24 research outputs found

    The European Forest and Agriculture Optimisation Model -- EUFASOM

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    Land use is a key factor to social wellbeing and has become a major component in political negotiations. This paper describes the mathematical structure of the European Forest and Agricultural Sector Optimization Model. The model represents simultaneously observed resource and technological heterogeneity, global commodity markets, and multiple environmental qualities. Land scarcity and land competition between traditional agriculture, forests, nature reserves, pastures, and bioenergy plantations is explicitly captured. Environmental change, technological progress, and policies can be investigated in parallel. The model is well-suited to estimate competitive economic potentials of land based mitigation, leakage, and synergies and trade-offs between multiple environmental objectives.Land Use Change Optimization, Resource Scarcity, Market Competition, Welfare Maximization, Bottom-up Partial Equilibrium Analysis, Agricultural Externality Mitigation, Forest Dynamics, Global Change Adaptation, Environmental Policy Simulation, Integrated Assessment, Mathematical Programming, GAMS

    Chemical limnology in coastal East Antarctic lakes: monitoring future climate change in centres of endemism and biodiversity

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    Polar lakes respond quickly to climate-induced environmental changes. We studied the chemical limnological variability in 127 lakes and ponds from eight ice-free regions along the East Antarctic coastline, and compared repeat specific conductance measurements from lakes in the Larsemann Hills and Skarvsnes covering the periods 1987–2009 and 1997–2008, respectively. Specific conductance, the concentration of the major ions, pH and the concentration of the major nutrients underlie the variation in limnology between and within the regions. This limnological variability is probably related to differences in the time of deglaciation, lake origin and evolution, geology and geomorphology of the lake basins and their catchment areas, sub-regional climate patterns, the distance of the lakes and the lake districts to the ice sheet and the Southern Ocean, and the presence of particular biota in the lakes and their catchment areas. In regions where repeat surveys were available, inter-annual and inter-decadal variability in specific conductance was relatively large and most pronounced in the non-dilute lakes with a low lake depth to surface area ratio. We conclude that long-term specific conductance measurements in these lakes are complementary to snow accumulation data from ice cores, inexpensive, easy to obtain, and should thus be part of long-term limnological and biological monitoring programmes

    DeepGreen – Metadata Schema for the exchange of publications between publishers and open access repositories

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    In 2011, important priorities were set to realize green publications in the open access movement in Germany. With financial support from the German Research Foundation (DFG), libraries negotiated Alliance licenses with publishers that guarantee extensive open access rights. Authors of institutions, that have therewith access to licensed journals, can freely publish their articles immediately or after a short embargo period in a repository of their choice. However, authors hesitantly use these open access rights. Also libraries – as managers of institutional and subject based repositories and thus legitimated representatives for the authors – only rarely make use of these rights. The aim of DeepGreen is to make the majority of those publications available online. Together with publishers of the Alliance licenses, the project consortium wants to develop a nearly fully automated workflow that covers both the delivery of data, including the full texts, of the publishers, as well as the data transformation to the necessary import formats and the loading process into the repositories. An intermediate “publication router” will serve as a distribution platform. The DeepGreen metadata schema contains metadata properties describing a wide range of deliverable bibliographic metadata from the Alliance license publishers (most common standards are JATS and CrossRef XML) as well as its compliance with technical, quality and metadata standards of the repositories. The schema includes required metadata elements and optional properties providing additional information.The metadata schema is aligned to the OCLC repository best practices (“Best Practices for CONTENTdm and other OAI-PMH compliant repositories: creating sharable metadata”, URL: http://www.oclc.org/content/dam/support/wcdigitalcollectiongateway/MetadataBestPractices.pdf). The current version of the schema is subject to changes as the functional requirements and workflow practices are evolving during the project experiences and prototype production

    The promoter of a plant defensin gene directs specific expression in nematode-induced syncytia in Arabidopsis roots

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    The beet cyst nematode Heterodera schachtii induces a feeding site, called syncytium, in roots of host plants. In Arabidopsis, one of the genes whose expression is strongly induced in these structures is Pdf2.1 which codes for an antimicrobial plant defensin. Arabidopsis has 13 plant defensin genes. Besides Pdf2.1, the Pdf2.2 and Pdf2.3 genes were strongly expressed in syncytia and therefore the expression of all three Pdf genes was studied in detail. The promoter of the Pdf2.1 gene turned out to be an interesting candidate to drive a syncytium-specific expression of foreign genes as RT-PCR showed that apart from the feeding site it was only expressed in siliques (seeds). The Pdf2.2 and Pdf2.3 genes were in addition expressed in seedlings, roots, leaves, stems, and flowers. These results were supported by the analysis of promoter::GUS lines. After infection with H. schachtii all GUS lines showed a strong staining in syncytia at 5 and 15 dpi. This expression pattern was confirmed by in situ RT-PCR
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