Potentials, challenges and visions for future European organic animal farming

There is a serious need for significant and fundamental improvements to the way we currently produce and consume food if we are going to respond meaningfully to the enormous global environmental challenges that face us. The role of animal farming in particular is faced with the challenge of balancing their potential positive contribution to our food system within an effective circular economy while ensuring that the animals on our farms exist as living, sentient beings that are treated in ways that allow their lives, from their perspective, to be worth living

Strategies And Visions For The Future Of Organic Animal Farming

Based on existing knowledge and current research projects, a number of innovative strategies and approaches are proposed that would enable organic animal farming to contribute to a more sustainable and resilient food systems that also impacts positively on our surrounding socio-ecological landscape. The focus is on 1) integrated, multispecies, diversified systems, 2) sustainable foraging strategies and efficient utilisation of natural resources, 3) home grown protein feed especially for monogastric animals, 4) resilience as the core of health development rather than just freedom of diseases, 5) breeding including multipurpose breeds, and 6) enhanced mother-infant contact

Last millennium northern hemisphere summer temperatures from tree rings: Part I: The long term context

Large-scale millennial length Northern Hemisphere (NH) temperature reconstructions have been progressively improved over the last 20 years as new datasets have been developed. This paper, and its companion (Part II, Anchukaitis et al. in prep), details the latest tree-ring (TR) based NH land air temperature reconstruction from a temporal and spatial perspective. This work is the first product of a consortium called N-TREND (Northern Hemisphere Tree-Ring Network Development) which brings together dendroclimatologists to identify a collective strategy for improving large-scale summer temperature reconstructions. The new reconstruction, N-TREND2015, utilises 54 records, a significant expansion compared with previous TR studies, and yields an improved reconstruction with stronger statistical calibration metrics. N-TREND2015 is relatively insensitive to the compositing method and spatial weighting used and validation metrics indicate that the new record portrays reasonable coherence with large scale summer temperatures and is robust at all time-scales from 918 to 2004 where at least 3 TR records exist from each major continental mass. N-TREND2015 indicates a longer and warmer medieval period (∼900–1170) than portrayed by previous TR NH reconstructions and by the CMIP5 model ensemble, but with better overall agreement between records for the last 600 years. Future dendroclimatic projects should focus on developing new long records from data-sparse regions such as North America and eastern Eurasia as well as ensuring the measurement of parameters related to latewood density to complement ring-width records which can improve local based calibration substantially

Invertebrate aquaporins: a review

Ewan M. Campbell, Andrew Ball, Stefan Hoppler, Alan S. Bowma