Publications
NIBIOs employees contribute to several hundred scientific articles and research reports every year. You can browse or search in our collection which contains references and links to these publications as well as other research and dissemination activities. The collection is continously updated with new and historical material.
2016
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Climate change and variability associated with natural hazards such as flooding, storms, droughts, increasing temperature, sea level rise and salinity have been a continuous threat to the life and property of Vietnamese society in the past and will continue to do so in the future in not addressed properly. A majority are smallholders, highly vulnerable and without the capacity to invest much in adaptation. Thus any new adaptation measures have to be simple, low cost, help in reducing greenhouse gases (GHGs), and easily adaptable. This manual draws lessons from selected mitigation and adaptation measures evaluated in the project. The manual examines three key aspects needed to scale-up and replicate the measures at the provincial level. The first is the institutional structures, including inputs needed, farmer and stakeholder capacity at the commune, district and provincial levels, barriers to scaling-up, and how to address them. Secondly, how demonstrating effective climate-resilient technologies on farmer fields, closely involving farmers, can provide good results for scaling-up. Third, the impacts of policies to enhance enabling environments for scaling-up. There is a need to prioritize short-term and long-term measures for scaling-up. It is important to generate funds to support the scaling-up, both from state and private sources. Active stakeholder integration is a necessary factor where the authorities, farmers, scientists, civil society and industry are working closely in the process. Knowledge transfer has to be done both through linear and non-linear extension models that will be more effective in providing timely and complete knowledge to farmers and stakeholders. […]
Authors
V. Geethalakshmi K. Bhuvaneswari A. Lakshmanan Sekhar Udaya Nagothu Sonali Mcdermid A.P. Ramaraj R. Gowtham K. SenthilrajaAbstract
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Sekhar Udaya NagothuAbstract
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Invasive nitrogen-fixing plants drive vegetation dynamics and may cause irreversible changes in nutrient-limited ecosystems through increased soil resources. We studied how soil conditioning by the invasive alien Lupinus nootkatensis affected the seedling growth of co-occurring native plant species in coastal dunes, and whether responses to lupin-conditioned soil could be explained by fertilisation effects interacting with specific ecological strategies of the native dune species. Seedling performance of dune species was compared in a greenhouse experiment using field-collected soil from within or outside coastal lupin stands. In associated experiments, we quantified the response to nutrient supply of each species and tested how addition of specific nutrients affected growth of the native grass Festuca arundinacea in control and lupin-conditioned soil. We found that lupin-conditioned soil increased seedling biomass in 30 out of 32 native species; the conditioned soil also had a positive effect on seedling biomass of the invasive lupin itself. Increased phosphorus mobilisation by lupins was the major factor driving these positive seedling responses, based both on growth responses to addition of specific elements and analyses of plant available soil nutrients. There were large differences in growth responses to lupin-conditioned soil among species, but they were unrelated to selected autecological indicators or plant strategies. We conclude that Lupinus nootkatensis removes the phosphorus limitation for growth of native plants in coastal dunes, and that it increases cycling of other nutrients, promoting the growth of its own seedlings and a wide range of dune species. Finally, our study indicates that there are no negative soil legacies that prevent re-establishment of native plant species after removal of lupins.
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Hans Martin HanslinAbstract
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Nano-scale zero-valent iron (nZVI) has been conceived for cost-efficient degradation of chlorinated pollutants in soil as an alternative to e.g permeable reactive barriers or excavation. Little is however known about its efficiency in degradation of the ubiquitous environmental pollutant DDT and its secondary effects on organisms. Here, two types of nZVI (type B made using precipitation with borohydride, and type T produced by gas phase reduction of iron oxides under H2) were compared for efficiency in degradation of DDT in water and in a historically (>45 years) contaminated soil (24 mg kg−1 DDT). Further, the ecotoxicity of soil and water was tested on plants (barley and flax), earthworms (Eisenia fetida), ostracods (Heterocypris incongruens), and bacteria (Escherichia coli). Both types of nZVI effectively degraded DDT in water, but showed lower degradation of aged DDT in soil. Both types of nZVI had negative impact on the tested organisms, with nZVI-T giving least adverse effects. Negative effects were mostly due to oxidation of nZVI, resulting in O2 consumption and excess Fe(II) in water and soil.