Mapping cumulative pressures on the grazing lands of northern Fennoscandia.

Traditional grazing areas in Europe have declined substantially over the last century. Specifically, in northern Fennoscandia, the grazing land is disturbed by cumulative land-use pressures. Here we analysed the configuration of the grazing land for reindeer and sheep in northern Fennoscandia in relation to the concurrent land-use pressures from tourism, road and railway networks, forestry, industrial and wind energy facilities, together with predator presence and climate change.

Impact of baseline clinical and radiological features on outcome of chronic rhinosinusitis in granulomatosis with polyangiitis.

Background: Granulomatosis with polyangiitis (GPA) causes a recurring inflammation in nose and paranasal sinuses that clinically resembles chronic rhinosinusitis (CRS) of other aetiologies. While sinonasal inflammation is not among the life-threatening features of GPA, patients report it to have major negative impact on quality of life. A relatively large proportion of GPA patients have severe CRS with extensive damage to nose and sinus structures evident by CT, but risk factors for severe CRS development remain largely unknown.

Impact of Paranasal Sinus Surgery in Granulomatosis With Polyangiitis: A Longitudinal Computed Tomography Study.

Objectives/hypothesis: Severe chronic rhinosinusitis (CRS) in patients with granulomatosis with polyangiitis (GPA) failing medical therapies can be treated with paranasal sinus surgery. Whether this surgery protects from progressive sinonasal damage remains unknown. Here, we aimed to analyze time-dependent relations between sinus surgeries and computed tomography (CT) imaging features in the CRS of GPA.

Development of CT-based methods for longitudinal analyses of paranasal sinus osteitis in granulomatosis with polyangiitis.

Background: Even though progressive rhinosinusitis with osteitis is a major clinical problem in granulomatosis with polyangiitis (GPA), there are no studies on how GPA-related osteitis develops over time, and no quantitative methods for longitudinal assessment. Here, we aimed to identify simple and robust CT-based methods for capture and quantification of time-dependent changes in GPA-related paranasal sinus osteitis and compare performance of the methods under study in a largely unselected GPA cohort.

Methods: GPA patients (n = 121) with ≥3 paranasal CT scans obtained ≥12 months apart and control patients not having GPA or rhinosinusitis (n = 15) were analysed by: (i) Global osteitis scoring scale (GOSS), originally developed for chronic rhinosinusitis; (ii) Paranasal sinus volume by manual segmentation; (iii) Mean maxillary and sphenoid diameter normalised to landmark distances (i.

Levels of forest ecosystem services depend on specific mixtures of commercial tree species.

Global and local ecosystem change resulting in diversity loss has motivated efforts to understand relationships between species diversity and ecosystem services. However, it is unclear how such a general understanding can inform policies for the management of ecosystem services in production systems, because these systems are primarily used for food or fibre, and are rarely managed for the conservation of species diversity. Here, using data from a nationwide forest inventory covering an area of 230,000 km, we show that relative abundances of commercial tree species in mixed stands strongly influence the potential to provide ecosystem services.

Long-Term Trends and Role of Climate in the Population Dynamics of Eurasian Reindeer.

Temperature is increasing in Arctic and sub-Arctic regions at a higher rate than anywhere else in the world. The frequency and nature of precipitation events are also predicted to change in the future. These changes in climate are expected, together with increasing human pressures, to have significant impacts on Arctic and sub-Arctic species and ecosystems.

Changing ideas in forestry: A comparison of concepts in Swedish and American forestry journals during the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

By combining digital humanities text-mining tools and a qualitative approach, we examine changing concepts in forestry journals in Sweden and the United States (US) in the early twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Our first hypothesis is that foresters at the beginning of the twentieth century were more concerned with production and less concerned with ecology than foresters at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Our second hypothesis is that US foresters in the early twentieth century were less concerned with local site conditions than Swedish foresters.

Quantifying the Implications of Different Land Users' Priorities in the Management of Boreal Multiple-Use Forests.

In the management of natural resources, conflicting interests and objectives among different stakeholders often need to be considered. Here, we examine how two contrasting management scenarios of boreal forests in northern Sweden differ in their consequences on forest structural composition and the economic gains at harvest. Management strategies prioritize either (i) forest characteristics that promote grazing resources for reindeer herded by the indigenous Sámi, or (ii) timber production as practiced in Sweden today.

Non-photochemical quenching capacity in Arabidopsis thaliana affects herbivore behaviour.

Under natural conditions, plants have to cope with numerous stresses, including light-stress and herbivory. This raises intriguing questions regarding possible trade-offs between stress defences and growth. As part of a program designed to address these questions we have compared herbivory defences and damage in wild type Arabidopsis thaliana and two "photoprotection genotypes", npq4 and oePsbS, which respectively lack and overexpress PsbS (a protein that plays a key role in qE-type non-photochemical quenching).

Higher levels of multiple ecosystem services are found in forests with more tree species.

Forests are of major importance to human society, contributing several crucial ecosystem services. Biodiversity is suggested to positively influence multiple services but evidence from natural systems at scales relevant to management is scarce. Here, across a scale of 400,000 km(2), we report that tree species richness in production forests shows positive to positively hump-shaped relationships with multiple ecosystem services.

The legacy of logging--estimating arboreal lichen occurrence in a boreal multiple-use landscape on a two century scale.

In northern Sweden, the availability of arboreal lichens (Bryoria fuscescens, Alectoria sarmentosa) as winter grazing resources is an important element in reindeer husbandry. With the industrialization of forestry, forests rich in arboreal lichens have diminished considerably. Here, we analyze how forestry has impacted lichen availability from the 1920's to the present day and model its future development assuming different forest management scenarios.

Forest fragmentation and landscape transformation in a reindeer husbandry area in Sweden.

Reindeer husbandry and forestry are two main land users in boreal forests in northern Sweden. Modern forestry has numerous negative effects on the ground-growing and arboreal lichens that are crucial winter resources for reindeer husbandry. Using digitized historical maps, we examined changes in the forest landscape structure during the past 100 years, and estimated corresponding changes in suitability of forest landscape mosaics for the reindeer winter grazing.

Effects of modern forest management on winter grazing resources for reindeer in Sweden.

Boreal forests in Sweden are exploited in a number of ways, including forestry and reindeer husbandry. In the winter, reindeer feed mainly on lichens, and lichen-rich forests are a key resource in the herding system. Commercial forestry has mainly negative effects on reindeer husbandry, and conflicts between these two industries have escalated over the last century.

Improper excess light energy dissipation in Arabidopsis results in a metabolic reprogramming.

Background: Plant performance is affected by the level of expression of PsbS, a key photoprotective protein involved in the process of feedback de-excitation (FDE), or the qE component of non-photochemical quenching, NPQ.

Results: In studies presented here, under constant laboratory conditions the metabolite profiles of leaves of wild-type Arabidopsis thaliana and plants lacking or overexpressing PsbS were very similar, but under natural conditions their differences in levels of PsbS expression were associated with major changes in metabolite profiles. Some carbohydrates and amino acids differed ten-fold in abundance between PsbS-lacking mutants and over-expressers, with wild-type plants having intermediate amounts, showing that a metabolic shift had occurred.

An illustrated gardener's guide to transgenic Arabidopsis field experiments.

Field studies with transgenic Arabidopsis lines have been performed over 8 yr, to better understand the influence that certain genes have on plant performance. Many (if not most) plant phenotypes cannot be observed under the near constant, low-stress conditions in growth chambers, making field experiments necessary. However, there are challenges in performing such experiments: permission must be obtained and regulations obeyed, the profound influence of uncontrollable biotic and abiotic factors has to be considered, and experimental design has to be strictly controlled.

Climate change: effects on the ecological basis for reindeer husbandry in Sweden.

This paper examines potential effects of predicted climate changes on the forage conditions during both summer and winter for semidomesticated reindeer in Sweden. Positive effects in summer ranges include higher plant productivity and a longer growing season, while negative effects include increased insect harassment. Forage quality may change in both positive and negative ways.

Predicting lichen hydration using biophysical models.

Two models for predicting the hydration status of lichens were developed as a first step towards a mechanistic lichen productivity model. A biophysical model included the water potential of the air, derived from measurements of air temperature, relative humidity and species-specific rate constants for desiccation and rehydration. A reduced physical model, included only environmental parameters, assuming instantaneous equilibration between the lichen and the air.

Reindeer in the Swedish mountains: an assessment of grazing impacts.

During the last decade, several well-publicized grazing-related incidents of vegetation degradation have helped to form an official opinion of overutilization of some mountain areas and a concern that Swedish reindeer husbandry may not be ecologically sustainable. We examine these examples in a temporal and management perspective to assess the scale of impact on summer grazing grounds in the Swedish mountains. Long-term data on population dynamics of reindeer show no trend with fluctuations around 225 000 animals for the last century.

Pikas (Ochotona princeps : Lagomorpha) as allogenic engineers in an alpine ecosystem.

Pikas (Ochotona princeps: Lagomorpha) build caches of vegetation ("haypiles"), which serve as a food source during winter in alpine and subalpine habitats. Haypiles appear to degrade over time and form patches of nutrient-rich soils in barren talus and scree areas. We sampled soils underneath and next to haypiles, and plants growing on and near haypiles in an alpine cirque in northwestern Wyoming, USA, to determine the effects of pika food caches on N, C, and C/N ratios in soils and plants.