| 1. |
- Alakukku, Laura, et al.
(författare)
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Maatalouden ympäristötuen vaikuttavuuden seurantatutkimus (MYTVAS 3) : loppuraportti
- 2014
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Since 1995, agri-environmental support partly funded by the EU has formed the core of Finland’s agri-environmental policy. This system has had a variety of impacts on the relationship between agriculture and the environment. Today’s agri-environmental support is one of the packages included in the Rural Development Programme for Mainland Finland (2007–2013/2014), which both in itself and through the underlying EU legislation requires monitoring of the impacts of the measures implemented. The study monitoring the impact of the 2nd Finnish agri-environmental scheme (MYTVAS 3), which ran from 2008 to 2013, forms part of this monitoring. The MYTVAS 3 monitoring study was also financed by the Ministry of the Environment. The monitoring study was carried out by a consortium coordinated by MTT Agrifood Research Finland and including the Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE), the University of Helsinki, the Finnish Game and Fisheries Research Institute and the University of Turku.The purpose of the MYTVAS 3 monitoring study was to find out how agri-environmental support and its various measures have affected the state of the environment in agricultural areas, how agri-environmental support has affected the potential for farming and how agri-environmental support should be developed to increase its impact. The monitoring focused on the impacts of agri-environmental support on the nutrient load from agriculture on the waterways and on biodiversity. When evaluating the findings presented, we should remember that while monitoring data shows that something happened, it does not necessarily explain what caused it. It is not always possible to show that particular developments were a specific outcome of the current agri-environmental support system and the implementation of its measures. The delay between a measure and its observed impact is often long, and the cause-and-effect relationships are complicated and partly unknown. Also, other agricultural policy and fluctuations on the market may affect the state of the agricultural environment directly or indirectly.The monitoring data show that agri-environmental support has not had a detrimental impact on the potential for farming. Despite a slight increase in the incidence of weeds, they do not cause problems of the kind that would require amendments to the content of agri-environmental measures. Carbon levels in the surface stratum of arable land seems to be continuing their slow decline, and there is still need for measures to preserve organic material in the soil.Compliance with the fertilisation limits in the agri-environmental support system would seem to have had very little impact on crop quality. Variations in the weight and protein content per hectolitre and per 1,000 seeds were of the same order between 2006 and 2012 as they were between 1995 and 2005. Crop quantities have also not been noticeably affected by compliance with the fertilisation limits. Average crop yields remained stable between 1986 and 2013, and no clearly different crop years were observed in the 2000s. It is possible, however, that the lower fertilisation levels could have lowered crop potential in the years with advantageous weather conditions in the 2000s and that protein contents have been lower in advantageous years.The monitoring data also show that the nutrient load potential of agriculture, measured by nutrient balances, has decreased continuously for nitrogen and particularly for phosphorus. The decrease in the nutrient load potential is due above all to a decrease in the use of synthetic fertilisers. The decline in nitrogen fertilisation has bottomed out in recent years, and low protein levels measured in high crop yield years show that there is no point in further reducing nitrogen fertilisation. Optimising nitrogen fertilisation according to how advantageous the growing season is and effectively using the soluble nitrogen in cattle manure are key measures in achieving reasonable nitrogen balances and good crop quality despite fluctuations in growing season conditions. New crop variants have been found to make more efficient use of nitrogen than old ones, and thus the introduction of new variants should be promoted. Despite the decrease in the nutrient balances, there are indications that nutrient loads in runoff water from domestic animal production sites are becoming an increasing problem. Indeed, the fundamental problem with the nutrient load from agriculture is the diversification of livestock farming and crop farming, which has made it more difficult to use nutrients appropriately. Therefore attention must be paid to measures that both boost the use of nutrients in manure and reduce the levels of nutrients that end up in manure. Based on nutrient load monitoring in the catchment areas of rivers, the phosphorus load per hectare of cropland has decreased in each programme period, being about 80% of the level of the first period (1995–1999) in the third period (2007–2013). Because of the increase in the area of cropland, the nitrogen load on waterways from agriculture continued to grow during the second programme period (2000–2006) but peaked in the third (2007–2013). A similar trend was found in the nitrogen load per hectare of cropland.The most important threat to biodiversity is caused by the development of landscape structure, typically involving a decrease in the number of open or half-open areas excluded from actual cultivation. The consequence of the clearing of margins and ecological islands located in crop fields, drainage measures aimed at increasing arable land and all rationalisation of cultivated areas is the diminishing of exactly those areas that are the most important from the perspective of the biodiversity of the agricultural environment. However, the measure-specific findings in the monitoring study show that biodiversity benefits have been locally achieved where measures have been implemented on a broad enough scale (biodynamic farming, traditional biotopes, wetlands, buffer zones, green fallow / nature management areas). Particular care should therefore be taken that all cultivated land continues to have a sufficient percentage of non-cultivated areas, whether they be natural meadows, nature management areas, biodiversity strips, buffer zones, filter strips, headlands, ecological islands, etc. Including the rather popular nature management areas as a new voluntary measure under basic measures was a significant contribution to biodiversity.Regarding the rural landscape, it may be noted that by visual inspection the area of cropland has remained largely unchanged, at the level of the landscape as a whole it is far more common for the landscape to become more closed than to become more open. This trend was also observed in the visual inspection of traditional biotopes, even if the openness of the meadows monitored largely remained unchanged.The only measures that directly address the reduction of gaseous emissions in the agri-environmental support system are the longterm grass cultivation on peat fields and special aid agreements for slurry injection in cropland. While other measures have indirectly affected gaseous emissions, the impact of agri-environmental support as a whole on reducing gaseous emissions from agriculture has been negligible. In general, we may conclude that the goals, content and support levels of agri-environmental support measures must be increasingly adapted and customised by region, by type of farming and by farm, because both the state of the agricultural environment and the needs of society differ greatly between different types of rural area.
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| 2. |
- Lehtonen, Esko, 1981, et al.
(författare)
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Gaze doesn't always lead steering
- 2018
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Ingår i: Accident Analysis and Prevention. - : Elsevier BV. - 0001-4575. ; 121, s. 268-278
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In car driving, gaze typically leads the steering when negotiating curves. The aim of the current study was to investigate whether drivers also use this gaze-leads-steering strategy when time-sharing between driving and a visual secondary task. Fourteen participants drove an instrumented car along a motorway while performing a secondary task: looking at a specified visual target as long and as much as they felt it was safe to do so. They made six trips, and in each trip the target was at a different location relative to the road ahead. They were free to glance back at the road at any time. Gaze behaviour was measured with an eye tracker, and steering corrections were recorded from the vehicle's CAN bus. Both in-car ‘Fixation’ targets and outside ‘Pursuit’ targets were used. Drivers often used a gaze-leads-steering strategy, glancing at the road ahead 200–600 ms before executing steering corrections. However, when the targets were less eccentric (requiring a smaller change in glance direction relative to the road ahead), the reverse strategy, in which glances to the road ahead followed steering corrections with 0–400 ms latency, was clearly present. The observed use of strategies can be interpreted in terms of predictive processing: The gaze-leads-steering strategy is driven by the need to update the visual information and is therefore modulated by the quality/quantity of peripheral information. Implications for steering models are discussed.
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| 3. |
- Regina, Kristiina, et al.
(författare)
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GHG mitigation of agricultural peatlands requires coherent policies
- 2016
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Ingår i: Climate Policy. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1469-3062 .- 1752-7457. ; 16:4, s. 522-541
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- As soon as peat soil is drained for agricultural production, the peat starts to degrade, which causes emissions to the atmosphere. In countries with large peatland areas, the GHG mitigation potential related to management of these soils is often estimated as the highest amongst the measures available in agriculture. Although the facts are well known, the policies leading to diminished emissions are often difficult to implement.We have analysed the reasons why the mitigation potential is not fully utilized and what could be done better in national implementation of climate policies. Four cases are used to illustrate the necessary steps to reach mitigation targets: determining the amount and properties of peat soils, estimating the potential, costs and feasibility of the mitigation measures, and selecting and implementing the best measures. A common feature for all of the cases was that national and international climate policies have increased the public interest in GHG emissions from peat soils and increased the pressure for mitigation. Basically the same factors restrict the implementation of mitigation measures in all countries with significant peat soil areas. The most important of these is lack of policy coherence, e.g. ignoring climate policies when planning land use or agricultural policies. We conclude that GHG mitigation is achieved only if other policies, especially national regulations and strategies, are in line with climate policies.
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