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This paper explores the distribution of agency in forest science. Studies of forest science tend to view it primarily as seeking to control and exploit natural resources. But recent turns in social theory open for understandings of human-nature relations beyond human control. This paper explores what such insights can mean for the understanding of forest science. It asks how nonhumans and nonhumans interact in practices of forest science and together constitute certain forms of agency. How are the activities engaged in by students and lecturers affected by nonhumans? How do they respond to nonhumans? The empirical scope of this paper focuses interaction between students and lecturers at bachelor’s level. Fieldwork was carried out in June 2023 by joining students and lecturers on excursions. In-depth interviews with eleven students were also conducted. The paper observes how students and lecturers actively distanced themselves from the forest science of the past for ignoring the requirements of trees and the services of their surrounding environments. Indeed, lecturers repeatedly addressed preferences and performances of nonhuman beings. This had major implications for which decisions were available. The paper therefore suggests that nonhumans and humans interacted in numerous ways. Students and lecturers responded to trees, wildlife, soil, and climate. Nonhumans especially affected decisions related to logging and planting, thereby providing inescapable premises for the actions of forest science practitioners, and ultimately contributing to both enable and constrain agency. To conclude, the paper discusses a few limitations and implications of its findings. Forest science Forestry Nonhuman agency Biodiversity Climate change Soil

Digital Twin technology has emerged to become a key enabling technology in the ongoing transition into Industry 4.0. A Digital Twin is in essence a digital representation of an asset that provides better insight into its dynamics by combining a priori knowledge of the system through mathematical models with online data acquired from sensors and instruments deployed in or at the physical asset. While the technology is seeing increased use across several different industrial, governmental and research sectors, and across scientific disciplines, its application within aquaculture is still in its infancy. However, due to the rapid ongoing development in technological methods in aquaculture, an increasing number of the building blocks required to make a Digital Twin for aquaculture purposes are becoming available. We set out to explore these possibilities by first defining a Digital Twin — what components it should contain, how it should be constructed, and outlining the capability levels of a finished Digital Twin. Our next step was then to explore the state-of-the-art within the different required components and enabling technologies within aquaculture, thereby identifying the current foundation for developing Digital Twin technology in this sector. Following this, we developed concrete case studies that elaborate upon how we by combining existing and developing new technological tools could envision developing Digital Twins for three application areas of high industrial relevance, namely oxygen conditions in sea-cages, fish growth in sea-cages and in-cage robotics and vehicle operations. In conclusion, we present our thoughts on the potential of Digital Twin technology in being a key component in ushering in Industry 4.0 in aquaculture, and outline a pathway on the way onward towards achieving this goal.

Context Intensive land use and exploitation of natural resources are the main direct drivers of biodiversity loss. Transformative changes in land management are called for as conservation and management actions have not been sufficient to support the viability of species populations. It has been proposed that to solve the sufficiency problem one could segregate the landscape into an intensively managed part, and into so-called multiuse-conservation landscapes that aggregate set asides with managed areas for multiple uses. Objectives We describe a scenario analysis where we evaluate the effects and cost-efficiency of transforming the boreal forest from intensively managed production landscapes progressively towards multiuse-conservation landscapes. Methods We simulated Finnish boreal forests under various managements and optimized management to produce six scenarios to reveal the ecological, economic, climate and management regime implications of multiuse-conservation landscapes. Ecological effects explored included habitat availability and metacommunity capacity of dead wood dependent species. Results Increasing the area of set aside and multiuse management increased the habitat availability and metacommunity capacity as well as climate benefits but caused economic losses in terms of timber revenues. Pooling the set asides and multiuse management areas together into the same landscapes reduced the economic losses, had negligible added climate benefits and produced mixed biodiversity effects: pooling decreased habitat availability but increased metacommunity capacity across all landscapes. Conclusions Changing land management and aggregating conservation efforts can be a cost-efficient way to protect biodiversity. Our results suggest biodiversity benefits in landscapes where the set aside and multiuse is aggregated. Careful spatial planning can also alleviate the conflicts between ecological and economic values of land. peerReviewed

The forest sector faces complex societal demands that require a workforce with the desired composition of competence. It is also a primary, rural, and male-dominated industry based on gendered norms and culture. There are knowledge gaps in how gender influences work-related satisfaction and experiences in the forest sector and how women manage to work in male-dominated workplaces. We fill part of these voids by studying job satisfaction and women's strategies using the Norwegian forest sector as a case study. By combining surveys and group interviews, we unveil statistical gender differences and individual experiences. We found that while most men and women are satisfied with the social aspects of the workplace, men are more satisfied than women. Women report considerably less gender equality and more use of suppression techniques than men. Thirty-two percent of the women report being sexually harassed during their most important job position. Being exposed to harassment, most women choose not to report it to management, but instead handle the situation themselves. Forestry is a gendered sector, and to change attitudes for improving the work environment and opportunities for all employees, gender-related issues must be raised and handled in a suitable manner by managers and organizations.

This is chapter 6 of the State of Environmental Science in Svalbard (SESS) report 2023. The chapter gives joint recommendations from the two updated SESS chapters SATMODSNOW and PASSES in this SESS report and set them into a wider context on snow research in Svalbard where SIOS now develops supersites for snow parameter monitoring in several projects such as Crios, SIOS Snow Pilot and SnowInOpt. The chapter also gives a brief overview over upcoming satellite sensors allowing for measurements of snow depth and snow water equivalents, which previously have been unavailable from satellites. The chapter also reviews the snow observations provided in the SIOS Data Management System, and advises improvements. We also highlight the importance of snow models and their ability to assimilate different in situ and earth observations to accurately represent the snow cover. At the end of the chapter, we look forward to new possibilities for a holistic approach where models (from past data and future climate scenarios) and observations are merged in a digital twin based on AI techniques for pattern recognition, allowing for detailed prediction of the future snow cover.

Forest degradation induced by intensive forest management and temperature increase by climate change are resulting in biodiversity decline in boreal forests. Intensive forest management and high-end climate emission scenarios can further reduce the amount and diversity of deadwood, the limiting factor for habitats for saproxylic species in European boreal forests. The magnitude of their combined effects and how changes in forest management can affect deadwood diversity under a range of climate change scenarios are poorly understood. We used forest growth simulations to evaluate how forest management and climate change will individually and jointly affect habitats of red-listed saproxylic species in Finland. We simulated seven forest management regimes and three climate scenarios (reference, RCP4.5 and RCP8.5) over 100 years. Management regimes included set aside, continuous cover forestry, business-as-usual (BAU) and four modifications of BAU. Habitat suitability was assessed using a species-specific habitat suitability index, including 21 fungal and invertebrate species groups. “Winner” and “loser” species were identified based on the modelled impacts of forest management and climate change on their habitat suitability. We found that forest management had a major impact on habitat suitability of saproxylic species compared to climate change. Habitat suitability index varied by over 250% among management regimes, while overall change in habitat suitability index caused by climate change was on average only 2%. More species groups were identified as winners than losers from impacts of climate change (52%–95% were winners, depending on the climate change scenario and management regime). The largest increase in habitat suitability index was achieved under set aside (254%) and the climate scenario RCP8.5 (> 2%), while continuous cover forestry was the most suitable regime to increase habitat suitability of saproxylic species (up to + 11%) across all climate change scenarios. Our results show that close-to-nature management regimes (e.g., continuous cover forestry and set aside) can increase the habitat suitability of many saproxylic boreal species more than the basic business-as-usual regime. This suggests that biodiversity loss of many saproxylic species in boreal forests can be mitigated through improved forest management practices, even as climate change progresses. peerReviewed

AbstractPlant secondary metabolites can protect organisms against oxidative stress caused by adverse environmental conditions. Cinnamomum camphora (L.) J. Presl contains plentiful terpenoids and is subdivided into 5 chemotypes. To develop natural antioxidants using the plant terpenoids, the terpenoid composition and antioxidant abilities of methanol, ethyl acetate, n-hexane and petroleum ether extracts from linalool and eucalyptol chemotypes were investigated, and the solvent effects on in vitro antioxidant activity of 8 main terpenoids were analyzed. Meanwhile, the in vivo effects of two strong antioxidant terpenoids were evaluated. For the two chemotypes, the 4 solvents exhibited the same extracting effects on the terpenoid types, but methanol extracts contained the highest content of terpenoids, which should contribute to their strongest scavenging activity against 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) and 2,2'-azino-bis(3-ethylbenzothiazoline-6-sulfonic acid) (ABTS) free radicals. In linalool and eucalyptol chemotype extracts, linalool, eucalyptol, ocimene, α-pinene, D-limonene, terpinene, β-pinene and longifolene were the 8 main terpenoids. Among the 4 solvents, the 8 terpenoids showed the strongest free radical-scavenging activity with methanol as the reaction medium, which might result from strong-polarity methanol easily activating C = C unsaturated bonds in these compounds. This might also contribute to the strongest scavenging activity of methanol extracts against free radicals. Among these main components, ocimene and longifolene separately showed the strongest activity in scavenging DPPH and ABTS free radical. In in vivo assay, the two compounds significantly lowered the reactive oxygen species (ROS) levels in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, a single-celled model organism, under H2O2 stress, and the lowering effects gradually enhanced with increasing the compound concentration, resulting in the corresponding promoting effect on the algal growth. At the same concentration, longifolene showed the strongest effect on protecting the algal cells against oxidative stress. Therefore, methanol was suitable for extracting terpenoids in natural antioxidant development, and ocimene and longifolene were two strong antioxidant terpenoids without cell toxicity, with the latter having stronger in vivo antioxidant activity. Graphical Abstract

Image translation with convolutional autoencoders has recently been used as an approach to multimodal change detection (CD) in bitemporal satellite images. A main challenge is the alignment of the code spaces by reducing the contribution of change pixels to the learning of the translation function. Many existing approaches train the networks by exploiting supervised information of the change areas, which, however, is not always available. We propose to extract relational pixel information captured by domain-specific affinity matrices at the input and use this to enforce alignment of the code spaces and reduce the impact of change pixels on the learning objective. A change prior is derived in an unsupervised fashion from pixel pair affinities that are comparable across domains. To achieve code space alignment, we enforce pixels with similar affinity relations in the input domains to be correlated also in code space. We demonstrate the utility of this procedure in combination with cycle consistency. The proposed approach is compared with the state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning algorithms. Experiments conducted on four real and representative datasets show the effectiveness of our methodology.