| 11. |
- Ahlborg, Helene, 1980, et al.
(författare)
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Ecology and sociotechnical systems research – motivations for theoretical and methodological integration across fields
- 2017
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Ingår i: International Sustainability Transitions conference 2017.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Currently, we are witnessing a number of global trends that do not promise well for the future. Accelerating climate change, loss of biodiversity, chemical pollution, disappearance of natural forest and degradation of fishing grounds and agricultural lands are just a few of the serious environmental problems that threaten the functional and structural integrity of ecosystems, to an extent that also human societies risk collapse. The scale of human impact is now such that scholars suggest that we live in the Anthropocene. The trends are driven by several linked factors, which are not easily disentangled into manageable specific problems to be solved by specific policies. More than ever, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborations are needed in order to address these urgent challenges. The objective of this paper is to argue for the importance of research on socio-technical-ecological systems (STES) rather than social-ecological (SES) and sociotechnical systems (STS) separately. Hence, we address researchers in both the social-ecological and sociotechnical fields. We organize the argument around six reasons why “technology” should be integrated into SES studies. We call these reasons: (1) the interface and mediation aspect, (2) ambivalence, (3) the agency aspect, (4) the question of scale, (5) the question of governance and politics, and (6) the question of epistemology and framing. We also highlight potential conceptual conflicts and mistranslations. Our discussion is primarily a theoretical argument, exemplified with empirical examples.Among the conceptual challenges, we note that SES scholars, if they consider technology in their analyses, generally treat it as an exogenous factor or as a passive background element. Similarly, STS scholars tend to neglect ecological dynamics and refer to the ecological domain mainly in terms of inputs and outputs, e.g. natural resources, environmental and health problems caused by human activities. In light of the discussion, we conclude that the importance of collaborating across the two fields goes beyond each field adding pieces together. We argue that integration and translation across these domains will lead to qualitative change in the theoretical and methodological approaches of both fields; and that technology, society and ecology should be given symmetric analytical attention.
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| 12. |
- Anslan, Sten, et al.
(författare)
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Great differences in performance and outcome of high-throughput sequencing data analysis platforms for fungal metabarcoding
- 2018
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Ingår i: MycoKeys. - : Pensoft Publishers. - 1314-4057 .- 1314-4049. ; 39, s. 29-40
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Along with recent developments in high-throughput sequencing (HTS) technologies and thus fast accumulation of HTS data, there has been a growing need and interest for developing tools for HTS data processing and communication. In particular, a number of bioinformatics tools have been designed for analysing metabarcoding data, each with specific features, assumptions and outputs. To evaluate the potential effect of the application of different bioinformatics workflow on the results, we compared the performance of different analysis platforms on two contrasting high-throughput sequencing data sets. Our analysis revealed that the computation time, quality of error filtering and hence output of specific bioinformatics process largely depends on the platform used. Our results show that none of the bioinformatics workflows appears to perfectly filter out the accumulated errors and generate Operational Taxonomic Units, although PipeCraft, LotuS and PIPITS perform better than QIIME2 and Galaxy for the tested fungal amplicon dataset. We conclude that the output of each platform requires manual validation of the OTUs by examining the taxonomy assignment values.
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| 13. |
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| 14. |
- Berndes, Göran, 1966, et al.
(författare)
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Is it possible to avoid bad impacts by using good fuel ethanol?
- 2010
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Much of the global production of biofuels is considered to be non-sustainable. Brazilian sugarcane ethanol, on the other hand, is normally judged to be “good”. Swedes are anxious only to use fuel ethanol with the best climate characteristics in a life-cycle perspective, and the bulk of ethanol used in Sweden comes from Brazil. The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency has identified some crucial issues which often are left out from discussions. These might be of extra importance for the Swedish ethanol use: - Might Swedish demand for good ethanol indirectly raise the demand for “bad” ethanol, such as US maize ethanol with fossil energy input? Or is it possible to encourage the production of exclusively “good” ethanol by choosing such (certified) ethanol? This depends on how the international market for fuel ethanol works. - To what extent does increased Swedish, or European, demand encourage the long-term supply of ethanol? What supply elasticities are there in Brazil and globally? If increased European use only means that we take hold of a fixed supply, the climate benefit compared to fossil fuels will not occur. The analyses are further complicated by the fact that there might be land-use competition between fuel, feedstuffs and food. When available land becomes more limited, increased production might necessitate breaking new soil, which could lead to emissions of climate-changing gases elsewhere. Consequently it is not only the fuel market itself that needs to be analysed.
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| 15. |
- Blicharska, Malgorzata, et al.
(författare)
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Old Trees: Cultural Value
- 2013
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Ingår i: Science. - : American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). - 0036-8075 .- 1095-9203. ; 339, s. 904-
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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| 16. |
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| 17. |
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| 18. |
- Buckland, Philip I., 1973-
(författare)
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The Bugs Coleopteran Ecology Package (BugsCEP) database : 1000 sites and half a million fossils later
- 2014
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Ingår i: Quaternary International. - : Elsevier. - 1040-6182 .- 1873-4553. ; 341, s. 272-282
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The Bugs database project started in the late 1980s as what would now be considered a relatively simple system, albeit advanced for its time, linking fossil beetle species lists to modern habitat and distribution information. Since then, Bugs has grown into a complex database of fossils records, habitat and distribution data, dating and climate reference data wrapped into an advanced software analysis package. At the time of writing, the database contains raw data and metadata for 1124 sites, and Russell Coope directly contributed to the analysis of over 154 (14%) of them, some 98790 identifications published in 231 publications. Such quantifications are infeasible without databases, and the analytical power of combining a database of modern and fossil insects with analysis tools is potentially immense for numerous areas of science ranging from conservation to Quaternary geology.BugsCEP, The Bugs Coleopteran Ecology Package, is the latest incarnation of the Bugs database project. Released in 2007, the database is continually added too and is available for free download from http://www.bugscep.com. The software tools include quantitative habitat reconstruction and visualisation, correlation matrices, MCR climate reconstruction, searching by habitat and retrieving, among other things, a list of taxa known from the selected habitat types. It also provides a system for entering, storing and managing palaeoentomological data as well as a number of expert system like reporting facilities.Work is underway to create an online version of BugsCEP, implemented through the Strategic Environmental Archaeology Database (SEAD) project (http://www.sead.se). The aim is to provide more direct access to the latest data, a community orientated updating system, and integration with other proxy data. Eventually, the tools available in the offline BugsCEP will be duplicated and Bugs will be entirely in the web.This paper summarises aspects of the current scope, capabilities and applications of the BugsCEP database and software, with special reference to and quantifications of the contributions of Russell Coope to the field of palaeoentomology as represented in the database. The paper also serves to illustrate the potential for the use of BugsCEP in biographical studies, and discusses some of the issues relating to the use of large scale sources of quantitative data.All datasets used in this article are available through the current version of BugsCEP available at http://www.bugscep.com.
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| 19. |
- Buckland, Philip, 1973-
(författare)
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Lessons from extinctions
- 2017
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Ingår i: Wood Wise. - : Woodland Trust. ; , s. 22-27
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Tidskriftsartikel (populärvet., debatt m.m.)abstract
- Many beetles are very good at colonising new areas when changes in the landscape open up new possibilities. Equally, they are highly susceptible to local extinction in the face of landscape scale changes in their environment.
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| 20. |
- Corcoll, Natàlia, 1981, et al.
(författare)
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Comparison of four DNA extraction methods for comprehensive assessment of 16S rRNA bacterial diversity in marine biofilms using high-throughput sequencing
- 2017
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Ingår i: FEMS Microbiology Letters. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 1574-6968 .- 0378-1097. ; 364:14
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- High-throughput DNA sequencing technologies are increasingly used for the metagenomic characterization of microbial biodiversity. However, basic issues, such as the choice of an appropriate DNA extraction method, are still not resolved for non-model microbial communities. This study evaluates four commonly used DNA extraction methods for marine periphyton biofilms in terms of DNA yield, efficiency, purity, integrity and resulting 16S rRNA bacterial diversity. Among the tested methods, the Plant DNAzol® Reagent (PlantDNAzol) and the Fast DNATM SPIN Kit for Soil (FastDNA Soil) methods were best suited to extract high quantities of DNA (77 - 130 μg g wet wt-1). Lower amounts of DNA were obtained (
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