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.
2022
Authors
Ágota Horel Tibor Zsigmond Csilla Farkas Györgyi Gelybó Eszter Tóth Anikó Kern Zsófia BakacsiAbstract
Land use and management affect soil hydrological processes, and the impacts can be further enhanced and accelerated due to climate change. In this study, we analyzed the possible long-term effects of different land use types on soil hydrological processes based on future climatic scenarios. Soil moisture and temperature probes were installed at four land use sites, a cropland, a vineyard, a meadow, and a forest area. Based on modeling of long-term changes in soil water content (SWC) using the HYDRUS 1D model, we found that changes in precipitation have a more pronounced effect on soil water content than changes in air temperature. Cropland is at the highest risk of inland water and SWC values above field capacity (FC). The number of days when the average SWC values are above FC is expected to increase up to 109.5 days/year from the current 52.4 days/year by 2081–2090 for the cropland. Our calculations highlight that the forest soil has the highest number of days per year where the SWC is below the wilting point (99.7 days/year), and based on the worst-case scenario, it can increase up to 224.7 days/year. However, general scenario-based estimates showed that vineyards are the most vulnerable to projected climate change in this area. Our study highlights the limitations of potential land use change for specific agricultural areas, and emphasizes the need to implement water retention measures to keep these agricultural settings sustainable.
Authors
M. Helbig T. Živković P. Alekseychik M. Aurela T. S. El-Madany E. S. Euskirchen L. B. Flanagan T. J. Griffis P. J. Hanson J. Hattakka C. Helfter T. Hirano E. R. Humphreys G. Kiely R. K. Kolka T. Laurila P. G. Leahy A. Lohila I. Mammarella M. B. Nilsson A. Panov Frans-Jan W. Parmentier M. Peichl J. Rinne D. T. Roman O. Sonnentag E.-S. Tuittila M. Ueyama T. Vesala P. Vestin Simon Weldon P. Weslien S. ZaehleAbstract
Peatlands have acted as net CO2 sinks over millennia, exerting a global climate cooling effect. Rapid warming at northern latitudes, where peatlands are abundant, can disturb their CO2 sink function. Here we show that sensitivity of peatland net CO2 exchange to warming changes in sign and magnitude across seasons, resulting in complex net CO2 sink responses. We use multiannual net CO2 exchange observations from 20 northern peatlands to show that warmer early summers are linked to increased net CO2 uptake, while warmer late summers lead to decreased net CO2 uptake. Thus, net CO2 sinks of peatlands in regions experiencing early summer warming, such as central Siberia, are more likely to persist under warmer climate conditions than are those in other regions. Our results will be useful to improve the design of future warming experiments and to better interpret large-scale trends in peatland net CO2 uptake over the coming few decades.
Authors
Julie Ingram Jane Mills Jasmine E. Black Charlotte-Anne Chivers José A. Aznar-Sánchez Annemie Elsen Magdalena Frac Belén López-Felices Paula Mayer-Gruner Kamilla Skaalsveen Jannes Stolte Mia TitsAbstract
No abstract has been registered
Authors
Pavel Raška Nejc Bezak Carla S.S. Ferreira Zahra Kalantari Kazimierz Banasik Miriam Bertola Mary Bourke Artemi Cerdà Peter Davids Mariana Madruga de Brito Rhys Evans David C. Finger Rares Halbac-Cotoara-Zamfir Mashor Housh Artan Hysa Jiří Jakubínský Marijana Kapović Solomun Maria Kaufmann Saskia Keesstra Emine Keles Silvia Kohnová Michele Pezzagno Kristina Potočki Samuel Rufat Samaneh Seifollahi-Aghmiuni Arthur Schindelegger Mojca Šraj Gintautas Stankunavicius Jannes Stolte Ružica Stričević Jan Szolgay Vesna Zupanc Lenka Slavikova Thomas HartmannAbstract
The major event that hit Europe in summer 2021 reminds society that floods are recurrent and among the costliest and deadliest natural hazards. The long-term flood risk management (FRM) efforts preferring sole technical measures to prevent and mitigate floods have shown to be not sufficiently effective and sensitive to the environment. Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) mark a recent paradigm shift of FRM towards solutions that use nature-derived features, processes and management options to improve water retention and mitigate floods. Yet, the empirical evidence on the effects of NBS across various settings remains fragmented and their implementation faces a series of institutional barriers. In this paper, we adopt a community expert perspective drawing upon LAND4FLOOD Natural flood retention on private land network (https://www.land4flood.eu) in order to identify a set of barriers and their cascading and compound interactions relevant to individual NBS. The experts identified a comprehensive set of 17 barriers affecting the implementation of 12 groups of NBS in both urban and rural settings in five European regional environmental domains (i.e., Boreal, Atlantic, Continental, Alpine-Carpathian, and Mediterranean). Based on the results, we define avenues for further research, connecting hydrology and soil science, on the one hand, and land use planning, social geography and economics, on the other. Our suggestions ultimately call for a transdisciplinary turn in the research of NBS in FRM.
Authors
Rudi Hessel Guido Wyseure Ioanna S. Panagea Abdallah Alaoui Mark S. Reed Hedwig van Delden Melanie Muro Jane Mills Oene Oenema Francisco Areal Erik van den Elsen Simone Verzandvoort Falentijn Assinck Annemie Elsen Jerzy Lipiec Aristeidis Koutroulis Lilian O'Sullivan Martin A. Bolinder Luuk Fleskens Ellen Kandeler Luca Montanarella Marius Heinen Zoltán Tóth Moritz Hallama Julian Cuevas Jantiene E. M. Baartman Ilaria Piccoli Tommy Dalgaard Jannes Stolte Jasmine E. Black Charlotte-Anne ChiversAbstract
Soils form the basis for agricultural production and other ecosystem services, and soil management should aim at improving their quality and resilience. Within the SoilCare project, the concept of soil-improving cropping systems (SICS) was developed as a holistic approach to facilitate the adoption of soil management that is sustainable and profitable. SICS selected with stakeholders were monitored and evaluated for environmental, sociocultural, and economic effects to determine profitability and sustainability. Monitoring results were upscaled to European level using modelling and Europe-wide data, and a mapping tool was developed to assist in selection of appropriate SICS across Europe. Furthermore, biophysical, sociocultural, economic, and policy reasons for (non)adoption were studied. Results at the plot/farm scale showed a small positive impact of SICS on environment and soil, no effect on sustainability, and small negative impacts on economic and sociocultural dimensions. Modelling showed that different SICS had different impacts across Europe—indicating the importance of understanding local dynamics in Europe-wide assessments. Work on adoption of SICS confirmed the role economic considerations play in the uptake of SICS, but also highlighted social factors such as trust. The project’s results underlined the need for policies that support and enable a transition to more sustainable agricultural practices in a coherent way.
Authors
Lisa ParuchAbstract
Microbial water quality is of vital importance for human, animal, and environmental health. Notably, pathogenically contaminated water can result in serious health problems, such as waterborne outbreaks, which have caused huge economic and social losses. In this context, the prompt detection of microbial contamination becomes essential to enable early warning and timely reaction with proper interventions. Recently, molecular diagnostics have been increasingly employed for the rapid and robust assessment of microbial water quality implicated by various microbial pollutants, e.g., waterborne pathogens and antibiotic-resistance genes (ARGs), imposing the most critical health threats to humans and the environment. Continuous technological advances have led to constant improvements and expansions of molecular methods, such as conventional end-point PCR, DNA microarray, real-time quantitative PCR (qPCR), multiplex qPCR (mqPCR), loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP), digital droplet PCR (ddPCR), and high-throughput next-generation DNA sequencing (HT-NGS). These state-of-the-art molecular approaches largely facilitate the surveillance of microbial water quality in diverse aquatic systems and wastewater. This review provides an up-to-date overview of the advancement of the key molecular tools frequently employed for microbial water quality assessment, with future perspectives on their applications.
Authors
Tatsiana Espevig Kristine Sundsdal Trygve S. Aamlid Jo Anne Crouch Karin Normann Marina Usoltseva Kate Entwistle Torfinn Torp May Bente BrurbergAbstract
No abstract has been registered
Authors
P.L. Sullivan S.A. Billings D. Hirmas L. Li X. Zhang S. Ziegler K. Murenbeeld H. Ajami A. Guthrie K. Singha D. Giménez A. Duro V. Moreno A. Flores A. Cueva A.N. Koop E.L. Aronson H.R. Barnard S.A. Banwart R.M. Keen Attila Nemes N.P. Nikolaidis J.B. Nippert D. Richter D.A. Robinson K. Sadayappan Souza de Souza M. Unruh H. WenAbstract
Soils form the skin of the Earth’s surface, regulating water and biogeochemical cycles and generating production of food, timber, and textiles around the world. Changes in soil and its ability to perform a range of processes have important implications for Earth system function, especially in the critical zone (CZ)—the area that extends from the top of the canopy to the bottom of groundwater and that harbors most of Earth’s biosphere. A key aspect of the way soil functions results from its structure, defined as the size, shape, and arrangement of soil particles and pores. The network of pores provides storage space for at least a quarter of Earth’s biodiversity, while the abundance, size and connectivity of the pore space regulates fluxes of heat, water, nutrients and gases that define the physical and chemical environment. Here we review the nature of soil structure, focusing on its co-evolution with the plants and microbes that live within the soil, and the degree to which these processes have been incorporated into flow and transport models. Though it is well known that soil structure can change with wetting and drying events, often oscillating seasonally, the dynamic nature of soil structure that we discuss is a systematic shift that results in changes in its hydro-bio-geochemical function over decades to centuries, timescales over which major changes in carbon and nutrient cycles have been observed in the Anthropocene. We argue that the variable nature of soil structure, and its dynamics, need to be better understood and captured by land surface and ecosystem models, which currently describe soil structure as static. We further argue that modelers and empiricists both are well-poised to quantify and incorporate these dynamics into their studies. From these efforts, four fundamental questions emerge: 1) How do rates of soil aggregate formation and collapse, and their overall arrangements, interact in the Anthropocene to regulate CZ functioning from soil particle to continental scales? 2) How do alterations in rooting-depth distributions in the Anthropocene influence pore structure to control hydrological partitioning, biogeochemical transformations and fluxes, exchanges of energy and carbon with the atmosphere and climate, regolith weathering, and thus regulation of CZ functioning? 3) How does changing microbial functioning in a high CO2, warmer world with shifting precipitation patterns influence soil organic carbon dynamics and void-aggregate profile dynamics? 4) How deeply does human influence in the Anthropocene propagate into the subsurface, how does this depth relate to profile structure, and how does this alter the rate at which the CZ develops? The United Nations has recently recognized that 33% of the Earth's soils are already degraded and over 90% could become degraded by 2050. This recognition highlights the importance of addressing these proposed questions, which will promote a predictive understanding of soil structure.
Abstract
Global land use change has resulted in more pasture and cropland, largely at the expense of woodlands, over the last 300 years. How this change affects soil hydraulic function with regard to feedbacks to the hydrological cycle is unclear for earth system modelling (ESM). Pedotransfer functions (PTFs) used to predict soil hydraulic conductivity (K) take no account of land use. Here, we synthesize >800 measurements from around the globe from sites that measured near-saturated soil hydraulic conductivity, or infiltration, at the soil surface, on the same soil type at each location, but with differing land use, woodland (W), grassland (G) and cropland (C). We found that texture based PTFs predict K reasonably well for cropland giving unbiased results, but increasingly underestimate K in grassland and woodland. In native woodland and grassland differences in K can usually be accounted for by differences in bulk density. However, heavy grazing K responses can be much lower indicating compaction likely reduces connectivity. We show that the K response ratios (RR) between land uses vary with cropland (C/W = 0.45 [W/C = 2.2]) and grassland (G/W = 0.63 [W/G = 1.6]) having about half the K of woodland.
Authors
Cornelya KlutschAbstract
No abstract has been registered