The role of privately owned sports related green spaces in urban ecological frameworks

An ecological framework seeks to maintain ecological processes in the wider landscape and to conserve ecosystems, habitats, species, genetic diversity, and landscapes of importance. As greater attention is paid to ecological frameworks and in particular to such frameworks within an urban setting, then an understanding of the landscape ecology of sports related open spaces and their position within the wider ecological setting of a city requires attention. In this chapter we focus on golf courses and in particular address questions relating to their historic development and their contemporary role in urban ecosystems. The exploration of these issues will be based on a case study centred on a new golf course development constructed in the 1990s at the Marriott Worsley Park, Salford UK. In this case study the historic development of Salford is outlined and the development of the Marriott Worsley Park is discussed in detail. Contemporary land use data are presented in order to understand the spatial importance of sports and open space within the city. This analysis leads to suggestions for the inclusion of sports space, and in particular golf courses within urban ecological frameworks

ShakeMe: Key Generation From Shared Motion

Devices equipped with accelerometer sensors such as today's mobile devices can make use of motion to exchange information. A typical example for shared motion is shaking of two devices which are held together in one hand. Deriving a shared secret (key) from shared motion, e.g. for device pairing, is an obvious application for this. Only the keys need to be exchanged between the peers and neither the motion data nor the features extracted from it. This makes the pairing fast and easy. For this, each device generates an information signal (key) independently of each other and, in order to pair, they should be identical. The key is essentially derived by quantizing certain well discriminative features extracted from the accelerometer data after an implicit synchronization. In this paper, we aim at finding a small set of effective features which enable a significantly simpler quantization procedure than the prior art. Our tentative results with authentic accelerometer data show that this is possible with a competent accuracy ($76$%) and key strength (entropy approximately $15$ bits).Comment: The paper is accepted to the 13th IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Intelligence and Computing (PIComp-2015

Monitavoitteinen päätösanalyysi turvepeltojen käyttömuotojen vertailussa

Tämän työn tarkoituksena oli selvittää vastaavatko ilmaston kannalta ongelmalliset turvepeltojen perinteiset syvään ojitetut käyttömuodot turvepeltojen viljelijöiden tavoitteita, sekä miten vaihtoehtoiset vähäpäästöisemmät turvepellon käyttömuodot voivat vastata tavoitteisiin. Suomella on sekä kansallinen, että Euroopan Unionin asettama kasvihuonekaasujen päästövähennystavoite, jotka velvoittavat Suomea vähentämään kasvihuonekaasupäästöjään 39 % vuoden 1990 tasosta vuoteen 2030 mennessä, ja 80 % vuoden 1990 tasosta vuoteen 2050 mennessä. Maataloussektorin osuus Suomen kasvihuonekaasupäästöistä on noin 10%. Viljellyt orgaaniset maat kattavat noin 10 % Suomen maanviljelymaan pinta-alasta, mutta ne tuottavat noin 50–60 % koko maanviljelysektorin kasvihuonekaasupäästöistä. Perinteisen intensiivisen viljan ja nurmen viljelyn vaatima alhainen vedenpinta turvepellolla aiheuttaa nopeaa turpeen aerobista hajoamista, johtaen korkeisiin kasvihuonekaasu- ja ravinnepäästöihin, painumaan, ja lukuisiin viljelyongelmiin. Kirjallisuuskatsauksen perusteella pohjavedenpinnan nostaminen on tehokkain keino kasvihuonekaasupäästöjen hillitsemiseksi turvepelloilla, mutta vedenpinnan nosto rajoittaa perinteisten satokasvien viljelyä. Kirjallisuudessa on esitetty turvepellon vaihtoehtoisiksi käyttömuodoiksi muun muassa ennallistamista, kosteikkoviljelyä ja metsitystä. Tässä työssä sovellettiin monitavoitteisen päätösanalyysin menetelmiä turvepellon käyttömuotojen keskinäisessä vertailussa erilaisten tavoitteiden valossa. Vertailtavia käyttömuotoja valittiin työhön 12 kappaletta, niiden sisältäessä käyttömuotoja sekä matalalla, että korkealla pohjavedenpinnalla. Työssä selvitettiin ensin, millaisilla indikaattoreilla turvepellon käyttömuotojen suoriutumista voidaan mitata, ja indikaattoreille etsittiin käyttömuotokohtaisia arvoja kirjallisuudesta. Kullekin indikaattorille oli tarkoitus kerätä viljelijöiltä tavoitteiden mukaiset painokertoimet kyselylomakkeen avulla, mutta koska vastauksia kyselyyn ei saatu, monitavoitteinen päätösanalyysi suoritettiin sekä tutkijaryhmän sisältä kerätyillä, että simulaation tuottamilla painokertoimilla. Syvään ojitetut perinteiset viljelymuodot menestyivät indikaattoreiden tarkastelussa hyvin taloudellisella ja tuotannollisella osa-alueella, mutta huonosti säätelevällä ja kulttuurillisella osa-alueella. Sekä tutkijaryhmän, että simulaation antamien painotusten perusteella tehdyissä monitavoitteisissa päätösanalyyseissa kosteikkoviljelyvaihtoehdot valikoituivat syvään ojitettuja viljelymuotoja huomattavasti useammin parhaiksi turvepellon käyttömuodoiksi. Tutkijaryhmän painotuksilla syvään ojitetut käyttömuodot eivät valikoituneet parhaaksi käyttömuodoksi kertaakaan, ja simulaation tuottamilla painotuksilla vain 3,5 prosentilla painotusyhdistelmistä. Monitavoitteiset päätösanalyysit osoittavat, että märillä käyttömuodoilla on potentiaalia valikoitua turvepellon parhaiksi käyttömuodoiksi myös taloutta vahvasti painottavilla painotusprofiileilla, mutta tämä edellyttää, että kosteikkoviljelytuotteille syntyy markkinat tulevaisuudessa. Tukipolitiikka vaikuttaa myös todennäköisesti vahvasti vaihtoehtojen taloudelliseen houkuttelevuuteen. Kosteikkoviljelystä tarvitaan kuitenkin pidempiaikaista tutkimustietoa, ja kosteikkoviljelyn tutkiminen tulisi aloittaa myös Suomessa, jotta arvioita indikaattoreiden saamista mahdollisista arvoista saataisiin tarkemmaksi.The aim of this study was to investigate if the drainage-based utilization of agricultural peatlands, associated with heavy greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, really meets the goals of the farmers, and to investigate how well alternatives with lesser GHG emissions could fit the farmers’ needs. Finland has obligations, both national and from European Union, to reduce its total GHG emissions from the levels of 1990 by 39 % until 2030, and 80 % until 2050. Ten percent of Finland’s total GHG emissions come from agricultural sector. Agricultural organic soils represent only about 10 % of total agricultural land in Finland, but it is estimated that the GHG emissions from these organic soils make up to 50-60 % of the total GHG emissions of the whole agricultural sector. The low water table in traditional drainage-based utilization of agricultural peatlands causes rapid decomposition of peat, which leads to high GHG emissions, leaching of nutrients, subsidence and to numerous problems on the fields. According to literature review done, raising of the water table is the most efficient way to reduce GHG emissions on agricultural peatlands, but the raised water table limits the use of traditional crops like cereals. Restoration of the peatland, paludiculture and afforestation have been suggested as alternative uses of these agricultural peatlands in literature. In this study, multi-criteria decision analysis was used to compare different uses of agricultural peatlands in the light of varying goals. Twelve different forms of peatland utilization were selected for the comparison, and these included forms of utilization with both high and low water tables. Firstly, it was investigated what kind of indicators can be used to assess the performance of the different types of utilization, and values for those indicators were gathered from the literature if possible. Weighting of the indicators in relation to the goals of the farmers was planned to be carried out with a questionnaire, but as we did not manage to get any answers from the farmers, the multi-criteria decision analysis was done with weightings collected both from a group of scientists and from a simulation. Traditional forms of drainage-based farming scored well on financial and productional indicators, but they lacked on regulating and cultural indicators. In both analyses with the weighting given by the group of scientists and by simulation, utilization forms of peatlands with high water table were selected as the best alternative for agricultural peatland management significantly more often than the deeply drained alternatives. With the weighting done by the group of scientists the deeply drained forms were selected not once as the best alternative for peatland utilization, and with the weightings extracted from the simulation in only 3,5 % of the cases a deeply drained form of utilization was selected as a best alternative. These multi-criteria decision analyses show, that the wet forms of peatland utilization have a great potential to be selected as the best alternatives of agricultural peatland utilization also with weighting profiles that put heavy weight also in financial indicators, although this requires the market to the alternative materials to be developed. The policy concerning agricultural subsidies likely affects financial attractiveness of the utilization alternatives of peatlands by great extent. Further long-term research of paludiculture is still needed, and field studies on paludiculture should also be started in Finland to improve the assessment of wet peatland use on most indicators

The Role of Teachers in the Finnish Educational System : High Professional Autonomy and Responsibility

Peer reviewe

The Teaching Profession Amid Changes in the Educational Ecosystems

Peer reviewe

Extracting Canopy Surface Texture from Airborne Laser Scanning Data for the Supervised and Unsupervised Prediction of Area-Based Forest Characteristics

Area-based analyses of airborne laser scanning (ALS) data are an established approach to obtain wall-to-wall predictions of forest characteristics for vast areas. The analyses of sparse data in particular are based on the height value distributions, which do not produce optimal information on the horizontal forest structure. We evaluated the complementary potential of features quantifying the textural variation of ALS-based canopy height models (CHMs) for both supervised (linear regression) and unsupervised (k-Means clustering) analyses. Based on a comprehensive literature review, we identified a total of four texture analysis methods that produced rotation-invariant features of different order and scale. The CHMs and the textural features were derived from practical sparse-density, leaf-off ALS data originally acquired for ground elevation modeling. The features were extracted from a circular window of 254 m(2) and related with boreal forest characteristics observed from altogether 155 field sample plots. Features based on gray-level histograms, distribution of forest patches, and gray-level co-occurrence matrices were related with plot volume, basal area, and mean diameter with coefficients of determination (R-2) of up to 0.63-0.70, whereas features that measured the uniformity of local binary patterns of the CHMs performed poorer. Overall, the textural features compared favorably with benchmark features based on the point data, indicating that the textural features contain additional information useful for the prediction of forest characteristics. Due to the developed processing routines for raster data, the CHM features may potentially be extracted with a lower computational burden, which promotes their use for applications such as pre-stratification or guiding the field plot sampling based solely on ALS data.Peer reviewe

Digital Storytelling for 21st-Century Skills in Virtual Learning Environments

Peer reviewe

High-Q guided-mode resonance of a crossed grating with near-flat dispersion

Guided-mode resonances in diffraction gratings are manifested as peaks (dips) in reflection (transmission) spectra. Smaller resonance line widths (higher Q-factors) ensure stronger light-matter interactions and are beneficial for field-dependent physical processes. However, strong angular and spectral dispersion are inherent to such high-Q resonances. We demonstrate that a class of high-Q resonant modes (Q-factor >1000) exhibiting extraordinarily weak dispersion can be excited in crossed gratings simultaneously with the modes with well-known nearly linear dispersion. Furthermore, we show that the polarization of the incoming light can be adjusted to engineer the dispersion of these modes, and strong to near-flat dispersion or vice-versa can be achieved by switching between two mutually orthogonal linear polarization states. We introduce a semi-analytical model to explain the underlying physics behind these observations and perform full-wave numerical simulations and experiments to support our theoretical conjecture. The results presented here will benefit all applications that rely on resonances in free-space-coupled geometries