scholarly journals Preliminary studies of fungi in the Biebrza National Park (NE Poland). II. Macromycetes

2013 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Kujawa ◽  
Marta Wrzosek ◽  
Grażyna Domian ◽  
Kamil Kędra ◽  
Jarosław Szkodzik ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Nature Conservation ◽  
Mycorrhizal Fungi ◽  
National Park ◽  
Taxonomic Diversity ◽  
Plant Litter ◽  
Molecular Techniques ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Ecological Niches ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Ne Poland

This paper presents the second part of the results of the first short-term inventory of fungi species occurring in the Biebrza National Park and is focused on a survey of macrofungi. The total number of macrofungi found during the survey in late August 2012 was 289 taxa: 17 ascomycetes and 272 basidiomycetes, inhabiting diverse ecological niches. The identified fungi belonged to ectomycorrhizal symbionts and saprobionts decomposing wood, plant litter and animal remnants. The identity of 25 mycorrhizal fungi species has been confirmed using molecular techniques. Five species are newly reported for Poland (<em>Amanita olivaceogrisea, Lepiota lepida, Stropharia alcis, Xerocomus fennicus, X. cisalpinus</em>) and 225 taxa (79 %) were not known in the Biebrza National Park. Fifty species are endangered in Poland, of which nine species are protected by law. Data on species richness and the taxonomic diversity of the identified fungi are briefly commented in terms of their significance for nature conservation and future research.

scholarly journals Preliminary studies of fungi in the Biebrza National Park (NE Poland). I. Micromycetes

2013 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Ruszkiewicz-Michalska ◽  
Cezary Tkaczuk ◽  
Maria Dynowska ◽  
Ewa Sucharzewska ◽  
Jarosław Szkodzik ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
National Park ◽  
Taxonomic Diversity ◽  
Ecological Niches ◽  
Trophic Groups ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Fungicolous Fungi ◽  
Ne Poland ◽  
Annotated List ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Scientific Project

This paper presents the results of the first short-term inventory of fungi species occurring in the Biebrza National Park, one of the biggest and best preserved protected areas of Poland. The paper is focused on a survey of microfungi. Fungi were collected in early autumn 2012, within the framework of a scientific project by the Polish Mycological Society. The results are published in two parts containing micro- and macromycetes, respectively. An annotated list of 188 identified taxa covers true fungi including 33 zygomycetes, 130 ascomycetes (including anamorphs) and 22 basidiomycetes, as well as two chromistan and one protozoan fungal analogues. The identified fungi taxa, inhabiting diverse ecological niches, represent a wide range of trophic groups including saprotrophs, biotrofic and necrotrophic parasites of plants, pathogens of arthropods, fungicolous fungi and species isolated from soil and organic matter. From 188 annotated taxa, 89% (167 species) have not been recorded in the Biebrza National Park until now and four species are newly reported for Poland (<em>Alternaria nobilis, Clonostachys solani, Mariannaea elegans, Metasphaeria cumana</em>). Data on the species richness and taxonomic diversity of the identified fungi are briefly commented in terms of micromycetes role in managing nature conservation.

scholarly journals Good governance and tourism development in protected areas: The case of Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park, central Vietnam

Koedoe ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Hübner ◽  
Lý T. Phong ◽  
Trương S.H. Châu
Keyword(s):  
Nature Conservation ◽  
Protected Areas ◽  
Protected Area ◽  
National Park ◽  
Good Governance ◽  
Tourism Development ◽  
Benefit Sharing ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Practical Implementation ◽  
Central Vietnam

Protected areas are increasingly expected to serve as a natural income-producing resource via the exploitation of recreational and touristic activities. Whilst tourism is often considered a viable option for generating income which benefits the conservation of a protected area, there are many cases in which insufficient and opaque planning hinder sustainable development, thereby reducing local benefit sharing and, ultimately, nature conservation. This article delineated and examined factors in governance which may underlie tourism development in protected areas. Based on Graham, Amos and Plumptre’s five good governance principles, a specific analysis was made of the Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park in central Vietnam, which highlighted challenges in the practical implementation of governing principles arising for nature conservation, sustainable tourism development and complex stakeholder environments. Despite the limited opportunity of this study to examine the wider national and international context, the discussion facilitated an overview of the factors necessary to understand governance principles and tourism development. This article could serve as a basis for future research, especially with respect to comparative analyses of different management structures existing in Vietnam and in other contested centrally steered protected area spaces. Conservation implications: This research has shown that tourism and its development, despite a more market-oriented and decentralised policymaking, is a fragmented concept impacted by bureaucratic burden, lack of institutional capacities, top-down processes and little benefit-sharing. There is urgent need for stakeholders – public and private – to reconcile the means of protected areas for the ends (conservation) by clarifying responsibilities as well as structures and processes which determine decision-making.

Political Consumerism for Sustainable Tourism

2018 ◽  
pp. 348-366
Author(s):  
Machiel Lamers ◽  
Jeroen Nawijn ◽  
Eke Eijgelaar
Keyword(s):  
Nature Conservation ◽  
Environmental Change ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Environmental Effects ◽  
Sustainable Tourism ◽  
Global Environmental Change ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Political Consumerism ◽  
Global Environmental

Over the last decades a substantial and growing societal and academic interest has emerged for the development of sustainable tourism. Scholars have highlighted the contribution of tourism to global environmental change and to local, detrimental social and environmental effects as well as to ways in which tourism contributes to nature conservation. Nevertheless the role of tourist consumers in driving sustainable tourism has remained unconvincing and inconsistent. This chapter reviews the constraints and opportunities of political consumerism for sustainable tourism. The discussion covers stronger pockets and a key weak pocket of political consumerism for sustainable tourism and also highlights inconsistencies in sustainable tourism consumption by drawing on a range of social theory arguments and possible solutions. The chapter concludes with an agenda for future research on this topic.

scholarly journals Staying Home, Staying Alive: Campus Food Pantry Student Clients’ Experiences During the COVID-19 Pandemic

2021 ◽  
pp. 193672442110356
Author(s):  
Elmira Jangjou
Keyword(s):  
Coping Strategies ◽  
Thematic Analysis ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Postsecondary Students ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Income Loss ◽  
Food Pantry ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
Seeking Help

In response to students’ food insecurity, a number of colleges and universities have taken action and established campus food pantries as part of their intervention plans. However, many of these pantries ceased operation due to COVID-19 campus shutdowns. The purpose of this study is to illustrate the short-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on postsecondary students, who use a university-provided food pantry. Drawing from semi-structured interviews with 12 participants, the thematic analysis explored the initial coping strategies these students used to endure the pandemic. Findings revealed that many students experienced the immediate effects of the pandemic in the form of income loss, self-isolation, anxiety, and appetite change. Although the pandemic interrupted these students’ journeys to continue their studies and become independent in various ways, the affected students implemented various coping strategies, including seeking help from family or friends, using available resources, cooking at home, and even trying to save money. However, considering that the targeted population in this study was already at risk because of their basic needs insecurity, these postsecondary students require extra attention from their higher education institutions in the case of emergencies, such as a global pandemic. In addition to its timely and relevant findings, this study provides important avenues for future research and intervention efforts.

scholarly journals Catchment water quality in the year preceding and immediately following restoration of a drained afforested blanket bog

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul P. J. Gaffney ◽  
Mark H. Hancock ◽  
Mark A. Taggart ◽  
Roxane Andersen
Keyword(s):  
Water Quality ◽  
Nutrient Release ◽  
Pass Rate ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Peatland Restoration ◽  
Blanket Bog ◽  
Quality Threshold ◽  
Policy Incentives

AbstractThe restoration of drained afforested peatlands, through drain blocking and tree removal, is increasing in response to peatland restoration targets and policy incentives. In the short term, these intensive restoration operations may affect receiving watercourses and the biota that depend upon them. This study assessed the immediate effect of ‘forest-to-bog’ restoration by measuring stream and river water quality for a 15 month period pre- and post-restoration, in the Flow Country peatlands of northern Scotland. We found that the chemistry of streams draining restoration areas differed from that of control streams following restoration, with phosphate concentrations significantly higher (1.7–6.2 fold, mean 4.4) in restoration streams compared to the pre-restoration period. This led to a decrease in the pass rate (from 100 to 75%) for the target “good” quality threshold (based on EU Water Framework Directive guidelines) in rivers in this immediate post-restoration period, when compared to unaffected river baseline sites (which fell from 100 to 90% post-restoration). While overall increases in turbidity, dissolved organic carbon, iron, potassium and manganese were not significant post-restoration, they exhibited an exaggerated seasonal cycle, peaking in summer months in restoration streams. We attribute these relatively limited, minor short-term impacts to the fact that relatively small percentages of the catchment area (3–23%), in our study catchments were felled, and that drain blocking and silt traps, put in place as part of restoration management, were likely effective in mitigating negative effects. Looking ahead, we suggest that future research should investigate longer term water quality effects and compare different ways of potentially controlling nutrient release.

scholarly journals Multiple Pedestrians and Vehicles Tracking in Aerial Imagery Using a Convolutional Neural Network

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (10) ◽  
pp. 1953
Author(s):  
Seyed Majid Azimi ◽  
Maximilian Kraus ◽  
Reza Bahmanyar ◽  
Peter Reinartz
Keyword(s):  
Neural Network ◽  
Deep Learning ◽  
Convolutional Neural Network ◽  
Object Tracking ◽  
Short Term Memory ◽  
Aerial Imagery ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Term Memory ◽  
Long Short Term Memory

In this paper, we address various challenges in multi-pedestrian and vehicle tracking in high-resolution aerial imagery by intensive evaluation of a number of traditional and Deep Learning based Single- and Multi-Object Tracking methods. We also describe our proposed Deep Learning based Multi-Object Tracking method AerialMPTNet that fuses appearance, temporal, and graphical information using a Siamese Neural Network, a Long Short-Term Memory, and a Graph Convolutional Neural Network module for more accurate and stable tracking. Moreover, we investigate the influence of the Squeeze-and-Excitation layers and Online Hard Example Mining on the performance of AerialMPTNet. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to use these two for regression-based Multi-Object Tracking. Additionally, we studied and compared the L1 and Huber loss functions. In our experiments, we extensively evaluate AerialMPTNet on three aerial Multi-Object Tracking datasets, namely AerialMPT and KIT AIS pedestrian and vehicle datasets. Qualitative and quantitative results show that AerialMPTNet outperforms all previous methods for the pedestrian datasets and achieves competitive results for the vehicle dataset. In addition, Long Short-Term Memory and Graph Convolutional Neural Network modules enhance the tracking performance. Moreover, using Squeeze-and-Excitation and Online Hard Example Mining significantly helps for some cases while degrades the results for other cases. In addition, according to the results, L1 yields better results with respect to Huber loss for most of the scenarios. The presented results provide a deep insight into challenges and opportunities of the aerial Multi-Object Tracking domain, paving the way for future research.

scholarly journals The Effectiveness of the Ecological Forest Rangers Policy in Southwest China

Forests ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 746
Author(s):  
Yifan Wang ◽  
Dengju Wang ◽  
Rong Zhao
Keyword(s):  
Poverty Alleviation ◽  
Southwest China ◽  
Rural Poverty ◽  
Ecological Effect ◽  
Income Growth ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Linkage Mechanism ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Forest Protection

To achieve the dual goal of poverty alleviation and ecological restoration, the policy of ecological forest rangers (EFRs) was implemented in rural poverty-stricken areas in China, where local residents commonly depend on nearby forest resources for livelihoods. This study aimed to analyze the short-term and long-term effectiveness of the EFRs policy in China mainly in poverty alleviation and income growth, with a brief discussion on the ecological effect of the policy. A questionnaire survey was conducted in four counties in the Karst rocky desertification region in southwest China. By combing through the early literature on REDD+, community forestry, leasehold forestry, etc., this paper summarizes the experience and lessons of similar community forest management models, aiming to explain the unsustainability of EFRs policy from the perspective of forest tenure and governance. The findings of the effectiveness analysis of EFRs policy in the four poverty-stricken counties reflect different degrees of effect in rural households with different income levels. We believe that the EFRs policy has played important roles in short-term regional poverty alleviation while its potential for long-term income growth has not been stimulated. For the amendment of EFRs policy, we put forward the following points: (1) It is necessary to redesign the selection and recruitment mechanism, as well as the exit mechanism of EFRs adapting to the local conditions. (2) It is advisable to further improve the local assessment and monitoring system of forest protection quality of EFRs and optimize the establishment of benefit linkage mechanism between protection effectiveness and EFRs remuneration. (3) The EFRs remuneration standards should be dynamically raised to assure the active participation of EFRs in forest protection. Furthermore, there is a need for one more effective integration model of forest protection and rural livelihoods improvement, which is considered as a potential future research direction.

scholarly journals Review of Trimester-Specific Gestational Weight Gain and Childhood Adiposity

2014 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-53
Author(s):  
K Thapa
Keyword(s):  
Weight Gain ◽  
Childhood Obesity ◽  
Gestational Weight Gain ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Institute Of Medicine ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Global Epidemic ◽  
Targeted Interventions ◽  
Gestational Weight ◽  
Childhood Adiposity

Childhood obesity is a global epidemic and a major public health challenge. There has been increasing evidence that intrauterine exposures, such as alcohol, smoking, and maternal nutritional status, may affect both the long and short term health consequences of the mother and offspring. Childhood adiposity may be affected by the mother’s pre-pregnancy weight and her weight gain during pregnancy. Consequently, interventions may need to start before conception of the child to prevent childhood obesity. In 2009, the Institute of Medicine updated its gestational weight gain recommendations by incorporating rates of gestational weight gain in the second and third trimesters based on the mother’s pre-pregnancy Body Mass Index. There is extensive research on the association between total gestational weight gain and short-term offspring adiposity. However, this review focuses on the association between trimester-specific gestational weight gain and childhood adiposity for singleton pregnancies with respect to the Institute of Medicine’s newly defined weight gain recommendations as very few studies have examined the association between the gestational weight gain during each trimester and childhood adiposity. Identifying the trimester that is most associated with childhood adiposity may help in the development of targeted interventions, guide physician’s nutritional and weight-gain recommendations for child-bearing mothers, and direct future research. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/jnps.v34i1.8429   J Nepal Paediatr Soc 2014;34(1):48-53

scholarly journals Carbon Source Preference in Chemosynthetic Hot Spring Communities

2015 ◽  
Vol 81 (11) ◽  
pp. 3834-3847 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew R. Urschel ◽  
Michael D. Kubo ◽  
Tori M. Hoehler ◽  
John W. Peters ◽  
Eric S. Boyd
Keyword(s):  
High Temperature ◽  
National Park ◽  
Hot Springs ◽  
Dissolved Inorganic Carbon ◽  
Hot Spring ◽  
Affinity Constant ◽  
Rrna Gene ◽  
Organic Substrates ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Acetate Assimilation

ABSTRACTRates of dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC), formate, and acetate mineralization and/or assimilation were determined in 13 high-temperature (>73°C) hot springs in Yellowstone National Park (YNP), Wyoming, in order to evaluate the relative importance of these substrates in supporting microbial metabolism. While 9 of the hot spring communities exhibited rates of DIC assimilation that were greater than those of formate and acetate assimilation, 2 exhibited rates of formate and/or acetate assimilation that exceeded those of DIC assimilation. Overall rates of DIC, formate, and acetate mineralization and assimilation were positively correlated with spring pH but showed little correlation with temperature. Communities sampled from hot springs with similar geochemistries generally exhibited similar rates of substrate transformation, as well as similar community compositions, as revealed by 16S rRNA gene-tagged sequencing. Amendment of microcosms with small (micromolar) amounts of formate suppressed DIC assimilation in short-term (<45-min) incubations, despite the presence of native DIC concentrations that exceeded those of added formate by 2 to 3 orders of magnitude. The concentration of added formate required to suppress DIC assimilation was similar to the affinity constant (Km) for formate transformation, as determined by community kinetic assays. These results suggest that dominant chemoautotrophs in high-temperature communities are facultatively autotrophic or mixotrophic, are adapted to fluctuating nutrient availabilities, and are capable of taking advantage of energy-rich organic substrates when they become available.

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