2016, Papendiek, Franka, Tartiu, Valentina E., Morone, Piergiuseppe, Venus, Joachim, Hönig, Anne

Fodder legumes play a major role in developing sustainable agricultural production systems and contain a range of compounds, which can be utilized to produce a wide spectrum of materials currently manufactured from petroleum-based sources. Hence, if associated with Green Biorefinery technology, the use of fodder legumes brings about significant advantages in terms of overall environmental sustainability. Since fodder legume production in Europe is currently very low, the objective of this study is to assess if a new value chain generated by Green Biorefineries can make fodder legume production profitable for farmers, and therewith increase cultivation numbers. We conducted a financial cost-benefit analysis of producing biomass from agricultural land in the federal state of Brandenburg (Germany) in three different production scenarios at two farm size levels. Costs, benefits, expected profits and risks between the scenarios were quantified. Fodder legume production for traditional fodder production was already able to increase the internal rate of return, while the production of feedstocks for Green Biorefineries, depending on prices paid for the legume juice showed an even higher profit potential. Therefore, in future agricultural production systems, fodder legumes should be part of crop rotations again.

2016, Cavalli, F., Alastuey, A., Areskoug, H., Ceburnis, D., Čech, J., Genberg, J., Harrison, R.M., Jaffrezo, J.L., Kiss, G., Laj, P., Mihalopoulos, N., Perez, N., Quincey, P., Schwarz, J., Sellegri, K., Spindler, G., Swietlicki, E., Theodosi, C., Yttri, K.E., Aas, W., Putaud, J.P.

Although particulate organic and elemental carbon (OC and EC) are important constituents of the suspended atmospheric particulate matter (PM), measurements of OC and EC are much less common and more uncertain than measurements of e.g. the ionic components of PM. In the framework of atmospheric research infrastructures supported by the European Union, actions have been undertaken to determine and mitigate sampling artefacts, and assess the comparability of OC and EC data obtained in a network of 10 atmospheric observatories across Europe. Positive sampling artefacts (from 0.4 to 2.8 μg C/m3) and analytical discrepancies (between −50% and +40% for the EC/TC ratio) have been taken into account to generate a robust data set, from which we established the phenomenology of carbonaceous aerosols at regional background sites in Europe. Across the network, TC and EC annual average concentrations range from 0.4 to 9 μg C/m3, and from 0.1 to 2 μg C/m3, respectively. TC/PM10 annual mean ratios range from 0.11 at a Mediterranean site to 0.34 at the most polluted continental site, and TC/PM2.5 ratios are slightly greater at all sites (0.15–0.42). EC/TC annual mean ratios range from 0.10 to 0.22, and do not depend much on PM concentration levels, especially in winter. Seasonal variations in PM and TC concentrations, and in TC/PM and EC/TC ratios, differ across the network, which can be explained by seasonal changes in PM source contributions at some sites.

2014, Vitolo, Claudia, Elkhatib, Yehia, Reusser, Dominik, Macleod, Christopher J.A., Buytaert, Wouter

Recent evolutions in computing science and web technology provide the environmental community with continuously expanding resources for data collection and analysis that pose unprecedented challenges to the design of analysis methods, workflows, and interaction with data sets. In the light of the recent UK Research Council funded Environmental Virtual Observatory pilot project, this paper gives an overview of currently available implementations related to web-based technologies for processing large and heterogeneous datasets and discuss their relevance within the context of environmental data processing, simulation and prediction. We found that, the processing of the simple datasets used in the pilot proved to be relatively straightforward using a combination of R, RPy2, PyWPS and PostgreSQL. However, the use of NoSQL databases and more versatile frameworks such as OGC standard based implementations may provide a wider and more flexible set of features that particularly facilitate working with larger volumes and more heterogeneous data sources.

2015, Villoria, Nelson B., Elliott, Joshua, Müller, Christoph, Shin, Jaewoo, Zhao, Lan, Song, Carol

We discuss an on-line tool that facilitates access to the large collection of climate impacts on crop yields produced by the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project. This collection comprises the output of seven crop models which were run on a global grid using climate data from five different general circulation models under the current set of representative pathways. The output of this modeling endeavor consists of more than 36,000 publicly available global grids at a spatial resolution of one half degree. We offer flexible ways to aggregate these data while reducing the technical barriers implied by learning new download platforms and specialized formats. The tool is accessed trough any standard web browser without any special bandwidth requirement.

2018, Wiedensohler, A., Ma, N., Birmili, W., Heintzenberg, J., Ditas, F., Andreae, M.O., Panov, A.

Aerosol particle number size distributions (PNSD) were investigated to verify, if extremely low-volatility organic vapors (ELVOC) from natural sources alone could induce new particle formation and growth events over the remote boreal forest region of Siberia, hundreds of kilometers away from significant anthropogenic sources. We re-evaluated observations determined at a height of 300 m of the remote observatory ZOTTO (Zotino Tall Tower Observatory, http://www.zottoproject.org). We found that new particle formation events occurred only on 11 days in a 3-year period, suggesting that homogeneous nucleation with a subsequent condensational growth could not be the major process, maintaining the particle number concentration in the planetary boundary layer of the remote boreal forest area of Siberia. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd