Organising decoupling

Viele der gravierenden, Länder übergreifende Umweltprobleme sind zu eng mit Wirtschaftswachstum und Lebensstilen verbunden, als dass sie ohne umfas­sende Änderung der industriellen Produktionsmuster lösbar wären. Transitions­forschung zeigt Wege zur nötigen Veränderung von Industrie und Gesellschaft um die Lebensgrundlagen einer wachsenden Bevölkerung bei Bewahrung der na­türlichen Ressourcen langfristig sicherzustellen

Moving towards systems innovation

Steigender Wohlstand schafft mehr und andere Umweltprobleme, als er löst. Zur Lösung der mit Wirtschaftswachstum einhergehenden globalen Umweltprobleme ist ein grundlegender Systemwandel nötig. Die industrielle Produktion muss Wirtschaftswachstum weitestgehend vom Ressourcenverbrauch entkoppeln. Ausgangspunkt für eine umfassende Neuorganisation der Produktionssysteme ist Wissen, das die Grundlagen für Systeminnovationen schafft. Transitionsforschung stellt dieses Wissen als Alternative zum Status Quo bereit

IHDP Global Carbon Cycle Research: International Carbon Research Framework

The degree to which carbon flows balance each other - human activities leading to carbon emissions into the atmosphere, vegetation and oceans soaking it up - is the subject of vigorous debate. It is not yet possible to define quantitatively the global effects of human activities such as forestry and agriculture, and may never be so. However, studies to determine these effects have emerged as critical for understanding how the earth's climate will evolve in the future. Global concern about the potential implications of the behaviour of the carbon cycle under anthropogenic stress includes concepts of system instability and large scale change. To contribute to understanding this behaviour, and our potential responses to it, requires a thorough investigation of both biophysical and social systems. Until recently, most scientific assessments of such risks focused on the anatomy of conceivable environmental changes themselves, devoting little attention to either the human driving forces or the ecosystems and societies that might be endangered by the changes. Recently, however, questions about the linkage and interaction of social, ecological, and biogeochemical systems are emerging as a central focus of policy-driven assessments of global environmental risks. The approach used here is to accept humans as an integral part of the carbon cycle, not as an agent perturbing an otherwise natural system - indeed, this approach assumes there is no independence of the different components of the carbon cycle. The human dimensions research community sees this critical and necessary re-conceptualisation as the foundation of a new approach to studying the interaction between human and environmental systems

Sahel decadal rainfall variability and the role of model horizontal resolution

Substantial low-frequency rainfall fluctuations occurred in the Sahel throughout the twentieth century, causing devastating drought. Modeling these low-frequency rainfall fluctuations has remained problematic for climate models for many years. Here we show using a combination of state-of-the-art rainfall observations and high-resolution global climate models that changes in organized heavy rainfall events carry most of the rainfall variability in the Sahel at multiannual to decadal time scales. Ability to produce intense, organized convection allows climate models to correctly simulate the magnitude of late-twentieth century rainfall change, underlining the importance of model resolution. Increasing model resolution allows a better coupling between large-scale circulation changes and regional rainfall processes over the Sahel. These results provide a strong basis for developing more reliable and skilful long-term predictions of rainfall (seasons to years) which could benefit many sectors in the region by allowing early adaptation to impending extremes

LifeCLEF Bird Identification Task 2017

International audienceThe LifeCLEF challenge BirdCLEF offers a large-scale proving ground for system-oriented evaluation of bird species identification based on audio recordings of their sounds. One of its strengths is that it uses data collected through Xeno-canto, the worldwide community of bird sound recordists. This ensures that BirdCLEF is close to the conditions of real-world application, in particular with regard to the number of species in the training set (1500). The main novelty of the 2017 edition of BirdCLEF was the inclusion of soundscape recordings containing time-coded bird species annotations in addition to the usual Xeno-canto recordings that focus on a single foreground species. This paper reports an overview of the systems developed by the five participating research groups, the methodology of the evaluation of their performance, and an analysis and discussion of the results obtained

LifeCLEF Bird Identification Task 2016: The arrival of Deep learning

International audienceThe LifeCLEF bird identification challenge provides a large-scale testbed for the system-oriented evaluation of bird species identification based on audio recordings. One of its main strength is that the data used for the evaluation is collected through Xeno-Canto, the largest network of bird sound recordists in the world. This makes the task closer to the conditions of a real-world application than previous, similar initiatives. The main novelty of the 2016-th edition of the challenge was the inclusion of soundscape recordings in addition to the usual xeno-canto recordings that focus on a single foreground species. This paper reports the methodology of the conducted evaluation, the overview of the systems experimented by the 6 participating research groups and a synthetic analysis of the obtained results

LifeCLEF Bird Identification Task 2014

International audienceThe LifeCLEF bird identification task provides a testbed for a system-oriented evaluation of 501 bird species identification. The main originality of this data is that it was specifically built through a citizen science initiative conducted by Xeno-Canto, an international social net-work of amateur and expert ornithologists. This makes the task closer to the conditions of a real-world application than previous, similar ini-tiatives. This overview presents the resources and the assessments of the task, summarizes the retrieval approaches employed by the participating groups, and provides an analysis of the main evaluation results. With a total of ten groups from seven countries and with a total of twenty-nine runs submitted, involving distinct and original methods, this first year task confirms the interest of the audio retrieval community for biodiver-sity and ornithology, and highlights further challenging studies in bird identification

LifeCLEF Bird Identification Task 2015

International audienceThe LifeCLEF bird identification task provides a testbed for a system-oriented evaluation of 999 bird species identification. The main originality of this data is that it was specifically built through a citizen science initiative conducted by Xeno-Canto, an international social network of amateur and expert ornithologists. This makes the task closer to the conditions of a real-world application than previous, similar initiatives. This overview presents the resources and the assessments of the task, summarizes the retrieval approaches employed by the participating groups, and provides an analysis of the main evaluation results

Are multimedia identification tools biodiversity-friendly?

This paper discusses the results of the LifeCLEF 2014 multimedia identification challenges with regards to the requirements of real-world ecological surveillance systems. In particular, we study the identification performances of the evaluated systems as a function of the ordinariness or rarity of the species in the dataset. This allows us to assess the ability of the underlying methods to be robust to heavily tailed distributions such as the ones encountered in real-world collections of life observations. Results show that all methods are more or less affected by the long-tail curse but that the best methods making use of classifiers with good discrimi- nation capacities do resist the phenomenon pretty well