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.
2004
Authors
Birger VenneslandAbstract
No abstract has been registered
Authors
Birger VenneslandAbstract
No abstract has been registered
Authors
Rolf Arnt Olsen Grete RasmussenAbstract
No abstract has been registered
Authors
Peder GjerdrumAbstract
EMC is traditionally analysed using small, clear wood specimens. However, some discrepancy was observed in full-size boards in a sawmill. In this experiment specimens of varying length from 10 to 120 mm clear wood and from 120 to 900 mm natural quality were tested. Commercial spruce boards were used. After kiln drying and proper conditionning, the samples were kept in a constant climate (40 °C, 65% RH) for half a year, until apparent equilibrium was reached. The EMC was observed by the dry weight method separately for adsorption and desorption. The EMC (average for ad- and desorption) was found to increase proportionally to the natural logarithm of the specimen length. Further, clear wood showed sifgnificantly higher EMC than natural quality. While for desorption the EMC was hardly influenced by length, desorption was highly length dependent. The difference in EMC (desorption) between a full-length board and a 10-mm clear specimen was estimated to 0.013 (fraction of dry wood). Accordingly, the hysteresis A:D ratio decreased from 0.96 for the shortest specimens to 0.88 for the longest. The results verify and extend earlier findings and are important for understanding and estimating the wood-moisture interaction of kiln dried timber, particulary for high drying quality specifications. However, the difficulty of deciding the EMC for large specimens should not be underestimated.
Authors
Torbjørn OkstadAbstract
No abstract has been registered
Authors
J. Brian Hardaker James W. Richardson Gudbrand Lien Keith D. SchumannAbstract
A method of stochastic dominance analysis with respect to a function (SDRF) is described and illustrated. The method, called stochastic efficiency with respect to a function (SERF), orders a set of risky alternatives in terms of certainty equivalents for a specified range of attitudes to risk. It can be applied for conforming utility functions with risk attitudes defined by corresponding ranges of absolute, relative or partial risk aversion coefficients. Unlike conventional SDRF, SERF involves comparing each alternative with all the other alternatives simultaneously, not pairwise, and hence can produce a smaller efficient set than that found by simple pairwise SDRF over the same range of risk attitudes. Moreover, the method can be implemented in a simple spreadsheet with no special software needed.
Abstract
Opportunities to make sequential decisions and adjust activities as a season progress and more information becomes available acharacterise the farm management process. ...
Authors
Ingerd Skow Hofgaard Birgitte Henriksen Åshild Ergon Hilde Kolstad Helge Skinnes Yalew Tarkegne Anne-Marte TronsmoAbstract
Development of Fusarium head blight (FHB) was studied in winter wheat pre-treated with potential defence activators. Several chemicals were pre-screened for their capacity to reduce development of Microdochium nivale in a detached leaf assay. Selected compounds were further tested for their capacity to reduce Fusarium culmorum development in heads of winter wheat in greenhouse and field experiments. In the detached leaf assay, leaves from plants pre-treated with a foliar fertilizer displayed reduced disease development compared to untreated control. A significantly reduced disease development of FHB in plants pre-treated with the foliar fertilizer was also registered in the greenhouse and field experiments. In the field experiment, harvested grainsfrom plants treated with the foliar fertilizer had up to 75% reduction in Fusarium infected seeds compared to grains from non-treated plants.
Authors
Svein SolbergAbstract
Summer drought, i.e. unusually dry and warm weather, has been a significant stress factor for Norway spruce in southeast Norway during the 14 years of forest monitoring. Dry and warm summers were followed by increases in defoliation, discolouration of foliage, cone formation and mortality. The causal mechanisms are discussed. Most likely, the defoliation resulted from increased needle-fall in the autumn after dry summers.During the monitoring period 19882001, southeast Norway was repeatedly affected by summer drought, in particular, in the early 1990s. The dataset comprised 455 Forest officers plots with annual data on crown condition and mortality. Linear mixed models were used for estimation and hypothesis testing, including a variancecovariance structure for the handling of random effects and temporal autocorrelation.
Authors
Erlend Ystrøm Haartveit R.A. Kozak T.C. ManessAbstract
In this paper, we review the development of supply chain management (SCM) and identify a number of considerations for applying these techniques to the forest products industry. A review of the literature found that SCM initiatives were primarily customer focused, where a significant amount of market pull exists. However, the forest products industry is characterized by sales of commodity products with push marketing. Successful implementation of SCM in these types of supply chains were found to focus on efficiencies through: 1) increasing throughput and 2) reducing inventories. Potential for efficiency improvements are larger when a holistic perspective is applied, integrating processes across companies in the supply chain. Two supply chain mapping methods were identified from the literature as key techniques for use in the forest products industry, and these were applied to three case companies in the western Canadian province of British Columbia. In general, it was found to be especially challenging to apply these techniques (and SCM in general) to commodity-based supply chains because of uncertainty in raw material supply, the relatively long lead times in production, and production processes that generate a relatively high percentage of consequence products. However, the mapping processes yielded some promising results with respect to creating an overview of supply chain structures, time consumption, and inventories. One major benefit derived from applying these methods would be improved communications between actors, customers, and suppliers along the supply chain. The authors suggest that SCM mapping tools be modified to improve their performance in analyzing supply chains for the forest products industry.