102 results match your criteria: "University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences-BOKU Vienna[Affiliation]"

Bamboo, as a pioneer vegetation, often forms forests on bare lands after catastrophic landslides. Compared to evergreen forest soil, bamboo forest soil is much more labile, with a higher percentage of microbially derived organic carbon (OC), lower molecular weight, and lower humic acid content. We hypothesised that different terrigenous organic matter (tOM) sources with varying lability and phosphorus (P) availability select for bacterioplankton with distinct metabolic pathways.

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Forest disturbance regimes are intensifying in many parts of the globe. In order to mitigate disturbance impacts a number of management responses have been proposed, yet their effectiveness in addressing changing disturbance regimes remains largely unknown. The strong positive relationship between forest age and the vulnerability to disturbances such as windthrows and bark beetle infestations suggests that a reduced rotation length can be a potent means for mitigating the impacts of natural disturbances.

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Forest structure, not climate, is the primary driver of functional diversity in northeastern North America.

Sci Total Environ

March 2021

Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, University of Vermont, 81 Carrigan Drive, Burlington, VT 05405, USA; Gund Institute for Environment, University of Vermont, 617 Main Street, Burlington, VT 05405, USA.

Functional diversity (FD), represented by plant traits, is fundamentally linked to an ecosystem's capacity to respond to environmental change. Yet, little is known about the spatial distribution of FD and its drivers. These knowledge gaps prevent the development of FD-based forest management approaches to increase the trait diversity insurance (i.

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Combined forest and soil management after a catastrophic event.

J Mt Sci

October 2020

Institute of Forest Ecology, Dept. of Forest and Soil Sciences, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) Vienna, Peter Jordanstr. 82, 1190 Vienna, Austria.

Unlabelled: At the end of October 2018, a storm of unprecedented strength severely damaged the forests of the eastern sector of the Italian Alps. The affected forest area covers 42,500 ha. The president of one of the damaged regions asked for help from the University of Padua.

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Effects of disturbance patterns and deadwood on the microclimate in European beech forests.

Agric For Meteorol

September 2020

Ecosystem Dynamics and Forest Management Group, School of Life Sciences, Technical University of Munich, Hans-Carl-von-Carlowitz-Platz 2, 85354 Freising, Germany.

More frequent and severe disturbances increasingly open the forest canopy and initiate tree regeneration. Simultaneously, increasing weather extremes, such as drought and heat, are threatening species adapted to cool and moist climate. The magnitude of the microclimatic buffering capacity of forest canopies to mitigate hot and dry weather conditions and its disturbance-induced reduction remains poorly quantified.

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Biofilm formation at oil-water interfaces is not a simple function of bacterial hydrophobicity.

Colloids Surf B Biointerfaces

October 2020

Department of Nanobiotechnology, Institute for Biologically Inspired Materials, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) Vienna, Austria. Electronic address:

Bacterial adsorption to interfaces is the initial step in biofilm formation. The mechanism of biofilm formation at liquid-liquid interfaces differs from the process of biofilm formation on solid-liquid interfaces. Until now, the former is not well understood.

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Available literature and previous studies focus on the Pulsed Electric Field (PEF) parameters influencing the drying process of fruit and vegetable tissue. This study investigates the applicability of PEF pre-treatment considering the industrial-scale drying conditions of onions and related quality parameters of the final product. First, the influence of the PEF treatment ( = 4.

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Mountain forests are at particular risk of climate change impacts due to their temperature limitation and high exposure to warming. At the same time, their complex topography may help to buffer the effects of climate change and create climate refugia. Whether climate change can lead to critical transitions of mountain forest ecosystems and whether such transitions are reversible remain incompletely understood.

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Substantial understory contribution to the C sink of a European temperate mountain forest landscape.

Landsc Ecol

February 2020

2Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research, Atmospheric Environmental Research (IMK-IFU), Kreuzeckbahnstraße 19, 82467 Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany.

Context: The contribution of forest understory to the temperate forest carbon sink is not well known, increasing the uncertainty in C cycling feedbacks on global climate as estimated by Earth System Models.

Objectives: We aimed at quantifying the effect of woody and non-woody understory vegetation on net ecosystem production (NEP) for a forested area of 158 km in the European Alps.

Methods: We simulated C dynamics for the period 2000-2014, characterized by above-average temperatures, windstorms and a subsequent bark beetle outbreak for the area, using the regional ecosystem model LandscapeDNDC.

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This study investigates the atmospheric drivers of severe precipitation deficits in the Greater Alpine Region during the last 210 years utilizing a daily atmospheric circulation type reconstruction. Precipitation deficit tends to be higher during periods with more frequent anticyclonic (dry) and less frequent cyclonic (wet) circulation types, as would be expected. However, circulation characteristics are not the main drivers of summer precipitation deficit.

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The accurate and precise analysis of isotopologue and tandem mass isotopologue ratios in heavy stable isotope labeling experiments is a critical part of assessing absolute intracellular metabolic fluxes. Resulting from feeding the organism of interest with a specifically isotope-labeled substrate, the principal characteristics of these labeling experiments are the metabolites' non-naturally distributed isotopologue patterns. For the purpose of inferring metabolic rates by maximizing the fit between a priori simulated and experimentally obtained labeling patterns, C is the preferred stable isotope of use.

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Windfelled Norway spruce (Picea abies) trees play a crucial role in triggering large-scale outbreaks of the European spruce bark beetle Ips typographus. Outbreak management therefore strives to remove windfelled trees to reduce the risk of outbreaks, a measure referred to as sanitation logging (SL). Although this practice has been traditionally applied, its efficiency in preventing outbreaks remains poorly understood.

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Harnessing Deep Learning in Ecology: An Example Predicting Bark Beetle Outbreaks.

Front Plant Sci

October 2019

Department of Forest and Soil Sciences, Institute of Silviculture, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) Vienna, Vienna, Austria.

Addressing current global challenges such as biodiversity loss, global change, and increasing demands for ecosystem services requires improved ecological prediction. Recent increases in data availability, process understanding, and computing power are fostering quantitative approaches in ecology. However, flexible methodological frameworks are needed to utilize these developments towards improved ecological prediction.

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Forest ecosystems provide a wide variety of ecosystem services to society. In harsh mountain environments, the regulating services of forests are of particular importance. Managing mountain forests for regulating services is a cost- and labor intensive endeavor.

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Analysis of underivatized amino acids is challenging regarding both separation and detection of this small, polar, and largely UV-inactive compounds. Additives for reversed phase chromatography such as ion pairing reagents can hamper mass spectrometric detection. Zwitterionic hydrophilic interaction chromatography using MS compatible eluents together with tandem mass spectrometry in multiple reaction monitoring mode for selective detection is an attractive approach to overcome the abovementioned issues.

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In times of rapid global change, anticipating vegetation changes and assessing their impacts is of key relevance to managers and policy makers. Yet, predicting vegetation dynamics often suffers from an inherent scale mismatch, with abundant data and process understanding being available at a fine spatial grain, but the relevance for decision-making is increasing with spatial extent.We present a novel approach for scaling vegetation dynamics (SVD), using deep learning to predict vegetation transitions.

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The concept of a circular economy (CE) is gaining increasing attention from policy makers, industry, and academia. There is a rapidly evolving debate on definitions, limitations, the contribution to a wider sustainability agenda, and a need for indicators to assess the effectiveness of circular economy measures at larger scales. Herein, we present a framework for a comprehensive and economy-wide biophysical assessment of a CE, utilizing and systematically linking official statistics on resource extraction and use and waste flows in a mass-balanced approach.

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Article Synopsis
  • Insects like crickets and locusts might be good food for people and animals, but we need to be careful about allergies.
  • The study looked at how people allergic to shrimp, dust mites, and flies reacted to proteins in edible insects.
  • Results showed that processing insects in certain ways, like cooking or using enzymes, can make them safer for people with these allergies.
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By applying second-generation sequencing technologies to microsatellite genotyping, sequence information is produced which can result in high-resolution population genetics analysis populations and increased replicability between runs and laboratories. In the present study, we establish an approach to study the genetic structure patterns of two European hedgehog species and . These species are usually associated with human settlements and are good models to study anthropogenic impacts on the genetic diversity of wild populations.

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Rationale: The wide chemical diversity and complex matrices inherent to metabolomics still pose a challenge to current analytical approaches for metabolite screening. Although dedicated front-end separation techniques combined with high-resolution mass spectrometry set the benchmark from an analytical point of view, the increasing number of samples and sample complexity demand for a compromise in terms of selectivity, sensitivity and high-throughput analyses.

Methods: Prior to low-field drift tube ion mobility (IM) separation and quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (QTOFMS) detection, rapid ultrahigh-performance liquid chromatography separation was used for analysis of different concentration levels of dansylated metabolites present in a yeast cell extract.

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For the study of different levels of (intra)cellular regulation and condition-dependent insight into metabolic activities, fluxomics experiments based on stable isotope tracer experiments using C have become a well-established approach. The experimentally obtained non-naturally distributed C labeling patterns of metabolite pools can be measured by mass spectrometric detection with front-end separation and can be consequently incorporated into biochemical network models. Here, despite a tedious derivatization step, gas chromatographic separation of polar metabolites is favorable because of the wide coverage range and high isomer separation efficiency.

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Models are pivotal for assessing future forest dynamics under the impacts of changing climate and management practices, incorporating representations of tree growth, mortality, and regeneration. Quantitative studies on the importance of mortality submodels are scarce. We evaluated 15 dynamic vegetation models (DVMs) regarding their sensitivity to different formulations of tree mortality under different degrees of climate change.

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Aim: spp. are an invasive alien plant species native to the Americas and well adapted to thrive in arid environments. In Kenya, several remote-sensing studies conclude that the genus is well established throughout the country and is rapidly invading new areas.

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High-severity, infrequent fires in forests shape landscape mosaics of stand age and structure for decades to centuries, and forest structure can vary substantially even among same-aged stands. This variability among stand structures can affect landscape-scale carbon and nitrogen cycling, wildlife habitat availability, and vulnerability to subsequent disturbances. We used an individual-based forest process model (iLand) to ask: Over 300 years of postfire stand development, how does variation in early regeneration densities versus abiotic conditions influence among-stand structural variability for four conifer species widespread in western North America? We parameterized iLand for lodgepole pine ( var.

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Disturbances alter composition, structure, and functioning of forest ecosystems, and their legacies persist for decades to centuries. We investigated how temperate forest landscapes may recover their carbon (C) after severe wind and bark beetle disturbance, while being exposed to climate change. We used the forest landscape and disturbance model iLand to quantify (i) the recovery times of the total ecosystem C, (ii) the effect of climate change on C recovery, and (iii) the differential factors contributing to C recovery.

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