Publications
NIBIOs employees contribute to several hundred scientific articles and research reports every year. You can browse or search in our collection which contains references and links to these publications as well as other research and dissemination activities. The collection is continously updated with new and historical material.
2026
Authors
Daniel RasseAbstract
No abstract has been registered
Authors
Clifton Makate Gerard Cornelissen Jan Mulder Vegard Martinsen Øyvind Nystad HandbergAbstract
This study examines how risk aversion, drought shocks, and land tenure correlate with the uptake of climate-smart agricultural (CSA) innovations in Uganda. Using survey data (442 households and 927 plots) from two districts (Mubende and Alebtong), farm-level weather data, and experimental and subjective risk aversion measures, the study finds risk aversion to be positively associated with recent drought shocks but negatively correlated with private land tenure. Risk aversion is associated with more land allocated to CSA, but recent drought shocks reduce adoption. Risk-averse farmers prioritize plots with secure land tenure for CSA investments. Promoting CSA practices that align with farmers’ risk-averse tendencies, ensuring protection against drought shocks, and strengthening tenure security can help sustain adoption.
Authors
Giovanna Ottaviani AalmoAbstract
No abstract has been registered
Authors
María Bustamante Liria Concetta Maria Messina Simona Manuguerra Andrea Santulli Giovanna Ottaviani AalmoAbstract
Despite significant progress in understanding the complexity of food systems’ challenges, there remains a lack of clarity around how these systems can undergo transformative change and what is required to enable such shifts. This paper focuses on social innovation as a promising mechanism for addressing structural challenges and reconfiguring food systems toward sustainability, equity, justice, and resilience. Our main contribution is the design of an actionable guidance that helps practitioners and researchers explore and leverage the transformative potential of social innovations. This guidance emerges from a dialogue between a key framework for analyzing social-ecological transformations and recent advancements in Transformative Social Innovation (TSI) theory. By incorporating insights on adaptive, bottom-linked governance and relational dynamics into the SES processual framework, we strengthen its applicability to TSI analysis and make it more adaptable for real-world contexts. We apply this guidance to a case study in Western Sicily’s aquatic food systems, where a long-standing social innovation – rooted in Living Lab methodologies and collaborative governance – demonstrates the potential to challenge dominant values by reconfiguring dominant social relations, empower local actors, and engage with both deep and shallow leverage points, contributing to systemic transformations. By combining cross-field dialogue with empirical application, this paper offers both practical tools for analyzing and designing transformative social innovation processes and practical insights into how social innovations can contribute to more sustainable, resilient, and equitable futures. It directly speaks to practitioners, scholars, and policy makers interested in enabling systemic transformation through socially embedded innovation processes.
Abstract
This paper presents a social benefit-cost analysis (BCA) of Precision Agriculture (PA)and Enhanced Efficiency Fertilizers (EEF) for reducing nitrate pollution in the Zelivka catchment, the drinking-water source for 1.5 million people in Prague and surrounding regions. The analysis combines field-level data (50,309 ha, 729 farms), meta-analytical biophysical parameters, a dynamic heterogeneous-agent adoption model, and cross-validation against an independent SWAT+ hydrological simulation. Technology adoption generates a mean Net Present Value of EUR 291 million (95% CI: EUR 94 775 million) over fifty years, with a deterministic benefit-cost ratio of 19.8. Even with health benefits set to zero, the NPV remains positive at EUR 44 million, indicating that private benefits alone cover adoption costs. BCA and the SWAT+ approaches imply comparable rates of reservoir-concentration decline (≈0.15 mg/L/yr in SWAT+ over its lag-free window versus a ≈0.13 mg/L/yr peak in the BCA once the lag has elapsed). At-source nitrogen prevention via agricultural technology adoption offers a cost-effective complement to structural catchment measures and end-of-pipe water treatment.
Authors
Helle Ross GobakkenAbstract
Support from Veiflyt project financed by Skogtiltaksfondet
Authors
Lokesh P Padhye Melanie Kah Erin M Leitao Karl Bowles Paul Nathanail Ian T Cousins Romain Figuière Bradley O Clarke Jordan M Partington Wejdan Alghamdi Elsie M Sunderland Bridger J Ruyle Satoshi Endo Trevor N Brown Zhengyang Wang Size Zheng Joseph J Pignatello Sanne J Smith Marcel Riegel Hans Peter Heinrich Arp Jens Blotevogel Robert J Giraud Anthony K Rappé Erlend Grenager Sørmo Gerard Cornelissen Marc A Deshusses Igor V Novosselov P Lee Ferguson Brian R Pinkard Timothy J Strathmann Kapish Gobindlal Jonathan Sperry Elisabeth Cuervo Lumbaque Nick Duinslaeger Jelena Radjenovic James HattonAbstract
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) represent a large—and structurally diverse—group of contaminants that have become ubiquitous in our environment. PFAS are all extremely persistent while some are also bioaccumulative, mobile and/or toxic, which gives rise to significant environmental and health concerns. Despite more than a decade of intensive research, the management of PFAS is still associated with considerable challenges. It is evident that a holistic approach is required to address the challenging global problem of PFAS. This roadmap features expert perspectives from world-renowned leading researchers and practitioners on how best to manage PFAS. The 15 topics cover different facets of the complex PFAS issue, providing a multidisciplinary and multisectoral overview. For each topic, we reflect on the current status of knowledge and offer recommendations on science and technology advances that will help meet current and future challenges. Taken together, the 15 topics cover the entire life cycle of PFAS—from their sources to their destruction. Important themes such as monitoring and analysis, understanding and predicting fate, source controls (regulation and replacement), and existing and emerging strategies for remediation (capture and destroy) are highlighted throughout the roadmap. Overall, there are many recent scientific and technological advancements that show promise for the management of PFAS. However, it is also clear that there is no ‘silver bullet’ and multifaceted solutions will be needed. Long-term success hinges on sustained collaboration among researchers, policymakers, industries, and communities, which we hope this roadmap will help to catalyze.
Authors
A. Terskaia R. Oucheikh Junxiang Peng J. Oliveira D. Parsons J. Morel A.M. Abdi Z. Cai S. Thapa N. Boke-Olen P. Olsson H.G. Smith J. Ekroos L. EklundhAbstract
Grassland management practices are critical both for maintaining resilient food production and for preserving biodiversity, yet spatially explicit information on them is often limited. Recent advances in freely available, remotely sensed land surface phenology and productivity datasets raise the question of whether phenological metrics provide additional, biologically interpretable information for characterising and mapping grassland management beyond conventional spectral features. In this study, we evaluated the information content and added value of freely available, ready-to-use Sentinel-2–derived High-Resolution Vegetation Phenology and Productivity (HR-VPP) data for distinguishing broad grassland management types (conventional leys, organic leys, and semi-natural grasslands) across multiple spatial scales. We analyzed 1455 grasslands across the intensively farmed Skåne province (southern Sweden) over 2018–2022 at provincial and local scales. We further tested whether phenological variables improve grassland management classification when combined with multi-temporal Sentinel-2 spectral data using state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) methods, and applied a conformal prediction framework to manage classification uncertainty. Relationships between HR-VPP metrics and field-measured biomass were additionally assessed using independent field data from northern Sweden. Field-level analyses showed weak (R2 = 0.28) to moderate (R2 = 0.47) relationships between HR-VPP productivity metrics and measured biomass. HR-VPP metrics captured statistically significant but subtle differences among management types, with strong overlap between categories, particularly at the provincial scale. Differences were more pronounced at local scales. Consequently, HR-VPP variables alone had limited predictive power and ML model accuracy was low (0.53). However, combining HR-VPP with Sentinel-2 spectral time-series data substantially improved classification performance, achieving an accuracy of 0.70. Feature importance analysis indicated that spectral indices dominated classification, with limited direct contribution from phenological parameters. These findings highlight both the potential and current limitations of continental-scale phenology and productivity products for grassland management monitoring and point to the need for improved models and complementary data sources to better capture management practices.
Authors
Telmo Jorge Carneiro Amado Jackson Ernani Fiorin William Ramos da Silva Thiago Inagaki Ulfried Arns Tiago Wyzykowski Felipe José Cury Fracetto Ademir de Oliveira FerreiraAbstract
Diversified no-tillage crop successions are key strategies for improving soil health, productivity, and sustainability in tropical environments. However, adoption of diversified cropping systems remains limited due to economic, cultural, and technical constraints. This study aimed to evaluate how long-term diversified crop rotations, differing in legume inclusion and mineral phosphorus (P) and potassium (K) fertilization, influence system nitrogen (N), P, and K budgets, biomass production, and crop productivity in mature tropical no-tillage systems (NTS). Using a 10-year field experiment established on a tropical Ferralsol in southern Brazil, we evaluated six long-term crop rotations that differed in crop diversification, inclusion of Fabaceae cover crops, and phosphorus and potassium mineral fertilization. Total system N, P, and K budgets were quantified by integrating nutrient inputs, crop uptake, grain nutrient export, biomass nutrient cycling, and net soil nutrient balances. Intensive legume-based rotations increased crop productivity compared with low-diversity, non-legume rotations (specifically, the two-crop black oat/common bean succession). Vetch-based rotations under optimal or suboptimal mineral fertilization, as well as unfertilized vetch rotations, produced the highest cumulative grain yields (∼52,000 kg ha -1 ), representing a 38% increase (a 1.38-fold increase) over the black oat/common bean rotation (∼38,000 kg ha -1 ). This response was associated with a 40% increase in aboveground biomass and grain yield when maize followed hairy vetch rather than black oat. Legume-intensive rotations under optimal mineral fertilization or without fertilization maintained a strongly positive N budget (+559 kg ha -1 ), whereas the low-diversity black oat/common bean rotation showed a net N deficit. Conversely, all unfertilized systems, including the highly productive unfertilized hairy vetch-based rotations, exhibited strongly negative P and K budgets, indicating a progressive risk of soil fertility depletion. Only suboptimal mineral-fertilized vetch rotations partially offset these nutrient deficits in highly crop-productive systems. The study highlights the role of legume-based crop rotations as a key strategy to sustain a positive N budget, thereby supporting nutrient cycling and crop productivity under tropical NTS. Maintaining nutrient balance remained dependent on coupling biological N fixation with balanced mineral P and K fertilization to offset nutrient export deficits in high-yield systems and to reduce the risk of long-term soil fertility depletion.
Authors
Andrea Ponzecchi Albin Lobo Claudia Cocozza Paolo Cherubini Matthias Saurer Erik Larnøy Lisbeth G. ThygesenAbstract
Broadleaf afforestation increasingly requires planting material that combines valuable wood properties with resilience to climatic stress. High heartwood content is a desirable trait in pedunculate oak (Quercus robur), but it is unclear whether selecting for it could be a trade-off with resistance and resilience to drought. We addressed this question in a 24 year old progeny trial in southern Denmark where trees were ranked by heartwood production and the 2018 drought was used as a natural stress event. Trees with contrasting heartwood content were assessed using multiple indicators of drought response, including annual ring width, vessel anatomy, wood density, and dual stable isotopes (δ¹³C and δ¹⁸O) measured separately in earlywood and latewood over a five-year period. The 2018 summer drought was of moderate intensity at the trial site, with SPEI3 approximately −1.5, but it was clearly reflected in isotopic signals, indicating that trees perceived the water deficit. In contrast, radial growth did not decline, and ring widths remained above average in 2018. Across all metrics, trees with lower and higher heartwood content showed broadly similar physiological and wood-structural responses. Within the environmental conditions and drought intensity observed in this study, our results provide no evidence for a strong trade-off between heartwood content and response to a drought of moderate severity. They therefore support, with appropriate caution, the continued consideration of heartwood content as a selection trait in breeding and afforestation programs in comparable environments.