Hopp til hovedinnholdet

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.

2016

Abstract

Finding new ways to simultaneously account for monetary and non-monetary goals in ecosystem services is needed in order to establish a new modelling framework for the facilitation of trade-offs between competing stakeholder interests. The socioecological sustainability of an ecosystem service is dependent on the consent of the people in the area of the ESS. An important reason is that a given ecosystem service may have highly different value in different stakeholder cultures. In this aspect is also the understanding of disservices and hidden services. The kind and level of conflict tend to differ with location and the operational level of decision-making. It is crucial work to identify all linked subservices and organise them into a common framework for evaluation. In our research group (MULTIESS) we try to develop multi-criteria tools to assess the implications of prioritizing different interests on ecological, sociological and economic output. Similarly, changes in the human population and environment will interact and influence on the services and their values, demanding such parameters to be evaluated for the whole range of potential scenarios. We maintain that in order to make multi-criteria analyses (MCA) successful, service outputs and externalities must and can be measured in familiar terms (e.g. money, biomass) without the use of direct or stated pricing of non-commodities such as welfare, recreation or biodiversity.

Abstract

The effects of cutting frequency, silage fermentation pattern and legume performance in grass-clover ley on use of inputs and profitability in an organic dairy system in Mid-Norway were examined. A whole-farm linear programming model was developed to compare a three-cut and a two-cut system, either with restricted silage fermentation through acidification or untreated at low or high red clover (Trifolium pratense L) proportion in the ley. Input-output relations incorporated into the model were derived from a meta-analysis of organic grassland field trials in Norway, silage fermentation experiments, and with feed intakes and milk yields from simulations with the NorFor feed evaluation system. The model maximised total gross margin of farms with 250,000 l milk quota, and housing capacity for 45 cows. Farmland availability was allowed to vary with 40 ha as the basis. High proportion of legumes in the leys was far more important for profitability than the score on the other variables considered. With little land available, the costs of preservatives were higher than their benefits. At higher land areas applying preservatives was more profitable. Cutting systems producing silages that result in an increased intake of silage per cow, generally three-cut systems, performed relatively better at higher land availabilities.