| 1. |
- Alakukku, Laura, et al.
(författare)
-
Maatalouden ympäristötuen vaikuttavuuden seurantatutkimus (MYTVAS 3) : loppuraportti
- 2014
-
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.
|
|
| 2. |
- Ehrentraut, Claudia, et al.
(författare)
-
Detecting hospital-acquired infections : A document classification approach using support vector machines and gradient tree boosting
- 2018
-
Ingår i: Health Informatics Journal. - : SAGE Publications. - 1460-4582 .- 1741-2811. ; 24:1, s. 24-42
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Hospital-acquired infections pose a significant risk to patient health, while their surveillance is an additional workload for hospital staff. Our overall aim is to build a surveillance system that reliably detects all patient records that potentially include hospital-acquired infections. This is to reduce the burden of having the hospital staff manually check patient records. This study focuses on the application of text classification using support vector machines and gradient tree boosting to the problem. Support vector machines and gradient tree boosting have never been applied to the problem of detecting hospital-acquired infections in Swedish patient records, and according to our experiments, they lead to encouraging results. The best result is yielded by gradient tree boosting, at 93.7percent recall, 79.7percent precision and 85.7percent F1 score when using stemming. We can show that simple preprocessing techniques and parameter tuning can lead to high recall (which we aim for in screening patient records) with appropriate precision for this task.
|
|
| 3. |
- Ekholm, Victor, 1989-
(författare)
-
Ion pairing and Langmuir-like adsorption at aqueous surfaces studied by core-level spectroscopy
- 2018
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Surface-bulk equilibria for solutes in aqueous solutions are studied using X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS) with high surface and chemical sensitivity. In the first part, the results show a reduction of the biochemically relevant guanidinium ions’ surface propensity with the addition of disodium sulphate due to ion pairing with the strongly hydrated sulphate ion, which could have implications for protein folding. Thereafter, the work considers amphiphilic organic compounds related to atmospheric science where the surface propensities, orientations at the surface and solute-solute and solute-solvent interactions are investigated. In the second part, two linear organic ions are investigated both as single solutes and in mixture. Both organic ions are surface enriched on their own and even more in the mixed solute solution. Due to hydrophobic expulsion of the alkyl chains, ion pairing between the organic ions and van der Waals interaction, the organic ions seem to assemble in clusters with their alkyl chains pointing out of the surface. The third part also covers linear organic compounds but one at a time probing the surface concentration as a function of bulk concentration. A Langmuir-like adsorption behavior was observed and Gibb’s free energy of surface adsorption (ΔGAds) values were extracted. An empiric model for deriving values for ΔGAds is proposed based upon the seemingly linear change in ΔGAds per carbon when comparing alcohols of different chain lengths. The fourth part investigates the acid/base fraction at the surface as function of bulk pH. The most important factor for this fraction seems to be how the surface propensity varies with the charge state of the acid or base instead of a possible difference in pH or pKa value at the surface. In the fifth part the oxygen K-edge of aqueous carbonate and bicarbonate is probed with the bulk-sensitive Resonant Inelastic X-ray Scattering (RIXS) technique.
|
|
| 4. |
- Friman, Styrbjörn, 1948, et al.
(författare)
-
Kidney transplantation--a 46-year experience from the Transplant Institute, Sahlgrenska University Hospital, Gothenburg, Sweden.
- 2011
-
Ingår i: Clinical transplants. - 0890-9016. ; , s. 119-25
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The limiting factor in organ transplantation is the availability of organs. Ongoing work to improve donation rates both at the public and the organizational level in donating hospitals is essential. We also think that encouragement of live donation is important, and the possibility of ABO incompatible transplantation has increased the number of LD transplantations. The one-year graft survival rate is excellent and focus has shifted towards achieving long-term results to reduce the attrition rate. There is also an increasing interest in studying and working to reduce comorbidities on a long-term basis and thus, improve survival rates and recipient quality of life.
|
|
