scholarly journals Reforestation in Slovakia: History, current practice and perspectives

REFORESTA ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Repáč ◽  
Zuzana Parobeková ◽  
Matúš Sendecký
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Current Practice ◽  
High Mountain ◽  
Research Activities ◽  
Successful Solution ◽  
Forest Reproductive Material ◽  
History Of ◽  
Reproductive Material ◽  
Forest Nurseries ◽  
Small Forest

The history of reforestation in Slovakia is long and rich; from reforestation by seeding, through the small forest nurseries, reforestation of extreme degraded and high-mountain sites to the current The Act on forest reproductive material, nursery centers and reforestation of large windthrow areas. After brief introduction of the history, rather large part of this review is dedicated to the current nursery and especially reforestation practices – planning, pre-planting site preparation, seeding and planting techniques, post-planting care, monitoring of planting performance. Recent nursery and planting research activities are given very shortly. Perspective nursery (e.g. improvement of seedlings’ quality by inoculation with beneficial microorganisms, vegetative propagation) and reforestation treatments and practices (e.g. the use of larger amount of container-grown seedlings, application of hydrogels and ectomycorrhizal fungi, progressive seeding technique, underplanting) are relatively in detail but of course not comprehensively discussed finally. Despite of the lack of a complex reforestation strategy and current and possibly future financial sources and personnel limitations, the introduced perspective practices should contribute to successful solution of reforestation challenges following from endangering the forests by climate change.

scholarly journals Voľba lesného reprodukčného materiálu v podmienkach klimatickej zmeny / Choice of forest reproductive material under conditions of climate change

2015 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 124-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dušan Gömöry ◽  
Roman Longauer ◽  
Diana Krajmerová
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Tree Species ◽  
Climatic Factors ◽  
Climate Scenario ◽  
Population Variation ◽  
Stress Factors ◽  
Information Uncertainty ◽  
Assisted Migration ◽  
Forest Reproductive Material ◽  
Reproductive Material

AbstractClimate change may endanger not only yield and fulfilling the social functions of European forests, but even the survival of several tree species. The study emphasises the complexity of climatic factors and physiological mechanisms, which may potentially endanger the persistence of tree populations and which cannot be reduced to problems of drought and temperature increase. A substantial inter-population variation in traits associated with the response to climatic stress, observed in provenance experiments, is a prerequisite for the choice of proper forest reproductive material (FRM) in reforestation as a strategy of climate-change mitigation. Assisted migration, i.e., transfer of FRM from source regions, currently characterised by such climate characteristics, which are expected in the target regions in the future, requires knowledge of key stress factors (depending on the climate scenario), physiological processes associated with the adaptation to this stress, identification of genes and eventually epigenetic mechanisms, controlling adaptation processes, and finally mapping of genetic and/or epigenetic variation in key genes. For most tree species, such information is not yet available. Therefore, assisted migration under such information uncertainty needs to be complemented by in situ gene conservation measures to preserve the possibility of reversing the effects of eventual erroneous decisions on FRM transfer.

scholarly journals Managing forest genetic resources as a strategy to adapt forests to climate change: perceptions of European forest owners and managers

2020 ◽  
Vol 139 (6) ◽  
pp. 1107-1119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Vinceti ◽  
Mattia Manica ◽  
Nina Lauridsen ◽  
Pieter Johannes Verkerk ◽  
Marcus Lindner ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Forest Ecosystems ◽  
Forest Owners ◽  
Planting Material ◽  
Forest Reproductive Material ◽  
Forest Genetic ◽  
Forest Genetic Resources ◽  
Reproductive Material ◽  
Non Local ◽  
European Forest

Abstract Managing genetic diversity is of key importance in fostering resilience of forest ecosystems to climate change. We carried out a survey reaching over 200 forest owners and managers from 15 European countries to understand their perceptions of the main threats to forest ecosystems, their knowledge of forest genetic resources (FGR) and their attitude toward actively managing these resources to strengthen the resilience of forest ecosystems to climate change. Respondents perceived pests and diseases to be the top-ranking threats to forests, followed by windstorms and drought, with differences across countries. They stated to be aware of the potential offered by managing FGR and indicated that they paid attention to origin and quality in their choice of planting material. Generally, respondents showed a positive attitude in using forest reproductive material foreign to the planting site, to better match the projected future climate conditions, introducing either a new native tree species or a new non-local genotype of a species already planted (keeping the same species but changing the source of planting material). However, forest reproductive material from local sources was largely preferred over non-local material (both genetically improved and not improved). Forest managers and owners may need to be exposed to more evidence of the potential benefits deriving from active adaptation and mitigation management of FGR before implementing adaptive measures. Also, more efforts should be invested in understanding perceptions and motivations of European forest owners and managers, in order to better tailor advice on optimal measures to counteract the detrimental effects of climate change.

ROBOTICS PROJECTS IN SCHOOL INFORMATICS COURSE

2019 ◽  
pp. 52-56
Author(s):  
V. V. Tarapata
Keyword(s):  
Information Transmission ◽  
Educational Robotics ◽  
Project Approach ◽  
Teaching Tools ◽  
Modern School ◽  
Research Activities ◽  
Information Processes ◽  
History Of ◽  
Normative Basis ◽  
Typical Model

The article describes the prerequisites for the use of educational robotics in the school course of informatics, the history of the development of its directions and the normative basis for its use in modern school education. A typical model of an educational robotic project for the organization of research and project activities of students has been proposed. The technological chart of the lesson as an example of the implementation of a robotic project in the framework of the research activities on informatics is considered. Approaches to the organization of educational activities, teaching tools and ways of evaluation in informatics class on the theme “Information processes. Information transmission” when using the project approach are described.

International Relations at the Beginning of the XX Century in the Works of Vladimir Mikhailovich Khvostov

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 218-221
Author(s):  
Albina Imamutdinova ◽  
Nikita Kuvshinov ◽  
Elena Andreeva ◽  
Elena Venidiktova
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Research Activities ◽  
History Of

Abstract The article discusses the research activities of Vladimir Mikhailovich Khvostov, his creative legacy on issues and problems of international relations of the early ХХ century; the life of V.M. Khvostov, characterization and evolution of his approaches and views on the history of international relations, foreign policy. A prominent organizer and theorist in the field of pedagogical Sciences, academician Vladimir Mikhailovich Khvostov played a significant role in the formation of the Academy of pedagogical Sciences of the USSR – the all-Union center of pedagogical thought. As its first President, he paid great attention to the development and improvement of the system of humanitarian education in the school, taking into account all the tasks and requirements imposed by the practice of Communist construction in our country. In his reports and speeches at various scientific sessions and conferences, he repeatedly emphasized the exceptional importance of social Sciences in the training of not only educated girls and boys, but also in the formation of politically literate youth.

The Historiography of Environmental History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. R. McNeill
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Industrial Pollution ◽  
Full Scale ◽  
Environmental Concerns ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter discusses the emergence of environmental history, which developed in the context of the environmental concerns that began in the 1960s with worries about local industrial pollution, but which has since evolved into a full-scale global crisis of climate change. Environmental history is ‘the history of the relationship between human societies and the rest of nature’. It includes three chief areas of inquiry: the study of material environmental history, political and policy-related environmental history, and a form of environmental history which concerns what humans have thought, believed, written, and more rarely, painted, sculpted, sung, or danced that deals with the relationship between society and nature. Since 1980, environmental history has come to flourish in many corners of the world, and scholars everywhere have found models, approaches, and perspectives rather different from those developed for the US context.

scholarly journals What Stymies Action on Climate Change? Religious Institutions, Marginalization, and Efficacy in Kenya

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Lauren Honig ◽  
Amy Erica Smith ◽  
Jaimie Bleck
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
State Repression ◽  
Address Climate Change ◽  
Policy Responses ◽  
Vulnerability To Climate Change ◽  
History Of ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
Critical Link

Addressing climate change requires coordinated policy responses that incorporate the needs of the most impacted populations. Yet even communities that are greatly concerned about climate change may remain on the sidelines. We examine what stymies some citizens’ mobilization in Kenya, a country with a long history of environmental activism and high vulnerability to climate change. We foreground efficacy—a belief that one’s actions can create change—as a critical link transforming concern into action. However, that link is often missing for marginalized ethnic, socioeconomic, and religious groups. Analyzing interviews, focus groups, and survey data, we find that Muslims express much lower efficacy to address climate change than other religious groups; the gap cannot be explained by differences in science beliefs, issue concern, ethnicity, or demographics. Instead, we attribute it to understandings of marginalization vis-à-vis the Kenyan state—understandings socialized within the local institutions of Muslim communities affected by state repression.

scholarly journals Artificial Intelligence and Behavioral Science Through the Looking Glass: Challenges for Real-World Application

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (12) ◽  
pp. 942-947
Author(s):  
Pol Mac Aonghusa ◽  
Susan Michie
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Machine Learning ◽  
Behavior Change ◽  
Behavioral Science ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Learning Approaches ◽  
Intervention Evaluation ◽  
Research Activities ◽  
Behavior Change Interventions

Abstract Background Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming the process of scientific research. AI, coupled with availability of large datasets and increasing computational power, is accelerating progress in areas such as genetics, climate change and astronomy [NeurIPS 2019 Workshop Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning, Vancouver, Canada; Hausen R, Robertson BE. Morpheus: A deep learning framework for the pixel-level analysis of astronomical image data. Astrophys J Suppl Ser. 2020;248:20; Dias R, Torkamani A. AI in clinical and genomic diagnostics. Genome Med. 2019;11:70.]. The application of AI in behavioral science is still in its infancy and realizing the promise of AI requires adapting current practices. Purposes By using AI to synthesize and interpret behavior change intervention evaluation report findings at a scale beyond human capability, the HBCP seeks to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of research activities. We explore challenges facing AI adoption in behavioral science through the lens of lessons learned during the Human Behaviour-Change Project (HBCP). Methods The project used an iterative cycle of development and testing of AI algorithms. Using a corpus of published research reports of randomized controlled trials of behavioral interventions, behavioral science experts annotated occurrences of interventions and outcomes. AI algorithms were trained to recognize natural language patterns associated with interventions and outcomes from the expert human annotations. Once trained, the AI algorithms were used to predict outcomes for interventions that were checked by behavioral scientists. Results Intervention reports contain many items of information needing to be extracted and these are expressed in hugely variable and idiosyncratic language used in research reports to convey information makes developing algorithms to extract all the information with near perfect accuracy impractical. However, statistical matching algorithms combined with advanced machine learning approaches created reasonably accurate outcome predictions from incomplete data. Conclusions AI holds promise for achieving the goal of predicting outcomes of behavior change interventions, based on information that is automatically extracted from intervention evaluation reports. This information can be used to train knowledge systems using machine learning and reasoning algorithms.

scholarly journals Hybridisation of Malus sylvestris (L.) Mill. with Malus × domestica Borkh. and Implications for the Production of Forest Reproductive Material

Forests ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 367
Author(s):  
Mateja Kišek ◽  
Kristjan Jarni ◽  
Robert Brus
Keyword(s):  
Malus Domestica ◽  
Natural Populations ◽  
Morphological Characteristics ◽  
Apple Trees ◽  
Genetic Characteristics ◽  
Malus Domestica Borkh ◽  
Malus Sylvestris ◽  
Forest Reproductive Material ◽  
Reproductive Material ◽  
Crab Apple

This study focuses on the morphological and genetic characteristics of European crab apple (Malus sylvestris (L.) Mill.) and the occurrence of hybrids in its populations. We analyzed a total of 107 putative European crab apple trees in Slovenia: 92 from nine natural populations, five from a seed stand and 10 from a stand of unnatural origin. We also included 18 domesticated apple trees (Malus × domestica Borkh.) and two Japanese flowering crab apple trees (Malusfloribunda van Houtte) as outliers. The trees were classified into groups of European crab apples, hybrids and domesticated apples according to their morphological and genetic characteristics. Classification based on morphological traits produced different results (58.75% European crab apple, 37.11% hybrids and 4.14% domesticated apple) compared to those based on genetic analysis (70.10% European crab apple, 21.64% hybrids and 8.26% domesticated apple). When genetic and morphological characteristics were combined, only 40.20% of the trees were classified as European crab apple, and an additional group of feral cultivars of domesticated apples (6.18%) was identified. The analysis revealed that hybridization with domesticated apple is taking place in all studied natural European crab apple populations; however, hybrids and feral cultivars only occur to a limited extent. When introducing European crab apple into forests in the future, only genetically verified forest reproductive material obtained exclusively from suitable seed stands should be used.

scholarly journals Public Perceptions of Climate Change in the Peruvian Andes

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 2677
Author(s):  
Adrian Brügger ◽  
Robert Tobias ◽  
Fredy S. Monge-Rodríguez
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Public Perceptions ◽  
Climate Impacts ◽  
Vulnerable Groups ◽  
Extreme Weather Events ◽  
High Mountain ◽  
Peruvian Andes ◽  
Food Shortages ◽  
Education Levels

How people subjectively perceive climate change strongly influences how they respond to its challenges. To date, relatively little is known about such perceptions in the Global South. This research examines public perceptions of climate change in the Peruvian Andes, a semi-arid high-mountain region that is highly exposed and vulnerable to adverse effects of climate change. Based on questionnaire data collected through face-to-face interviews (N = 1316), we found that respondents identify various climate-related issues as the most important challenges for their country. Many of these issues are related to water. Respondents also noticed more subtle changes and expected them to continue (e.g., extreme temperatures, food shortages). Climate impacts were clearly seen as negative, which was also reflected in the presence of emotions. When compared to previous research, more respondents had personally experienced extreme weather events (80%) and they were more certain that the climate is already changing, is caused by human activity, and is affecting distant and close places similarly. A comparison of the perceptions along different socioeconomic characteristics suggests that more vulnerable groups (e.g., rural, low income and education levels) tended to perceive climate change as more consequential, closer, and as a more natural (vs. anthropogenic) phenomenon than those from less vulnerable groups. The salience of water-related problems and personal experiences of climate-related events, as well as differences between various subgroups, could be used to improve measures to adapt to the consequences of climate change by correcting misconceptions of the population and of decisionmakers.

scholarly journals Responses of Benthic Macroinvertebrate Communities of Two Tropical, High-Mountain Lakes to Climate Change and Deacidification

Diversity ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 243
Author(s):  
Javier Alcocer ◽  
Luis A. Oseguera ◽  
Diana Ibarra-Morales ◽  
Elva Escobar ◽  
Lucero García-Cid
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Species Richness ◽  
Water Temperature ◽  
Water Level ◽  
Environmental Changes ◽  
Mountain Lakes ◽  
High Mountain ◽  
Macroinvertebrate Communities ◽  
High Mountain Lakes ◽  
La Luna

High-mountain lakes are among the most comparable ecosystems globally and recognized sentinels of global change. The present study pursued to identify how the benthic macroinvertebrates (BMI) communities of two tropical, high mountain lakes, El Sol and La Luna, Central Mexico, have been affected by global/regional environmental pressures. We compared the environmental characteristics and the BMI communities between 2000–2001 and 2017–2018. We identified three principal environmental changes (the air and water temperature increased, the lakes’ water level declined, and the pH augmented and became more variable), and four principal ecological changes in the BMI communities [a species richness reduction (7 to 4), a composition change, and a dominant species replacement all of them in Lake El Sol, a species richness increase (2 to 4) in Lake La Luna, and a drastic reduction in density (38% and 90%) and biomass (92%) in both lakes]. The air and water temperature increased 0.5 °C, and lakes water level declined 1.5 m, all suggesting an outcome of climate change. Contrarily to the expected acidification associated with acid precipitation, both lakes deacidified, and the annual pH fluctuation augmented. The causes of the deacidification and the deleterious impacts on the BMI communities remained to be identified.

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