Digital Twin for Wind Energy: Latest updates from the NorthWind project

NorthWind, a collaborative research initiative supported by the Research Council of Norway, industry stakeholders, and research partners, aims to advance cutting-edge research and innovation in wind energy. The core mission is to reduce wind power costs and foster sustainable growth, with a key focus on the development of digital twins. A digital twin is a virtual representation of physical assets or processes that uses data and simulators to enable real-time forecasting, optimization, monitoring, control and informed decision-making. Recently, a hierarchical scale ranging from 0 to 5 (0 - Standalone, 1 - Descriptive, 2 - Diagnostic, 3 - Predictive, 4 - Prescriptive, 5 - Autonomous has been introduced within the NorthWind project to assess the capabilities of digital twins. This paper elaborates on our progress in constructing digital twins for wind farms and their components across various capability levels

Digital Twins in Wind Energy: Emerging Technologies and Industry-Informed Future Directions

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Seasonal adaptation, phenology and survival in gall-inducing sawflies (Tenthredinidae: Nematinae: Pontania)

The phenological adaptation of herbivorous insects in the Arctic may be particularly prone to the negative impact of the current global climate change. Increasing temporal dissociation with their plant resources, and to their natural enemies such as parasitoids may be detrimental for their survival. The life history adaptations for gall-inducing sawflies in the Arctic (Tenthredinidae: Nematinae: Pontania nivalis, P. glabrifrons and P. arcticornis) followed the common outline for overwintering insects. During winter hibernation, diapause intensity prevented resumption of morphogenesis in early winter and turned into a post-diapause quiescence mid-winter, in which response to temperature synchronizes spring eclosion. Hindcasts of temperature conditions in spring for the last 21 years revealed a highly significant advancement in dates of eclosion, an evidence of global warming. There were, however, large inter-annual differences in eclosion timing, which probably is caused by timing of the spring snow melt. In early spring there is a short phenological window of opportunity for oviposition on suitable willow (Salix spp).host resources. Females showed a non-discriminatory oviposition preference pattern that did not enhanced larval performance, however larval survival was high. This pattern is probably caused by a brief and early spring eclosion when host plant cues are lacking. In autumn, diapause preparation was shown to occur in response to photoperiod during pre-diapause. Pontania spp. had a remarkable phenological synchronous behaviour in which larvae start to emerge from the galls in search for overwintering sites to pupate on 5 september. Although specialist insect species may be especially prone to the negative impacts of climatic change, this study does not provide any clear indications that this applies to Pontania spp.

Data from: Determinants of parasitoid communities of willow-galling sawflies: habitat overrides physiology, host plant, and space

Studies on the determinants of plant–herbivore and herbivore–parasitoid associations provide important insights into the origin and maintenance of global and local species richness. If parasitoids are specialists on herbivore niches rather than on herbivore taxa, then alternating escape of herbivores into novel niches and delayed resource tracking by parasitoids could fuel diversification at both trophic levels. We used DNA barcoding to identify parasitoids that attack larvae of seven Pontania sawfly species that induce leaf galls on eight willow species growing in subarctic and arctic–alpine habitats in three geographic locations in northern Fennoscandia, and then applied distance- and model-based multivariate analyses and phylogenetic regression methods to evaluate the hierarchical importance of location, phylogeny and different galler niche dimensions on parasitoid host use. We found statistically significant variation in parasitoid communities across geographic locations and willow host species, but the differences were mainly quantitative due to extensive sharing of enemies among gallers within habitat types. By contrast, the divide between habitats defined two qualitatively different network compartments, because many common parasitoids exhibited strong habitat preference. Galler and parasitoid phylogenies did not explain associations, because distantly related arctic–alpine gallers were attacked by a species-poor enemy community dominated by two parasitoid species that most likely have independently tracked the gallers’ evolutionary shifts into the novel habitat. Our results indicate that barcode- and phylogeny-based analyses of food webs that span forested vs. tundra or grassland environments could improve our understanding of vertical diversification effects in complex plant–herbivore–parasitoid networks

Data from: Determinants of parasitoid communities of willow-galling sawflies: habitat overrides physiology, host plant, and space

Studies on the determinants of plant–herbivore and herbivore–parasitoid associations provide important insights into the origin and maintenance of global and local species richness. If parasitoids are specialists on herbivore niches rather than on herbivore taxa, then alternating escape of herbivores into novel niches and delayed resource tracking by parasitoids could fuel diversification at both trophic levels. We used DNA barcoding to identify parasitoids that attack larvae of seven Pontania sawfly species that induce leaf galls on eight willow species growing in subarctic and arctic–alpine habitats in three geographic locations in northern Fennoscandia, and then applied distance- and model-based multivariate analyses and phylogenetic regression methods to evaluate the hierarchical importance of location, phylogeny and different galler niche dimensions on parasitoid host use. We found statistically significant variation in parasitoid communities across geographic locations and willow host species, but the differences were mainly quantitative due to extensive sharing of enemies among gallers within habitat types. By contrast, the divide between habitats defined two qualitatively different network compartments, because many common parasitoids exhibited strong habitat preference. Galler and parasitoid phylogenies did not explain associations, because distantly related arctic–alpine gallers were attacked by a species-poor enemy community dominated by two parasitoid species that most likely have independently tracked the gallers’ evolutionary shifts into the novel habitat. Our results indicate that barcode- and phylogeny-based analyses of food webs that span forested vs. tundra or grassland environments could improve our understanding of vertical diversification effects in complex plant–herbivore–parasitoid networks

Barcode sequences of parasitoid larvae

COI barcode sequences of 561 parasitoid larvae collected from galls induced by Pontania sawflie

Commands and data for GLM analyses in mvabund

Combined text file containing commands and data used for the model-based analyses of the effects of host (galler and willow species) and location on parasitism using the mvabund package in R

Parasitoid numbers in Pontania population-level samples

Numbers of parasitoid larvae (identified by COI barcodes) representing each of 14 parasitoid species in 22 Pontania leaf-galler community samples

Barcode sequences of reared parasitoid reference specimens

COI barcode sequences of 72 reared adult parasitoid reference specimens that were used to identify larval parasitoids based on their barcodes

Commands and data for test of phylogenetic effects

Combined text file containing commands and data used for testing the effects of galler and parasitoid phylogenies on proportional species-level parasitism as described in Ives & Godfray (2006)