In Fragebogen-Untersuchungen zur Lärmwirkung wurden bisher sehr unterschiedliche Operationalisierungen von Wirkungsvariablen (wie z.B. Belästigung, Störung von Aktivitäten) und außer-akustischen Faktoren (sog. Moderatoren wie z.B. Lärmempfindlichkeit, misfeasance) verwendet. Deshalb hat sich die Arbeitsgruppe community response der International Commission on the Biological Effects of Noise (ICBEN, Team No. 6) als langfristiges Ziel die Entwicklung von Fragebogen-Guidelines und die Formulierung eines Muster-Fragebogens für die Lärmwirkungsforschung gesetzt. D.h. es soll ein Vorschlag erarbeitet werden, in welcher Form globale und spezifische Lärmwirkungen in Befragungen erhoben werden sollten. Um dieses Vorhaben zu unterstützen, hat der Arbeitskreis Ökologische Lärmforschung die Erstellung einer systematischen Übersicht über vorhandene Fragebögen aus Lärmwirkungsstudien auf internationaler Ebene in Angriff genommen. Diese Übersicht soll es u.a. ermöglichen, die Struktur von verschiedenen Fragebögen sowie die in ihnen verwendeten Operationalisierungen für Lärmwirkungs- und Moderatorvariablen (hinsichtlich Art der Frageformulierung sowie der Antwortformate) zu vergleichen. Für den/die einzelne/n Lärmforscher/in bietet diese Übersicht die Möglichkeit, sich auf sehr effiziente Art und Weise darüber zu informieren, wie bestimmte Konstrukte in bisherigen Untersuchungen operationalisiert worden sind bzw. welche Alternativen zu den bereits selbst angewandten Operationalisierungen bestehen. Nach einer systematischen Ermittlung von Namen und Adressen einschlägiger Lärmforscher/innen, wurden diese um die Zusendung von Fragebögen sowie ergänzender Materialien aus eigenen Lärmwirkungsstudien gebeten. Die zugesandten Fragebögen werden gegebenenfalls übersetzt und mit der Methode der qualitativen Inhaltsanalyse ausgewertet. Hierbei werden die Fragebögen im Hinblick auf formelle Aspekte (z.B. Jahr der Erhebung, Sprache, Art der Befragungsmethode) wie auch im Hinblick auf strukturelle Aspekte (z.B. Umfang des Fragebogens, abgefragte Variablengruppen, Antwortformate) ausgewertet. Hauptgegenstand der Auswertung ist aber insbesondere die Auswertung der Lärmwirkungsvariablen (z.B. die Abfrage der globalen Lärmbelästigung, Aktivitätenstörungen, Kommunikationsstörungen) sowie der Moderatorvariablen (z.B. Lärmempfindlichkeit, Lärmbewältigungsvermögen, misfeasance). Parallel dazu wurde eine Datenbank entwickelt, in der die Ergebnisse der Analysen dargestellt und verwaltet werden. Diese Datenbank wird ab November 2001 im Internet unter http://www.eco.psy.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/nqd für jede/n interessierte/n Forscher/in zugänglich und nutzbar sein. Langfristig ist darüber hinaus geplant, ein Archiv mit den Original-Fragebögen aufzubauen, in dem einzelne Fragebögen auf Wunsch eingesehen werden können.
SP0 is conceived for coordination of the ICON research, for internal and external scientific exchange as well as for investigating development pathways of land use on the Philippines. The SP0 team will supervise the project activities as a whole, including reporting and final synthesis. It will design the ICON homepage, establish and maintain a web-based database and present the project and its results in scientific forums and public media. It will organize collaboration and scientific exchange with international networks dealing with atmospheric processes, global carbon, nitrogen, water and energy cycles, and long-term ecological research. Specifically, SP0 is devoted to ensuring a sound integration of the ICON project within the scientific communities of Germany and SE Asia. Supported by the ICON local research coordinator based at and employed by IRRI, it will coordinate with the IRRI farm management to assist other ICON subprojects with field setup, routine data collection and technical backstopping.
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Die vorgeschlagenen Arbeiten befassen sich mit der Rolle von hydrothermalen Fluiden für den Transport von Material und Energie von der ozeanischen Kruste in die ozeanische Wassersäule, in die Biosphäre und in die mineralische Ebene. Es handelt sich um eine Fortsetzung der Arbeiten aus den ersten beiden Teilen des SPP-Projektes. Die Zeitreihenstudien werden sich dieses Mal stärker auf den südlichen MAR konzentrieren, da die bisherigen Daten die einzigartige Rolle der dort neu entdeckten jungen post-eruptiven Systeme dargelegt haben, in denen wir die höchsten bisher in Hydrothermalfluiden gemessenen Temperaturen gefunden haben. Der Vergleich des ultramafischen Logatchev-Feldes mit den basaltischen Systemen bei 5 S ermöglicht eine Abschätzung der entsprechenden Rolle der beiden Systemtypen für den jeweiligen Elementeintrag. Die Teilnahme an vier weiteren Forschungsfahrten wird die notwendigen Proben zur Charakterisierung der anorganischen und organischen Fluidgeochemie, verschiedener chemischer Spezies in den Fluiden und ihrer Rolle für Geo-Bio-Schnittstellen liefern. Weiterhin werden Sieden und Phasenseparation und die Charakterisierung der superheißen (464 Grad C) überkritschen Dampfphase in den 5 Grad S-Fluiden untersucht. Die geochemische Kartierung der Plumes wird um die numerische Modellierung von Wärme und Massentransport von den Vents in die ozeanische Wassersäule erweitert.
Tree bark from more than 700 species is used in southern African traditional medicine. Among the priority species are for example Prunus africana, a prostate disorder remedy, or Ocotea bullata and Warburgia salutaris, which have anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial properties respectively. Traditionally, bark harvesting for medicinal use is a sustainable practice. Traditional healers and their harvesters collect enough for their needs and not more. But as the population grows and becomes urbanized, forests diminish and trade in bark for medicinal purposes is commercialized. Unsustainable extraction methods, involving excessive debarking that may ultimately kill the tree, become common and threaten the species. For some species the bark is also internationally traded and export demand increases pressure on the preferred species. The harvest of Prunus africana for example is estimated at 3,500 tons a year to fuel a USDollar220 million market in Europe and North America. Consequently, certain popularly traded species such as Warburgia salutaris and Prunus africana are experiencing serious decline and regarded as rare in many areas. A possibility to prevent the overexploita-tion of these species will be the implementation of sustainable resource management. Objectives: Resource management requires quantitative data of resource availability and growth rates. Therefore, the project will develop suitable methods for quantifying bark quantities, growth rates and optimal harvesting strategies for selected tree species in afromontane forest and miombo woodland. The project component we are dealing with, is the development of optimal sampling methods for determining the stocking of a particular species as well as the development of a bark growth and yield model to evaluate the sustained bark production and yield from different management systems.
To ward off an attack by herbivorous insects, plants produce a variety of toxic or repulsive compounds. However, specialized insects have developed counter-strategies to deal with these defence compounds, which explains why many of these insects have become agricultural pests. It is becoming increasingly clear that these plant-insect interactions can only be understood by investigating the function of plant toxins from the perspective of the plant and the insect simultaneously. In a preliminary study carried out in the FARCE laboratory at the University of Neuchâtel, we have demonstrated that benzoxazinoids (BXDs), a specific class of nitrogen-containing secondary metabolites produced by grasses, strongly affect the metabolism, the behaviour and the fitness of an important, highly specialized pest of maize: caterpillars of the moth Spodoptera frugiperda. We have found that maize changes its BXD production after detecting caterpillar feeding, and that Spodoptera frugiperda has evolved mechanisms to circumvent their negative effects. The BXD-mediated interaction between maize and Spodoptera caterpillars complex an ideal model to study the role of plant secondary metabolites at the interface between plants and insects. The current project brings together knowledge from molecular biology, plant and insect biochemistry, phytochemistry, ecology and behaviour, as well as agricultural sciences to track the fate of BXDs from their production in the plant to their conversion inside the target insect. By using such a highly interdisciplinary, cross-species approach we will be able to elucidate the precise role of BXDs in plant-insect interactions. As BXDs consume a significant fraction of the nitrogen available to a plant, but at the same time serve as a potentially important barrier against pests, our study goes beyond purely fundamental research and opens up interesting possibilities for application in agriculture. The project is headed by UniNE, represented by the FARCE laboratory and the Analytical Chemistry Service of the Swiss Plant Science Web, and involves partners from the Federal Research Station Agroscope Changins-Wädenswil, the University of Geneva and the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena (Germany).
EMOCLIP: - institutional partnership project is devised to establish an institutional partnership between Institute for Environmental Sciences at the University of Geneva (ISE) and the Faculty of Applied Ecology Futura Singidunum University Belgrade (Futura). The project will be oriented toward strengthening Futura's institutional capacity on environmental modeling and climatology. Besides that, other positive effects, such as creating conditions for long term cooperation between ISE and Futura, improving coursesand teaching methods and creating a Centre for Environmental Modeling (CEM) at Futura will be realized. The realization of project will not only contribute to Futura's research capacities but will also have an impact on students' educational profiles. Students who complete studies, revised as a result of this project, will be much better prepared to deal with everyday environmental problems in practice through the application of environmental modeling. IP - climatology, CL - environmental modeling, EMO The comprehensive and sustainable management structure, preparation and realization of training courses for young researchers, organization of dissemination workshops and seminars for students and other stakeholders, improvement of Futura's research infrastructure to conduct environmental modeling, improvement of teaching methods and courses syllabuses. including the formation of IP will be carried outTo achieve these objectives a series of activities Jointly established overall objectives of this IP can be presented as follows: shared responsibilities for strengthening institutional research capacities in the area of environmental modeling and climatology; participative strategic planning for institutional structural development and modernization of research and teaching methods for environmental modeling and climatology; joint research management structure development and improvement; improvement of efficiency, transparency and visibility of jointly research activities; capacity building of Futura research staff for international standards regarding environmental modeling and similar subjects; development of curricula for environmental modeling and climatology master or PhD courses; networking improvement between Swiss and Eastern European research institutions with the aim of knowledge transfer and information dissemination for environmental modeling and climatology.
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.
This proposal deals with the atmospheric composition in the Arctic. Climate change is currently proceeding fastest in the Arctic than anywhere else on the planet. One key hypothesis for this fast warming is that short-lived species (including ozone and aerosols) influence the Arctic climate in several ways either directly through radiative forcing and indirectly through clouds and snow/ice albedo. In particular, the role of light absorbing aerosols (such as black carbon) remains largely unknown. There are ample evidences that the Arctic troposphere is characterized by elevated concentrations of particles of different origins both in late winter and spring (the so-called Arctic Haze) but also in summer. The Arctic and summer haze are composed of a mix of particles of different origins and most largely result from long range transport of anthropogenic pollution from mid-latitudes and from wildfires in boreal regions. However, the pathways for the transport of pollution into the Arctic, the relative contributions of various geopolitical regions, as well as the role of biomass burning in boreal forest are not known in a quantitative manner. In this project, we propose to explore two specific questions, including (i) the pathways for long range transport of aerosol and ozone-related pollution from the northern mid-latitudes to the Arctic and (ii) the impact of the boreal wildfires on the Arctic atmospheric composition. We will address these questions using conjointly the fully coupled model of aerosol-chemistry-climate ECHAM5-HAMMOZ as well as a suite of products from various platforms (including satellite such as CALIOP, MISR, MODIS, ground-based stations in the Arctic and pan-Arctic region, and research aircrafts such as those deployed in the framework of the POLARCAT experiment). We are planning to 1) conduct a comprehensive analysis of a boreal wildfire event collected in POLARCAT and to test our model's representation of the processes related to transport of boreal biomass burning pollution; 2) develop a timeseries (annual cycle) of the CALIOP vertically-resolved attenuated backscatter at relevant locations of the northern mid-latitudes to test our model's ability to reproduce the long range transport of pollution towards the Arctic; 3) explore the factor that govern interannual variability in the Arctic composition with a focus over the period from 2006 to 2008. The proposed work will provide an improved quantitative understanding of the processes governing the Arctic composition and ultimately of the processes that govern climate change there but also globally.