An Early Neolithic Pottery Deposition at Ellerødgård I, Southern Zealand

An Early Neolithic Pottery Deposition at Ellerødgård I, Southern Zealan

Productivity and quality, competition and facilitation of chicory in ryegrass/legume-based pastures under various nitrogen supply levels

Traditional perennial ryegrass-white clover mixtures have limitations in combined productivity and quality that herbs like chicory may alleviate. This study examined the consequences on productivity and quality of as well as competition and facilitation after introducing chicory into varies ryegrass-legume-based pastures in a field study over 3 consecutive growing seasons. A cultivar of chicory, suitable for grazing, in pure stand was found to out-yield a pure stand ryegrass in terms of dry matter and nitrogen (N) accumulation but was found to yield similar to mixture of chicory and ryegrass. The inclusion of chicory, increased N accumulation per area unit irrespective of associated leguminous species but had no effect (P>0.05) on the combined dry matter yield of these mixtures as compared to the chicory-ryegrass mixture. Chicory was not found to co-exist well with associated fodder legumes but it co-existed well with perennial ryegrass. Determined by a direct 15N plant labelling technique, chicory transferred little N to associated legumes and under moderate soil N conditions it almost out-competed the white clover whereas lucerne was able to withstand the competition with birdsfoot trefoil as intermediate. Chicory and ryegrass did exchange N amounting to less than 5% of the receiver plants’ N economy whereas the N transfer from the N-rich lucerne constituted 15% of the associated ryegrass’ N economy but less (P<0.05) of the chicory’s N economy. These differences are ascribed to the species’ root morphology and root zonation. Chicory accumulated large amounts of calcium, potassium, sodium and zinc but significant less of magnesium and manganese, irrespective of the N supply. In the case of sodium it was a short-term effect whereas calcium and possibly also sulphur, copper and zinc accumulation increased over time. It is concluded that chicory may improve the management of intensive dairy farms with a large N surplus because of the increase in productivity per unit area and N uptake efficiency and add significant improvements of the quality of the forage

Individual plant care in cropping systems

Individual plant care cropping systems, embodied in precision farming, may lead to new opportunities in agricultural crop management. The objective of the project was to provide high accuracy seed position mapping of a field of sugar beet. An RTK GPS was retrofitted on to a precision seeder to map the seeds as they were planted. The average error between the seed map and the actual plant map was about 32 mm to 59 mm. The results showed that the overall accuracy of the estimated plant positions is acceptable for the guidance of vehicles and implements. For subsequent individual plant care, the deviations were not, in all cases, small enough to ensure accurate individual plant targeting

Seed Mapping of Sugar Beet

Individual plant care may well become embodied in precision farming in the future and will lead to new opportunities in agricultural crop management. The objective of this project was to develop and evaluate a data logging system attached to a precision seeder to enable high accuracy seed position mapping of a field of sugar beet. A Real Time Kinematic Global Positioning System (RTK GPS), optical seed detectors and a data logging system were retrofitted on to a precision seeder to map the seeds as they were planted. The average error between the seed map and the actual plant map was about 16–43 mm depending on vehicle speed and seed spacing. The results showed that the overall accuracy of the estimated plant positions was acceptable for the guidance of vehicles and implements as well as potential individual plant treatments

Reducing the number of templates for aligned-spin compact binary coalescence gravitational wave searches using metric-agnostic template nudging

Efficient multi-dimensional template placement is crucial in computationally intensive matched-filtering searches for Gravitational Waves (GWs). Here, we implement the Neighboring Cell Algorithm (NCA) to improve the detection volume of an existing Compact Binary Coalescence (CBC) template bank. This algorithm has already been successfully applied for a binary millisecond pulsar search in data from the Fermi satellite. It repositions templates from over-dense regions to under-dense regions and reduces the number of templates that would have been required by a stochastic method to achieve the same detection volume. Our method is readily generalizable to other CBC parameter spaces. Here we apply this method to the aligned--single-spin neutron-star--black-hole binary coalescence inspiral-merger-ringdown gravitational wave parameter space. We show that the template nudging algorithm can attain the equivalent effectualness of the stochastic method with 12% fewer templates

Environmental assessment of enzyme use in industrial production – a literature review

AbstractEnzymatic processes have been implemented in a broad range of industries in recent decades because they are specific, fast in action and often save raw materials, energy, chemicals and/or water compared to conventional processes. A number of comparative environmental assessment studies have been conducted in the past 15 years to investigate whether these properties of enzymatic processes lead to environmental improvements and assess whether they could play a role in moving toward cleaner industrial production. The purpose of this review is to summarize and discuss the findings of these studies and to recommend further developments regarding environmental assessment and implementation of the technology. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been widely used as an assessment tool, while use of the ‘carbon footprint’ concept and Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is limited to a few studies. Many studies have addressed global warming as an indicator and several studies have furthermore addressed other impact categories (acidification, eutrophication, photochemical ozone formation, energy and land use). The results show that implementing enzymatic processes in place of conventional processes generally results in a reduced contribution to global warming and also a reduced contribution to acidification, eutrophication, photochemical ozone formation and energy use to the extent that this has been investigated. Agricultural land has been addressed in few studies and land use savings appear to occur in industries where enzymatic processes save agricultural raw materials, whereas it becomes a trade-off in processes where only fossil fuels and/or inorganic chemicals are saved. Agricultural land use appears to be justified by other considerable environmental improvements in the latter cases, and the results of this review support the hypothesis that enzyme technology is a promising means of moving toward cleaner industrial production. LCA gives a more complete picture of the environmental properties of the processes considered than EIA and carbon footprint studies, and it is recommended that researchers move toward LCA in future studies. Tradition, lack of knowledge and bureaucracy are barriers to implementation of enzymatic processes in industry. Education and streamlining of public approval processes etc. are means of overcoming the barriers and accelerating the harvesting of the environmental benefits