scholarly journals Habitat Associations of Bats in an Agricultural Landscape: Linear Features Versus Open Habitats

Animals ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 1856 ◽  
Author(s):  
Domhnall Finch ◽  
Henry Schofield ◽  
Fiona Mathews
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Agricultural Landscape ◽  
Survey Design ◽  
Habitat Associations ◽  
Agricultural Fields ◽  
Linear Features ◽  
Bat Activity ◽  
Linear Feature ◽  
Species Groups ◽  
Intensively Managed

1. Bats are important components of agricultural ecosystems. However, little is known about the extent to which bats use linear features when foraging and commuting in agricultural settings, when compared to the interior of fields. 2. As part of a large-scale citizen science project, bat detectors were placed in the centre of agricultural fields (arable and pasture) and along linear features (intensively managed hedgerows, sympathetically managed hedgerows and treelines). 3. Our results show that all 10 of the bat species groups identified were found both along linear features and in the middle of agricultural fields. Of the five species groups analysed further, all had significantly more bat activity along linear features compared to the middle of fields, except for Nyctalus noctula. However, our results showed that 29% of calls from Rhinolophus ferrumequinum were recorded in the middle of agricultural fields, compared to only 10% for Pipistrellus pipistrellus. Bat activity was more likely to be associated with treelines compared to other linear feature types. 4. Our results highlight the importance of linear feature management to bat conservation, but also the need to consider field centres during survey design and Environmental Impact Assessments.

scholarly journals Gefährlich und nützlich zugleich: Strategien zum Management der invasiven Robinie

2018 ◽  
Vol 169 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michaela Vítková ◽  
Marco Conedera ◽  
Jiří Sádlo ◽  
Jan Pergl ◽  
Petr Pyšek
Keyword(s):  
Time Management ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Agricultural Landscape ◽  
Black Locust ◽  
Robinia Pseudoacacia ◽  
Management Strategies ◽  
Habitat Type ◽  
Agricultural Landscapes ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Intensively Managed

Dangerous and useful at the same time: management strategies for the invasive black locust The North American black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) is considered controversial as many other introduced tree species because of its both positive and negative properties. Based on a literature review and own data we analyze the occurrence of black locust in Czechia and Switzerland and present the management approaches in place. In both countries, black locust is on the blacklist of invasive introduced species. It can grow in a wide range of habitats from urban and agricultural landscape to dry grassland and forest. Meanwhile, the species became in many places part of the environment and human culture, so that neither unrestricted cultivation nor large-scale eradication is feasible. We suggest a context-dependent management which respects the different needs and takes into account the local environmental conditions, land-use, habitat type, risk of spread as well as economic, cultural and biodiversity aspects. To this purpose we propose three management strategies: 1) control respectively gradual suppression of black locust in forests where the species is not welcome, 2) its eradication in sensitive ecosystems as dry grasslands or clear and dry forests and 3) its tolerance in intensively managed agricultural landscapes and in urban environment.

scholarly journals Methods of Landscape Valorization and Possibilities of Its Application in Hunting Area Categorisation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Szewczyk Grzegorz ◽  
Krzysztof Lipka ◽  
Piotr Wężyk ◽  
Karolina Zięba-Kulawik ◽  
Monika Winczek
Keyword(s):  
Natural Environment ◽  
Functional Role ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Forest Cover ◽  
Agricultural Landscape ◽  
Environmental Changes ◽  
Environmental Values ◽  
Small Game ◽  
Forest Habitats

As a result of environmental changes, assessment indexes for the agricultural landscape have been changing dramatically. Being at the interface of human activity and the natural environment, hunting is particularly sensitive to environmental changes, such as increasing deforestation or large-scale farming. The classical categorisation of hunting grounds takes into account the area, forest cover, number of forest complexes, fertility of forest habitats, lack of continuity of areas potentially favourable to wild animals. Landscape assessment methods used in architecture often better reflect the actual breeding and hunting value of a given area, especially in relation to fields and forests. The forest-field mosaic, large spatial fragmentation as well as interweaving of natural environment elements with buildings do not have to be the factors that limit the numbers of small game. Identification of the constituents of architectural-landscape interiors: content and significance assessment, determination of the functional role or assessment based on the general environmental values being represented take into account factors important for the existence of game, in particular small game.

scholarly journals Rhizosphere Bacteria Exhibit Narrower Environmental Adaptation in Proso Millet Than in Foxtail Millet and Sorghum in Agricultural Fields

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lixin Tian ◽  
Feifei Zhang ◽  
Pengliang Chen ◽  
Panpan Zhang ◽  
Zhijun Gao ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Community Assembly ◽  
Bacterial Communities ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Foxtail Millet ◽  
Environmental Adaptation ◽  
Rhizosphere Bacteria ◽  
Agricultural Fields ◽  
Proso Millet ◽  
Rhizosphere Community ◽  
Rhizosphere Bacterial Communities

Abstract It is of great ecological significance to understand how the assembly processes of soil microbe communities respond to environmental change. However, the assembly processes of the rhizosphere bacterial communities in three minor grain crops (i.e., foxtail millet, proso millet, and sorghum) across agro-ecosystems are rarely investigated. Here, we investigated the environmental thresholds and phylogenetic signals for ecological preferences of rhizosphere bacterial communities of three minor grain crop taxa across complex environmental gradients to reflect their environmental adaptation. Additionally, we reported environmental factors affecting their community assembly processes based on a large-scale soil survey in agricultural fields across northern China using high-throughput sequencing.. The results demonstrated a narrower range of environmental thresholds and weaker phylogenetic signals for the ecological traits of rhizosphere bacteria in proso millet than in foxtail millet and sorghum fields, while proso millet rhizosphere community was the most phylogenetically clustered. The null model analysis indicated that homogeneous selection belonging to deterministic processes governed the sorghum rhizosphere community, whereas dispersal limitation belonging to stochastic processes was the critical assembly process in the foxtail and proso millet. Mean annual temperature was the decisive factor for adjusting the balance between stochasticity and determinism of the foxtail millet, proso millet, and sorghum rhizosphere communities. A higher temperature resulted in stochasticity in the proso millet and sorghum communities. For the foxtail millet community, the deterministic assembly increased with an increase in temperature. These results contribute to the understanding of root-associated bacterial community assembly processes in agro-ecosystems on a large scale.

scholarly journals Динаміка розмірів сільськогосподарських полів як функція їх розмірів та форми

2007 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 14-31
Author(s):  
O.V. Zhukov ◽  
V.O. Sirovatko ◽  
N.O. Ponomarenko
Keyword(s):  
Regression Analysis ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Remote Sensing Data ◽  
Field Size ◽  
Agricultural Fields ◽  
Distribution Law ◽  
Administrative Area ◽  
Log Normal ◽  
Shape Characteristics ◽  
Shape And Size

<p>We estimated the size and shape characteristics of agricultural fields within the administrative area and identified patterns of the margin trends from 1950-1960 till the present time. Here we considered large-scale soil maps for the area of Vasilkovsky district of the Dnepropetrovsk region, which were drawn up in 1950-1960. To assess the landscape metric we used FRAGSTATS program which allow to make conformity assessment of the observed distributions of field sizes regards the normal, exponential, log-normal, gamma, Weibull, and Pareto distributions. We also used Box-Cox transformation to convert the experimental data into the normal distribution law for the further application of the transformed data in regression analysis. We estimated that the area of agricultural fields ranged from 1.20 to 269.00 hectares during the period of large-scale mapping in 1950-1960. The variation limits of the field sizes based on the results of remote sensing data and in our time they are 2,.5-266.57 hectares. Area of the fields in different periods strongly correlate and are statistically significant (<em>r</em> = 0.98, <em>p</em> = 0.00). Field sizes currently associated with the field sizes in the 50-60 years of linear regression. Shape parameters and field sizes significantly correlated, therefore, to establish the main trends of varying shape and size of fields, as well as for non-multicollinearity variables for regression analysis, we performed a multivariate factor analysis. An important aspect of the structuring of the agri-landscape is the location of settlements and, therefore, the fields distance from them. In results obtained indicate that the processes increase and decrease the size of fields in agricultural production are determined by various factors. Aspects of the shape and size of the fields associated with the dynamics of the processes that lead to variations in field areas. Fields that have shown a tendency to change their size, have different characteristics of forms and size from the stable fields. Typically, variable field size is smaller and more complex shapes.</p>

Interpersonal Perceptions and Interviewer Effects in Face-to-Face Surveys

2020 ◽  
pp. 004912412092621
Author(s):  
Simon Kühne
Keyword(s):  
Survey Data ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Survey Design ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Interpersonal Perceptions ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Interviewer Effects ◽  
Self Reports ◽  
And Training

Survey interviewers can negatively affect survey data by introducing variance and bias into estimates. When investigating these interviewer effects, research typically focuses on interviewer sociodemographics with only a few studies examining the effects of characteristics that are not directly visible such as interviewer attitudes, opinions, and personality. For the study at hand, self-reports of 1,212 respondents and 116 interviewers, as well as their interpersonal perceptions of each other, were collected in a large-scale, face-to-face survey of households in Germany. Respondents and interviewers were presented with the same questions regarding their opinions and mutual perceptions toward social and political issues in Germany. Analyses show that interviewer effects can be largely explained by how an interviewer is seen by respondents. This indicates that some respondents adjust their answers toward anticipated interviewer opinions. Survey practitioners ought to acknowledge this in their survey design and training of interviewers.

scholarly journals Multi-Scale Evaluation of the TSEB Model over a Complex Agricultural Landscape in Morocco

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 1181
Author(s):  
Jamal Elfarkh ◽  
Jamal Ezzahar ◽  
Salah Er-Raki ◽  
Vincent Simonneaux ◽  
Bouchra Ait Hssaine ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Latent Heat ◽  
Complex Terrain ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Agricultural Landscape ◽  
Local Scale ◽  
Heat Fluxes ◽  
Balance Model ◽  
Modis Data ◽  
Multi Scale ◽  
Basin Scale

An accurate assessment of evapotranspiration (ET) is crucially needed at the basin scale for studying the hydrological processes and water balance especially from upstream to downstream. In the mountains, this term is poorly understood because of various challenges, including the vegetation complexity, plant diversity, lack of available data and because the in situ direct measurement of ET is difficult in complex terrain. The main objective of this work was to investigate the potential of a Two-Source-Energy-Balance model (TSEB) driven by the Landsat and MODIS data for estimating ET over a complex mountain region. The complexity is associated with the type of the vegetation canopy as well as the changes in topography. For validating purposes, a large-aperture scintillometer (LAS) was set up over a heterogeneous transect of about 1.4 km to measure sensible (H) and latent heat (LE) fluxes. Additionally, two towers of eddy covariance (EC) systems were installed along the LAS transect. First, the model was tested at the local scale against the EC measurements using multi-scale remote sensing (MODIS and Landsat) inputs at the satellite overpasses. The obtained averaged values of the root mean square error (RMSE) and correlation coefficient (R) were about 72.4 Wm−2 and 0.79 and 82.0 Wm−2 and 0.52 for Landsat and MODIS data, respectively. Secondly, the potential of the TSEB model for evaluating the latent heat fluxes at large scale was investigated by aggregating the derived parameters from both satellites based on the LAS footprint. As for the local scale, the comparison of the latent heat fluxes simulated by TSEB driven by Landsat data performed well against those measured by the LAS (R = 0.69, RMSE = 68.0 Wm−2), while slightly more scattering was observed when MODIS products were used (R = 0.38, RMSE = 99.8 Wm−2). Based on the obtained results, it can be concluded that (1) the TSEB model can be fairly used to estimate the evapotranspiration over the mountain regions; and (2) medium- to high-resolution inputs are a better option than coarse-resolution products for describing this kind of complex terrain.

A large-scale field study in eastern Siberia using novel time-domain electromagnetic technology

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. T109-T120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sofia Davydycheva ◽  
Alexander Kaminsky ◽  
Nikolai Rykhlinski ◽  
Andrei Yakovlev
Keyword(s):  
High Resolution ◽  
Time Domain ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Survey Design ◽  
Eastern Siberia ◽  
Scale Field ◽  
Large Scale Field ◽  
Time Domain Electromagnetic ◽  
Integrated Interpretation

We evaluated the results of a large-scale commercial project that illustrated the capabilities of advanced time-domain electromagnetic (TDEM) technologies powered with integrated interpretation of geologic and geophysical data. To study the hydrocarbon prospectivity of a field in Eastern Siberia, we developed a survey design, and then acquired, processed, and interpreted the TDEM data from 30 profiles (total length 772 km) covering an area of approximately [Formula: see text]. The data were acquired using the conventional TDEM and a novel high-resolution version of TDEM, the focused-source electromagnetic method. We described the geologic framework, data acquisition methodologies, and key results obtained using integrated TDEM, seismic, and well-logging data. The interpretation was used to select well locations for additional exploratory drilling. Postsurvey drilling supported our interpretation. The presented case study demonstrates the value of TDEM in the exploration workflow.

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