Organic farms as refuges for small mammal biodiversity in agro ecosystems

Habitat fragmentation, the process by which relatively continuous habitats is broken into smaller pieces, occurs in natural systems but is to a high degree also human-induced through landscape use. Fragmentation of the landscape produces a series of habitat patches surrounded by a matrix of different habitats and land use regimes. The major landscape consequences of fragmentation are loss of habitat, reduction in habitat patch size, and increasing isolation of habitat patches. In general, population performance declines in response to habitat loss but size of remaining area and isolation effects is known also to influence the population trend. Small mammals are well suited for examination of population responses to habitat fragmentation as they have modest spatial requirements and short generation times. In theory, organic farms could play an important role in the agricultural landscape as refuges for some small mammal species, as the lack of pesticide and fertiliser treatment, less weed control, more diversified crop structure and a general environmental friendly attitude, form a basis for habitats that provide cover and food for small mammals, and thus for larger predators of these species. Furthermore, density and area of small biotopes could be expected to be higher in the organic farms, thus leading to a decreased distance between optimal habitats. This study compares species diversity and abundance of small mammals in conventional farms and intensively and extensively grown organic farms. In a wide range of different fields in conventional and organic farms, the diversity and density of small mammals were investigated by live-trapping sessions, comprising trap lines with 15 meters between each trap. We studied the responses of populations (belonging to 11 species of small mammals) to habitat patches of different size and different surrounding management strategies (ecological and conventional farming). We found a general correlation between the number of small mammal individuals and small biotope size. This correlation applies in autumn as well as in spring. There is only a weak tendency for more small mammals in small biotopes within organic farms compared within conventional farms. The number of small mammal species stabilises at small biotope sizes around 1000 square meters. The value of organic farms in respect to small mammal biodiversity depends mainly upon the number and area of small biotopes, and only to a minor degree upon the treatments of the fields

ORGANIC FARMS AS REFUGES FOR SMALL MAMMAL BIODIVERSITY

Habitat fragmentation, the process by which relatively continuous habitats is broken into smaller pieces, occurs in natural systems but is to a high degree also human- induced through landscape use. Fragmentation of the landscape produces a series of habitat patches surrounded by a matrix of different habitats and/or land use regimes. The major landscape consequences of fragmentation are loss of habitat, reduction in habitat patch size, and increasing isolation of habitat patches. In general, population performance declines in response to habitat loss but size of remaining area and isolation effects is known also to influence the population trend. Small mammals are well suited for examination of population responses to habitat fragmentation as they have modest spatial requirements and short generation times. In theory, organic farms could play an important role in the agricultural landscape as refuges for some small mammal species, as the lack of pesticide and fertiliser treatment, less weed control, more diversified crop structure and a general environmentalfriendly attitude, form a basis for habitats that provide cover and food for small mammals, and thus for larger predators of these species. Furthermore, density and area of small biotopes could be expected to be higher in the organic farms, thus leading to a decreased distance between optimal habitats

Home range and dispersal of the field vole Microtus agrestis in an organic agro-ecosystem

During 2008-2011 field voles (Microtus agrestis) were studied in a Danish agro-ecosystem in connection with a programme elucidating the role of organic farming as refuge for biodiversity, due to the observed biodiversity losses in conventional farmland. The aim of the study was to quantify home ranges and movements of voles in order to test a hypothesis that vole populations living in organic farm could colonize unoccupied areas in conventional farms. Voles were radiocollared and tracked until death or disappearance. Results showed that vole home-ranges were larger during onset of the breeding season than during the height of the breeding season and the non-breeding period. Males had larger home ranges than females. Voles occupying isolated small biotopes had restricted home range and only few individuals crossed fields from one small biotope to another. Although crossings do occur, the magnitude of dispersal seems restricted

Dansk betydningsinventar i et datalingvistisk perspektiv

In this paper we investigate the Danish sense inventory from a paradigmatic and a syntagmatic perspective, respectively, and we present a collection of related lexical semantic resources that we have developed in collaboration between The Society for Danish Language and Literature and The University of Copenhagen. The resources comprise a Danish wordnet (DanNet), The Danish FrameNet Lexicon, and The Danish Sentiment Lexicon. All three resources are designed to enable semantic processing to be used in digital humanities research as well as more broadly in language-centric technology development. Finally, in order to illustrate the use of the resources when processing running text, we provide some annotation examples of each resource

Betydningsinventarer – i ordbøger og i løbende tekst

We examine a set of highly polysemous nouns in Danish in order to un-derstand how well word senses in Den Danske Ordbog (DDO) and the Danish wordnet, DanNet, correlate with the meanings found in examples of running text. The overall goal of the task is to provide adequate train-ing data for automatic word sense disambiguation. To this end, we anno-tate a corpus with a full sense inventory from DDO and compare with the annotations provided on the basis of a clustered inventory derived auto-matically from DDO and DanNet’s ontological classes. The results show that our hypothesis of clustered senses being more manageable and providing higher annotation agreement (apart from what can be expected from a higher chance agreement when there are less annotation options), holds for a vast majority of the studied cases. Further, the investigations provide a valuable assessment of the organization of senses in the studied dictionaries

Creation of Shared Language Resource Repository in the Nordic and Baltic Countries

Proceeding volume: 8The META-NORD project has contributed to an open infrastructure for language resources (data and tools) under the META-NET umbrella. This paper presents the key objectives of META-NORD and reports on the results achieved in the first year of the project. META-NORD has mapped and described the national language technology landscape in the Nordic and Baltic countries in terms of language use, language technology and resources, main actors in the academy, industry, government and society; identified and collected the first batch of language resources in the Nordic and Baltic countries; documented, processed, linked, and upgraded the identified language resources to agreed standards and guidelines. The three horizontal multilingual actions in META-NORD are overviewed in this paper: linking and validating Nordic and Baltic wordnets, the harmonisation of multilingual Nordic and Baltic treebanks, and consolidating multilingual terminology resources across European countries. This paper also touches upon intellectual property rights for the sharing of language resources.Peer reviewe

Baltic and Nordic Parts of the European Linguistic Infrastructure

This paper describes scientific, technical and legal work done on the creation of the linguistic infrastructure for the Nordic and Baltic countries. The paper describes the research on assessment of the language technology support for languages of Baltic and Nordic countries, on establishing language resource sharing infrastructure and collection and description of linguistic resources. We present improvements necessary to ensure usability and interoperability of language resources, discuss IPR issues related to intellectual property rights for complex resources, describe extension of infrastructure through integration of language-resource specific repositories. Work on treebanks, wordnets, terminology resources and finite-state technology is described in more details. Finally, our approach on ensuring sustainability of infrastructure is discussed.Peer reviewe