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.
2017
Authors
Blas Mola-Yudego Javier Arevalo Olalla Díaz-Yáñez Ioannis Dimitriou Elliot Freshwater Antti Haapala Tahamina Khanam Mari SelkimäkiAbstract
Wood biomass for energy is largely produced in Europe from forest land resulting from silvicultural and management practices or from agricultural land in the form of fast growing plantations. The present paper reviews and compares the estimated current potentials for wood biomass production in 25 countries in Europe. The potentials are divided attending to these sources to identify the most suitable method of wood biomass production on a country level, based on its current forest and agriculture levels of production. Data has been collected and compiled from previous models and estimations. The total aggregated available potential in Europe is 76 Mm3 of wood biomass from the forests, with an additional 90 Mm3 from increasing the utilization of forest lands, and 98 Mm3 from fast growing plantations (dedicating 5% of current agricultural land). Germany and France showed high potentials both from agriculture and forest; Finland and Sweden had most of its potential from forest sources; and Spain, Poland, and UK from fast-growing plantations. When considered together, Europe presents a large potential for wood biomass production for energy, and each country should develop different policy strategies of promotion attending to the most available source to realize this potential efficiently.
Authors
Åshild Ergon Laura Kirwan Gustav Fystro Marina Azzaroli Bleken Rosemary P Collins Odd Arne RognliAbstract
No abstract has been registered
Authors
Anne-Grete Roer Hjelkrem Torfinn Torp Guro Brodal Heidi Udnes Aamot Einar Strand Berit Nordskog Ruth Dill-Macky Simon G. Edwards Ingerd Skow HofgaardAbstract
No abstract has been registered
Authors
Reidun Pommeresche Anne-Kristin Løes Torfinn TorpAbstract
The density and diversity of springtails (Collembola) in the upper soil layer (0–3.8 cm) were studied in a perennial grass-clover ley in NW Norway during April–June 2012. The study was part of a field experiment comparing yields and soil characteristics after application of non-digested slurry (NS) versus anaerobically digested slurry (DS) from dairy cows. In total for three sampling dates, 39 species of springtails were identified. In the Control plots receiving no manure, the density level was around 30 000 individuals (ind.) m−2 throughout the whole season. Three days after slurry application (40 t ha−1), the density of springtails had dropped significantly; from 55 214 to 7410 ind. m−2 in the NS treatment and from 41 914 to 10 260 ind. m−2 in the DS treatment. After 7 weeks the densities had increased again to 54% and 38% of the initial levels in NS and DS treatments, respectively. The springtails were divided into two ecological groups based on morphology and colour. The epigeic group comprised surface-dwelling species with eye organs and pigmentation. The endogeic group comprised soil-dwelling species lacking eye organs and pigmentation, and generally with shorter extremities than those found in the epigeic group. The negative effect of manure application on density was more severe and long-lasting in the epigeic than in the endogeic group. This effect was similar for both manure types. One species (Parisotoma notabilis) comprised 50% of the epigeic population, while three Mesaphorura spp. and Stanaphorura lubbocki comprised half the endogeic population. In general, the community structure, described by the relative abundance of each species, was more affected by manure application in the epigeic than in the endogeic group. Hence, slurry application seemed to affect surface-dwelling species more negatively than soil- dwelling species, even within the small sampling depth used here. The density of endogeic species seemed to recover faster than the density of the epigeic species. A simplified classification of epigeic and endogeic springtails, based on the presence or absence of pigmentation and eyes, may be useful in studies of soil springtails where identification of the actual species is not the primary purpose.
Authors
Leif Sundheim Inger Therese L. Lillegaard Christiane Kruse Fæste Anne Lise Brantsæter Guro Brodal Gunnar Sundstøl EriksenAbstract
No abstract has been registered
Abstract
Management of peat soils is regionally important as they cover large land areas and have important but conflicting ecosystems services. A recent management trend for drained peatlands is the control of greenhouse gases (GHG) by changes in agricultural practices, peatland restoration or paludiculture. Due to complex antagonistic controls of moisture, water table management can be difficult to use as a method for controlling GHG emissions. Past studies show that there is no obvious relationship between GHG emission rates and crop type, tillage intensity or fertilization rates. For drained peat soils, the best use options can vary from rewetting with reduced emission to efficient short term use to maximize the profit per amount of greenhouse gas emitted. The GHG accounting should consider the entire life cycle of the peatland and the socio-economic benefits peatlands provide locally. Cultivating energy crops is a viable option especially for wet peat soils with poor drainage, but harvesting remains a challenge due to tractability of wet soils. Paludiculture in lowland floodplains can be a tool to mitigate regional flooding allowing water to be stored on these lands without much harm to crops. This can also increase regional biodiversity providing important habitats for birds and moisture tolerant plant species. However, on many peatlands rewetting is not possible due to their position in the landscape and the associated difficulty to maintain a high stable water table. While the goal of rewetting often is to encourage the return of peat forming plants and the ecosystem services they provide such as carbon sequestration, it is not well known if these plants will grow on peat soils that have been altered by the process of drainage and management. Therefore, it is important to consider peat quality and hydrology when choosing management options. Mapping of sites is recommended as a management tool to guide actions. The environmental status and socio-economic importance of the sites should be assessed both for continued cultivation but also for other ecosystem services such as restoration and hydrological functions (flood control). Farmers need advice, tools and training to find the best after-use option. Biofuels might provide a cost-efficient after use option for some sites. Peat extraction followed by rewetting might provide a sustainable option as rewetting is often easier if the peat is removed, starting the peat accumulation from scratch. Also this provides a way to finance the after-use. As impacts of land use are uncertain, new policies should consider multiple benefits and decisions should be based on scientific evidence and field scale observations. The need to further understand the key processes and long term effects of field scale land use manipulations is evident. The recommended actions for peatlands should be based on local condition and socio-economic needs to outline intermediate and long term plans.
Authors
R. Ahmad Romadhoni Surya Putra Zhen Liu Mogens LundAbstract
This paper aims to study the impact of biogas technology adoption as a livestock waste technology to support Mixed Crop and Livestock (MCL) farming among smallholder farmers in Indonesia. A cross sectional survey was conducted to collect data from 351 farm households (171 biogas adopters and 180 non-adopters) in the province of Yogyakarta. This study employed treatment effects analysis based on propensity score matching techniques to evaluate the impacts of biogas technology adoption among the farm households. The results showed that the adoption of the biogas technology reduces firewood consumption of smallholder farm households in Indonesia. Unfortunately, the impact on the use of slurry for organic fertilizers and the use of gas (Liquid Petroleum Gas, LPG) as another household cooking energy could not be evaluated. This study empirically showed that the benefits of the biogas technology had not yet been optimized at the household level which may partly explain the slow rate of biogas technology diffusion among farmers. However, the consumption reduction of firewood as a benefit of using biogas contributed to behavioral changes of the women in the households especially with respect to firewood collection and cooking activities.
Abstract
We investigate a set of long-term river runoff time series at daily resolution from Brazil, monitored by the Agencia Nacional de Aguas. A total of 150 time series was obtained, with an average length of 65 years. Both long-term trends and human influence (water management, e.g. for power production) on the dynamical behaviour are analyzed. We use Horizontal Visibility Graphs (HVGs) to determine the individual temporal networks for the time series, and extract their degree and their distance (shortest path length) distributions. Statistical and information-theoretic properties of these distributions are calculated: robust estimators of skewness and kurtosis, the maximum degree occurring in the time series, the Shannon entropy, permutation complexity and Fisher Information. For the latter, we also compare the information measures obtained from the degree distributions to those using the original time series directly, to investigate the impact of graph construction on the dynamical properties as reflected in these measures. Focus is on one hand on universal properties of the HVG, common to all runoff series, and on site-specific aspects on the other. Results demonstrate that the assumption of power law behaviour for the degree distribtion does not generally hold, and that management has a significant impact on this distribution. We also show that a specific pretreatment of the time series conventional in hydrology, the elimination of seasonality by a separate z-transformation for each calendar day, is highly detrimental to the nonlinear behaviour. It changes long-term correlations and the overall dynamics towards more random behaviour. Analysis based on the transformed data easily leads to spurious results, and bear a high risk of misinterpretation.
Abstract
We present the complete genome sequence of Luteibacter rhizovicinus type strain LJ96T, a yellow-pigmented gammaproteobacterium isolated from the rhizosphere of barley (Hordeum vulgare) Johansen et al. (2005) , a species with numerous potential applications. The genome sequence was deposited to NCBI GenBank with the accession number CP017480.
Abstract
The genus Microbacterium contains bacteria that are ubiquitously distributed in various environments and includes plant-associated bacteria that are able to colonize tissue of agricultural crop plants. Here, we report the 3,508,491 bp complete genome sequence of Microbacterium sp. strain BH-3-3-3, isolated from conventionally grown lettuce (Lactuca sativa) from a field in Vestfold, Norway. The nucleotide sequence of this genome was deposited into NCBI GenBank under the accession CP017674.