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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.

2015

Abstract

This literature review documents behavioural differences in organic and conventional sheep and goats in Norway. Increased indoor space results in increased lying time, more synchronized lying behaviour, less displacements and higher milk yield in sheep, and increased lying time and lower frequency of agonistic behaviour in goats. Sheep and goats spend 45-50 % of their time outdoors when given access to an outdoor yard during winter. Under normal thermal conditions, fully fleeced sheep do not need solid floors of welfare reasons in Norway. Neither do dairy goats in insulated buildings. The significance of different milk feeding strategies in goat kids is poorly documented, but studies on lambs and calves show that suckling increases the growth rate, gives better social competence and more exploratory behaviour. Thus, the organic regulations in Norwegian sheep and goat production have some positive impact on behavioural indicators of sheep and goat welfare, especially during winter housing.

To document

Abstract

Aim Previous research on how climatic niches vary across species ranges has focused on a limited number of species, mostly inv asive, and has not, to date, been very conclusive. Here we assess the degree of niche conservatism between distant populations of native alpine plant species that have been separated for thousands of years. Location European Alps and Fennoscandia. Methods Of the studied pool of 888 terrestr ial vascular plant species occurring in both the Alps and Fennoscandia, we used two complementary approaches to test and quantify climatic-niche shifts for 31 species having strictly disjunct populations and 358 species having either a contiguous or a patchy distribution with distant populations. First, we used species distr i- bution modelling to test for a region effect on each species’ climatic niche. Second, we quantified niche overlap and shifts in niche width (i.e. ecological amplitude) and position (i.e. ecological optimum) within a bi-dimensional climatic space. Results Only one species (3%) of the 31 species with str ictly disjunct populations and 58 species (16%) of the 358 species with distant popula- tions showed a region effect on their climatic niche. Niche overlap was higher for species with strictly disjunct populations than for species with distant populations and highest for arctic–alpine species. Climatic niches were, on average, wider and located towards warmer and wetter conditions in the Alps. Main conclusion Climatic niches seem to be generally conserved between populations that are separated between the Alps and Fennoscandia and have probably been so for 10,000–15,000 years. Therefore, the basic assumption of species distribution models that a species’ climatic niche is constant in space and time – at least on time scales 10 4 years or less – seems to be largely valid for arctic–alpine plants.