Report on Improved Forest models with enhanced representation of behavior and behavioral change of forest owners and conservation managers. BIOCONSENT (Deliverable 3.1)

The complex nature of human decision making has been the focus of studies for decades across several themes, including environment modelling (Groeneveld et al., 2017). Forest management decisions are shaped by many socio-ecological factors and result in different behavioural responses. There are diverse types of forest owners and managers, hereafter collectively referred to as ‘agents’, with a variety of objectives, preferences and behaviour that affect forest management decision-making. It is important to consider these differences in behaviour and behavioural change in forest management decision support tools when assessing the impact of policies, market drivers, and conservation goals on forest environments (e.g., see Brodrechtova et al., 2018 and Sotirov et al., 2019). Distinct methods have been used to represent agent behaviour through integration of influence factors for decision making (e.g., economic, social, environmental factors) into modelling of land use change and decision support systems to the provision of ecosystem services (Groeneveld et al., 2017). In the context of the BIOCONSENT project, behaviour is defined as being forest management practices opted to be implemented by the forest owners and conservation managers. Within the project, the factors that shape forest management decision making will be covered by the analysis of behaviour of forest owners and conservation managers, as they act as primary agents of change by making and implementing management decisions. The BIOCONSENT project, aims to design an effective and integrated decision support tool, supported by more in-depth knowledge that will be gained on (i) analysing policy objectives and identifying implementation instruments (ii) the behavioural responses from agents of change and (iii) the outcomes of forest conservation and restoration measures. To better understand how alternative policies and management actions affect forest biodiversity conservation and restoration, WP3 seeks to integrate biophysical, social, economic, and policy/governance aspects into forest modelling tools. WP3 will quantify scenario outcomes on regional and EU levels, by interpreting and upscaling policy and management scenarios

Alterations in the Properties of Neonatal Thalamocortical Synapses with Time in In Vitro Slices

New synapses are constantly being generated and lost in the living brain with only a subset of these being stabilized to form an enduring component of neuronal circuitry. The properties of synaptic transmission have primarily been established in a variety of in vitro neuronal preparations. It is not clear, however, if newly-formed and persistent synapses contribute to the results of these studies consistently throughout the lifespan of these preparations. In neonatal somatosensory, barrel, cortex we have previously hypothesized that a population of thalamocortical synapses displaying unusually slow kinetics represent newly-formed, default-transient synapses. This clear phenotype would provide an ideal tool to investigate if such newly formed synapses consistently contribute to synaptic transmission throughout a normal experimental protocol. We show that the proportion of synapses recorded in vitro displaying slow kinetics decreases with time after brain slice preparation. However, slow synapses persist in vitro in the presence of either minocycline, an inhibitor of microglia-mediated synapse elimination, or the TrkB agonist 7,8-dihydroxyflavone a promoter of synapse formation. These findings show that the observed properties of synaptic transmission may systematically change with time in vitro in a standard brain slice preparation