Kestävää viherrakentamisen ja ennallistamisen kasvimateriaalia pohjoisille matkailualueille

Viherrakentamisen ja ennallistamisen kasvilajien valinta ja saatavuus on pohjoisen vaativissa kasvuolosuhteissa usein ongelma. Syksyllä 2007 päättyi laaja pohjoisille matkailualueille keskittynyt EU LIFE ympäristörahaston hanke Matkailualueet maisemalaboratorioina – Työvälineitä kestävän matkailun edistämiseen (LANDSCAPE LAB). Oulun yliopiston kasvitieteellinen puutarha oli hankkeessa mukana yhtenä kumppanina ja toteutti yhteistyössä Lapin ammattiopiston luonto- ja ympäristöalan toimipisteen kanssa Kestävän viherrakentamisen ja ennallistamisen kasvimateriaali, (LABPLANT) osahankkeen. Osahankkeen tavoitteina oli etsiä ja valita pohjoiseen viherrakentamiseen ja ennallistamiseen sopivaa kasvimateriaalia, kehittää kasvien lisäysmenetelmiä ja tuottaa kestävää kasvimateriaalia, perustaa näytealueita pohjoisiin matkailukeskuksiin ja kirjoittaa opaskirja pohjoisen matkailuympäristön kestävistä kasveista.Kestävien kasvien valinta perustui oleellisesti jo olemassa olevaan, aiemmista projekteista tulleeseen tietoon sekä Oulun yliopiston kasvitieteellisen puutarhan ja Lapin ammattiopiston Metsäruusun toimipisteen kasvikokoelmiin. Esiteltävän kasvimateriaalin valinnan kriteerit olivat ilmastollinen kestävyys sekä käyttökelpoisuus pohjoisessa ympäristössä. Kasvimateriaali koostuu perinteisistä viherrakentamisen kasveista, luonnonkasveista ja potentiaalisista uusista viherrakentamisen kasveista. Osahankkeen aikana lisättiin yhteensä lähes sata eri lajia tai kantaa monivuotisia ruohokasveja, varpuja, pensaita ja puita.Osatehtävän aikana perustettiin yhteensä kuusi näyteistutusaluetta, näistä kaksi Leville, kaksi Ylläkselle ja kaksi Pallakselle. Näytealueilla esitellään kasvien käyttöä erilaisissa pohjoisissa matkailuympäristöissä. Valmistunut opaskirja, Pohjoisen matkailuympäristön kestävät kasvit, kertoo pohjoisen ympäristön ja kasvien ominaispiirteistä sekä siitä, miten pohjoisen matkailukeskusten ympäristöistä voidaan kehittää viihtyisämpiä ja ekologisesti kestävämpiä. Opaskirjassa esitellään yli 300 pohjoisilla alueilla käyttökelpoista ja kestävää luonnon- ja viherrakentamisen kasvia lisäys- ja saatavuustietoineen

China in the Arctic; and the Opportunities and Challenges for Chinese-Finnish Arctic Co-operation

The Arctic region is rapidly transforming from a peripheral region to a global theatre with an increasing number of non-Arctic stakeholders. One illustration of this transformation process is the growing presence of China in the Arctic. This report first discusses China’s changing role in global affairs (Chapter 1). This provides background for exploring China’s interests, role and presence in the Arctic. The study of China’s presence in the region is carried out through the lens of the Chinese government’s four priority areas towards the region as expressed in the country’s first official Arctic statement – the White Paper – from January 2018 (Chapter 2). Further, Chinese interests and actions in the Arctic are studied from the viewpoint of one particular Arctic State, Finland. The authors provide an overview of a broad spectrum of Chinese-Finnish interactions in different contexts, including investments in Northern Finland and co-operation within the areas of Finnish Arctic expertise and research. In addition, concerns and risks related to interaction with Chinese actors are discussed (Chapter 3). Over the past decade, China has undertaken an effort to demonstrate its growing knowledge of, and commitment to, the Arctic region. Some actors and experts are concerned about China’s aims and actions in the region, while others express hope for Chinese institutions, investors and companies to contribute to regional development and knowledge-building. The report presents a balanced and multifaceted, although necessarily not fully comprehensive, picture of China’s rise as an actor in the Arctic.</p

China in the Arctic; and the Opportunities and Challenges for Chinese-Finnish Arctic Co-operation

The Arctic region is rapidly transforming from a peripheral region to a global theatre with an increasing number of non-Arctic stakeholders. One illustration of this transformation process is the growing presence of China in the Arctic. This report first discusses China’s changing role in global affairs (Chapter 1). This provides background for exploring China’s interests, role and presence in the Arctic. The study of China’s presence in the region is carried out through the lens of the Chinese government’s four priority areas towards the region as expressed in the country’s first official Arctic statement – the White Paper – from January 2018 (Chapter 2). Further, Chinese interests and actions in the Arctic are studied from the viewpoint of one particular Arctic State, Finland. The authors provide an overview of a broad spectrum of Chinese-Finnish interactions in different contexts, including investments in Northern Finland and co-operation within the areas of Finnish Arctic expertise and research. In addition, concerns and risks related to interaction with Chinese actors are discussed (Chapter 3). Over the past decade, China has undertaken an effort to demonstrate its growing knowledge of, and commitment to, the Arctic region. Some actors and experts are concerned about China’s aims and actions in the region, while others express hope for Chinese institutions, investors and companies to contribute to regional development and knowledge-building. The report presents a balanced and multifaceted, although necessarily not fully comprehensive, picture of China’s rise as an actor in the Arctic

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe