the standing timber volume for certain forest areas. In order to improve the efficiency of an inventory, field based sample-plots can be statistically combined with remote sensing data. Such models usually incorporate auxiliary variables derived from canopy height models. The inclusion of forest type variables, which quantify broadleaf and conifer volume proportions, has been shown to further improve model performance. Currently, the most common way of quantifying broadleaf and conifer forest types is by ca…
Are coastal communities able to pay for the protection of fish resources impacted by climate change?
2020
Abstract The purpose of this study is to examine inhabitants’ motivation and their willingness to pay to mitigate the impact of climate change on fish resources. Willingness to pay was tested empirically using survey data from 333 inhabitants of Sciacca, a fishing community in Sicily, Italy, which has the island’s second largest fishing fleet. People’s attitudes towards climate change, their degree of involvement in the issue, and their concerns about this phenomenon’s potential impact on the marine environment are the key factors affecting their willingness to pay. It was further found that respondents are willing to pay an average of €6.81 per month to support mitigation policies in the f…
Calibrating Expert Assessments Using Hierarchical Gaussian Process Models
2020
Expert assessments are routinely used to inform management and other decision making. However, often these assessments contain considerable biases and uncertainties for which reason they should be calibrated if possible. Moreover, coherently combining multiple expert assessments into one estimate poses a long-standing problem in statistics since modeling expert knowledge is often difficult. Here, we present a hierarchical Bayesian model for expert calibration in a task of estimating a continuous univariate parameter. The model allows experts' biases to vary as a function of the true value of the parameter and according to the expert's background. We follow the fully Bayesian approach (the s…
Impacts of forestry on boreal forests : An ecosystem services perspective
2017
Forests are widely recognized as major providers of ecosystem services, including timber, other forest products, recreation, regulation of water, soil and air quality, and climate change mitigation. Extensive tracts of boreal forests are actively managed for timber production, but actions aimed at increasing timber yields also affect other forest functions and services. Here, we present an overview of the environmental impacts of forest management from the perspective of ecosystem services. We show how prevailing forestry practices may have substantial but diverse effects on the various ecosystem services provided by boreal forests. Several aspects of these processes remain poorly known and…
Assessing environmental conditions of Antarctic footpaths to support management decisions.
2016
Thousands of tourists visit certain Antarctic sites each year, generating a wide variety of environmental impacts. Scientific knowledge of human activities and their impacts can help in the effective design of management measures and impact mitigation. We present a case study from Barrientos Island in which a management measure was originally put in place with the goal of minimizing environmental impacts but resulted in new undesired impacts. Two alternative footpaths used by tourist groups were compared. Both affected extensive moss carpets that cover the middle part of the island and that are very vulnerable to trampling. The first path has been used by tourists and scientists since over …
Cost-efficiency assessments of marine monitoring methods lack rigor—a systematic mapping of literature and an end-user view on optimal cost-efficienc…
2021
Global deterioration of marine ecosystems, together with increasing pressure to use them, has created a demand for new, more efficient and cost-efficient monitoring tools that enable assessing changes in the status of marine ecosystems. However, demonstrating the cost-efficiency of a monitoring method is not straightforward as there are no generally applicable guidelines. Our study provides a systematic literature mapping of methods and criteria that have been proposed or used since the year 2000 to evaluate the cost-efficiency of marine monitoring methods. We aimed to investigate these methods but discovered that examples of actual cost-efficiency assessments in literature were rare, contr…
The Importance of Phytoplankton Biomolecule Availability for Secondary Production
2017
The growth and reproduction of animals is affected by their access to resources. In aquatic ecosystems, the availability of essential biomolecules for filter-feeding zooplankton depends greatly on phytoplankton. Here, we analyzed the biochemical composition, i.e., the fatty acid, sterol and amino acid profiles and concentrations as well as protein, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus content of 17 phytoplankton monocultures representing the seven most abundant phytoplankton classes in boreal and sub-arctic lakes. To examine how the differences in the biochemical composition between phytoplankton classes affect their nutritional quality for consumers, we assessed the performance of Daphnia, on …
On the Role of Perception: Understanding Stakeholders’ Collaboration in Natural Resources Management through the Evolutionary Theory of Innovation
2021
Natural resources management deals with highly complex socioecological systems. This complexity raises a conundrum, since wide-ranging knowledge from different sources and types is needed, but at the same time none of these types of knowledge is able by itself to provide the basis for a viable productive system, and mismatches between the two of them are common. Therefore, a growing body of literature has examined the integration of different types of knowledge in fisheries management. In this paper, we aim to contribute to this ongoing debate by integrating the evolutionary theory of innovation—and specifically the concept of proximity—and the theory of perception. We set up a theoretical …