Das Projekt B1 'Allometrie und Raumbesetzung von krautigen und holzigen Pflanzen' ist Teil des Sonderforschungsbereiches 607 Wachstum und Parasitenabwehr und befindet sich bereits in der vierten Phase des seit 1998 laufenden Forschungsprojektes. Bisher wurde im Projekt B1 die Allometrie als Resultat der pflanzeninternen Steuerung der Allokation untersucht. Auf Individuenebene wurden Allometrie und ihre Veränderung für verschiedene Baumarten in verschiedenen ontogenetischen Stadien untersucht. Auf Bestandesebene wurden die self-thinning-Linien von Yoda und Reineke für krautige bzw. holzige Pflanzenbestände analysiert. Bisherige Allometriebestimmungen erbrachten für diese Arten zwar ähnliche Größenordnung aber auch charakteristische Unterschiede, die Ausdruck spezifischer Strategien der Raumbesetzung und -ausbeutung widerspiegeln. Die bisher vereinzelten Auswertungen sollen in Phase IV in eine übergreifende Analyse (versch. Arten, ontogenetische Stadien, Konkurrenzsituationen, Störfaktoren) der Allometrie auf Pflanzen- und Bestandesebene münden.
The project examines funding of environmental technology development and commercialisation. The objectives are to: measure the performance of existing funding schemes (emphasising commercial-type funding); determine how environmental aspects are dealt with; identify obstacles; and suggest evolution of new schemes. Eight project work packages address these objectives, and also include development of environmental technology typologies, analysis of funding gaps, and comparison to Japan and the USA. The project supports SSP 5A by connecting policy and practice, linking researchers from across the EU, and using wide consultation to disseminate knowledge and maximise exploitation of research results. Consortium partners are drawn from five EU states, and have expertise and networks in private and public environmental technology funding and technology development processes. Stakeholder consultation with private and public funders, developers, academics, policy makers and NGOs will support research and knowledge dissemination. Consultation will include major public conferences and forums, sector-specific focus groups, and workshops to test analysis and geographic variations. Consultation and publication and dissemination of the final report will spur innovation by private and public funders, supporting knowledge exploitation after project completion. Research will emphasise private sector solutions, but will also include public-private partnerships, which are innovative measures that can assist in closing the funding gap. The varying applicability of such partnerships across different EU states will also be considered. The two project deliverables will be a database containing research and contact information, and a widely published final report that will integrate all research and recommendations. Prime Contractor: Partenaires Europeens pour l'Environnement; Bruxelles; Belgium.
Objective: Changes in climatic conditions, land use practices and soil and sediment pollution have large-scale adverse impacts on water quantity and quality. The current knowledge base in river basin management is not adequate to deal with these impacts. Austere is both integrating and developing knowledge to resolve this and disseminating it to stakeholders. In the water cycle, soil is a key element affecting groundwater recharge and the chemical composition of both subsurface and surface waters (the latter is additionally affected by sediments). The proper functioning of the river-sediment-soil-groundwater system is linked to key biogeochemical processes determining the filter, buffer and transformation capacity of soils and sediments. Austere aims at a better understanding of the system as a whole by identifying relevant processes, quantifying the associated parameters and developing numerical models of the groundwater-soil-sediment-river system to identify adverse trends in soil functioning, water quantity and quality. The modelling addresses all relevant scales starting from micro-scale water/solid interactions, the transport of dissolved species, pollutants as well as suspended matter in soil and groundwater systems at the catchments scale, and finally the regional scale, with case studies located in major river basins in Europe. With this integrated modelling system, Austere provides the basis for improved river basin management, enhanced soil and groundwater monitoring programs and the early identification and forecasting of impacts on water quantity and quality during this century. Austere is committed to the dissemination and exploitation of project results through structured workshops, dedicated short courses, and the active participation of consortium partners in national and international conferences. A peer review panel supervises the quality and direction of the project.
The aim of the current research is to identify regional sources and trans-boundary flow leading to the observed salinity of Lake Tiberias (LT) -also known as the Sea of Galilee or Lake Kinneret-, and its surroundings, which is considered the only natural surface fresh water reservoir of the area. The current study will include all sources of brines in the Tiberias Basin (TB) with specific emphasis of the relationship between the brines from the Ha'on and Tiberias Regions (HTR).The tasks will be achieved by a multidisciplinary approach involving: (i) numerical modelling of density-driven flow processes (i.e., coupled heat and dissolution of evaporites), (ii) hydrochemical studies, supplemented by investigations of subsurface structures.(i) Numerical modelling will be carried out by applying the commercial software FEFLOW® (WASY, GmbH) complemented with the open source code OpenGeoSys developed at the UFZ of Leipzig (Wang et al., 2009). The final goal is to build a 3D regional-scale model of density-driven flow that will result in: (1) revealing the different interactions between fresh groundwater and natural salinity sources (2) elucidate the driving mechanisms of natural brines and brackish water body's movements.(ii) Hydrochemical study will include major, minor and, if possible, rare earth elements (REE) as well as isotope studies. The samples will be analysed at the FU Berlin and UFZ Halle laboratories. Geochemical data interpretation and inverse modelling will be supported by PHREEQC. Hydrochemical field investigations will be carried out in Tiberias basin and its enclosing heights, i.e. the Golan, Eastern Galilee and northern Ajloun in order to search for indications of the presence of deep, relic saline groundwater infested by the inferred Ha'on mother-brine. The current approaches will be supplemented by seismic and statistical data analysis as well as GIS software applications for the definition of the subsurface structures. The key research challenges are: building a 3D structural model of selected regions of TB, adapting both structural and hydrochemical data to the numerical requirements of the model; calibrating the 3D regional-scale model with observational data. The results of this work are expected to establish suitable water-management strategies for the exploitation of freshwater from the lake and from the adjacent aquifers while reducing salinization processes induced by both local and regional brines.
Die Erkennung von Veränderungen der Landbedeckung der Erdoberfläche auf der Basis von satellitengestützten Fernerkundungsdaten ist seit Jahrzehnten ein sehr aktives Forschungsfeld. Das Ziel des Landschaftsveränderungsdiensts ist es, freie Copernicus-Satellitendaten für eine automatische Ableitung von Landbedeckungsänderungen zu nutzen und diese Informationen regelmäßig für einzelne Landschaftselemente (z.B. für Waldgebiete, Wasserflächen, Landwirtschaftsflächen usw.) über einen Web Service bereitzustellen. Copernicus Daten eignen sich aufgrund der hohen zeitlichen (ca. 3-5 Tage, je nach Sensor) und mittleren räumlichen Auflösung (ab 10m) ideal für eine regelmäßige bundesweite flächendeckende Analyse der Landbedeckung. Um eine hohe Bearbeitungsleistung zu erreichen wird die 'Copernicus Data and Exploitation Platform - Deutschland' (CODE-DE) für die Datenverarbeitung und -analyse genutzt. Es können aktuelle und konsistenteste Informationen über Landdeckungsänderungen abgeleitet werden, um kontinuierlich Geodaten in einer einheitlichen Qualität zu pflegen (siehe Abbildung 1). Andererseits können die gewonnenen Informationen genutzt werden, um statistisch relevante Geoinformationen zur quantitativen Beschreibung der UN-SDG-Indikatoren zu extrahieren. Die 2015 verabschiedete Agenda 2030 mit 17 Entwicklungszielen (SDG) und 169 Unterzielen verknüpft das Prinzip der Nachhaltigkeit mit der ökonomischen, ökologischen und sozialen Entwicklung. Die Umsetzung erfordert einen soliden Überprüfungsmechanismus. Dieser soll durch eine regemäßige nationale Erfassung von ca. 200 definierten UN-SDG-Indikatoren erfolgen, mit dem Ziel Fortschritte zu monitoren und die Politik zu informieren.
Fire is an important ecological factor of disturbance in African tropical ecosystems, driving vegetation dynamics and regulating nutrient cycling and biomass. The significance of wildfires for future environmental processes is underlined by recent projections of global warming, which predict more frequent and more intense extremes of natural events. Particularly in East Africa, where population growth and natural resource exploitation are among the highest in the world, strategies for sustainable economic development will have to deal with environmental changes at regional to continental scales. Understanding such complex responses to global change requires long-term records, since only they provide a way to observe the response of ecosystems to large-magnitude environmental change on decadal and longer time scales. We use high-resolution charcoal data from lake-sediment cores to reconstruct past fire/climate/human interactions in East Africa, aiming in particular 1) to understand how the fire regime influenced vegetation dynamics during the last millennia in savannah-type and sub-humid tropical ecosystems, 2) to test whether changes in fire regime are coupled with episodes of past climatic extremes inferred from the available sedimentological data, and 3) to detect early human deforestation and the timing of increased fire frequencies beyond its natural variability. Additionally, we will apply novel techniques such as molecular markers (benzene polycarboxylic acids, BPCAs) to complement the standard sedimentary approaches to reconstruct Holocene fire history. The proposed research addresses new, highly relevant questions for today's key issue of sustainability (economic development, natural resource management, adaptation of vulnerable communities to global change). Additionally, it will contribute with new high-quality data to ongoing multi-proxy research concerning the magnitude, frequency, and rates of past climate change in equatorial East Africa. Finally, the project will contribute to our understanding of tropical ecosystem functioning and its interaction with regional, cultural, and economic systems.
Objective: This collaborative research project will last 36 months and involve 10 partners. Its general aim is to contribute to the EU Renewed Sustainable Development Strategy through the enhancement of the links between policy and research on sustainable development in the field of sanitation (a crucial area with regard to environmental sustainability and quality of life in general). The project has two specific aims. - Generating new knowledge on the factors hindering the dissemination of scientific and technological knowledge that can be immediately applied in support to sustainable development, and of identifying knowledge brokerage methods enabling to overcome these hindering factors and to maximise the exploitation of relevant knowledge. - Starting up a learning process on knowledge brokerage in general as a tool for the socialisation of Scientific and Technological Research. The project components, to be implemented in the partner countries, are: - Research. Activities will carried out for mapping the knowledge and technological options for environmentally sustainable sanitation (ESS), and the actors that possess this knowledge. This, together with a consultation of experts aimed at listing the obstacles to knowledge brokerage dissemination, will provide the basis for experimentations. - Experimentation. Knowledge brokerage experiments on ESS will be carried out in the Netherlands, Italy and Bulgaria via 3 pilot projects. - Learning. The results achieved will serve to start up a process aimed at drafting policy guidelines (including a position paper) on knowledge brokerage on ESS. - Dissemination. Dissemination and awareness-raising initiatives will be carried out on the project issues and results. 9 WPs are foreseen. WP1 and 2 for the first part of the research; WP3-6 will be devoted to the design and implementation of 3 pilot projects, WP7 will be devoted to learning process; WP8 will deal with dissemination and WP9 with project management.
Building Materials are a basic need, which is often difficult to meet in developing countries. Concrete is the building material best suited to meet these demands, although cement, the central ingredient is often disproportionately expensive in developing counties. The most promising option to lower costs (and environmental impact) is to blend conventional Portland cement with pozzolanic materials. The aim of this project is to develop technologies appropriate for the small scale, local production of pozzolans from clay (a material widely available) in conjunction with the exploitation of waste biomass for combined heat and power production. The modular concept of a clay activation unit, CAU to be coupled with a biomass boiler, will give the flexibility to adapt the solution to local conditions. We have already demonstrated that relatively common (low grade) clayey soils can be activated to give a pozzolan similar in performance to fly ash (from coal fired electricity production) widely used in the developed world. Results also indicate that it is possible to improve their reactivity by using and optimizing flash calcination, to allow high levels of substitution and very significant improvements in cost/performance ratio. To achieve this we need also to look at the performance of the activated clays in concrete from the point of view of rheology, hardening and durability to enable optimum cost/performance to be achieved according to local materials and applications. The partnership between LMC, EPFL and two academic groups in Cuba has already been established in a previous project. Furthermore, one of the Cuban partners plays a leading role in ECOSUR (a Swiss NGO) which has established workshops, producing low cost building materials, in many developing countries. In the first part of the project significant scientific advances were made, which enabled a huge acceleration in progress, relative to previous work by the Cuban partners alone. In addition, 3 Cuban PhD students spent several months working in the Swiss laboratory and have now returned to Cuba to continue their research. In this project, funding is requested for one PhD student to be based in Switzerland, who will work closely with 3 Cuban PhD Student (funded be the Cuban government). On the Cuban side, funds are requested for essential equipment and to fund the stays of the students at EPFL. Each of the Cuban students will spend 4-8 months working at EPFL during the course of the project.
Objective: In Osnabruck, Germany, Herhof Recyclingcenter Osnabrueck GmbH (HRO) operates, under patented technology (biological drying), a 90.000 tons/a Municipal Solid Wastes (MSW) recycling plant, where appr. 50Prozent of incoming MSW (45.000 tons/a) is converted into a secondary fuel (marketed under the name Stabilat), currently used in cement plants. A portion of Stabilat (appr. 500 kg/h) will be converted to electricity and heat in a novel gasification plant. The producer gas (LCV 5 MJ/Nm3) will be cleaned in a novel high temperature gas filter and combusted in a gas boiler, the steam generated to run a 0,5 MWe steam turbine. The electricity produced will be fed in the Grid, while waste heat will be utilised in the recycling plant. The off-gases from gas boiler and the liquid effluents (tars and oxygenates) will be guided to the recycling plant waste treatmen systems, while the inert ash will be incorporated in the residues resulting from the operation of the recycling plant. The integrated facility (MSW recycling and energy exploitation of Stabilat) will provide a sustainable solution for the treatment of MSW and will generate renewable energy, and a high quality fuel while safeguarding the environment and the public health. This innovative integration of state-of-the-art technologies has a large potential for duplication in the EU and beyond, achieving the disposal not only of the MSW but also of the resulting by-product streams (such as RDF or SRF fuels). Moreover, the proposed project addresses several EU policies related to renewable energies, energy efficiency, environmental protection, recycling of MSW, etc. Moreover, the coupling of the MSW recycling and the subsequent energy exloitation of by-products streams to electricity and heat will result in significant economies of scale. This, in turn, will result in positive synergistic effects (lower emissions of pollutants, elimination of the need to transport secondary fuels over long distances, reduced capital and operating costs and increased competitiveness).
The proposed RTN adopts a unified approach to a unique sainfoin (Onobrychis viciifolia) collection. It will provide excellent training for young researchers in evaluating traditional resources and developing novel strategies for sustainable agriculture. This is timely because of the pending CAP reforms. The RTN will offer multisectorial and multidisciplinary training at 12 first-class research institutions and 3 SMEs in 11 countries. It is based on a structured combination of research and training activities to ensure that the young researchers will achieve optimal development of professional skills for their future careers . The young researchers will greatly benefit from the vast expertise in a wide range of disciplines amongst the partners: agronomy, plant breeding, seed production and marketing, animal nutrition, veterinary science, chemical analysis, biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology. The scientific approach will develop a scientific and technical basis for animal feeding systems based on lower chemical inputs by re-popularising traditional fodder legumes for more efficient, animal- and environment-friendly farming systems. Sainfoin will be a showcase for an excellent fodder legume, which was widely grown in Europe before the use of commercial fertilisers and synthetic drugs. Currently, a considerable amount of research occurs on sainfoin but includes only a few cultivars. This prevents exploitation of its full genetic potential. The unique collection already available within this network and a concerted evaluation will lay the foundation for exploiting the full potential of this traditional forage crop in contemporary cultivation systems. Training will consist of extensive scientific education on a local and network-wide basis and include complementary skills, e.g. foreign languages, personal, social and inter-cultural skills (management skills and soft skills). The proposed RTN adopts a unified approach to a unique sainfoin (Onobrychis viciifolia) collection. It will provide excellent training for young researchers in evaluating traditional resources and developing novel strategies for sustainable agriculture. This is timely because of the pending CAP reforms. The RTN will offer multisectorial and multidisciplinary training at 12 first-class research institutions and 3 SMEs in 11 countries. It is based on a structured combination of research and training activities to ensure that the young researchers will achieve optimal development of professional skills for their future careers . The young researchers will greatly benefit from the vast expertise in a wide range of disciplines amongst the partners: agronomy, plant breeding, seed production and marketing, animal nutrition, veterinary science, chemical analysis, biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology...
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