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.
2012
Authors
Helge Bonesmo Shannan Little Odd Magne Harstad Karen A. Beauchemin Arne Oddvar Skjelvåg Otto SjelmoAbstract
No abstract has been registered
Abstract
During recent decades, forests have expanded into new areas throughout the whole of Norway. The processes explained as causing the forest expansion have focused mainly on climate or land use changes. To enable a spatially explicit separation of the effects following these two main drivers behind forest expansion, the authors set out to model the potential for natural forest regeneration following land use abandonment, given the present climatic conditions. The present forest distribution, a number of high-resolution land cover maps, and GIS methods were used to model the potential for natural forest regeneration. Furthermore, the results were tested with independent local models, explanatory variables and predictive modelling. The modelling results show that land use abandonment, in a long-term perspective, has the climatic and edaphic potential to cause natural forest regeneration of 48,800 km2, or 15.9% of mainland Norway. The future natural forest regeneration following land use change or abandonment can now be spatially separated from the effects of climate changes. The different independent model tests support the main findings, but small fractions of the modelled potential natural forest regeneration will probably be caused by other processes than land use abandonment.
Authors
Erlend NybakkAbstract
This study examines the relationships among learning orientation, firm innovativeness and financial performance in the context of the Norwegian wood industry. A questionnaire-based survey was sent to the CEOs of firms in the wood industry in Norway (241 usable replies, response rate of 49 percent). Learning orientation and firm innovativeness were conceptualised and analysed as latent second-order constructs by using structural equation modelling. The findings show that learning orientation has a positive effect on firm innovativeness in the traditional manufacturing industry. In addition, learning orientation was found to positively affect financial performance via the full mediating effect of firm innovativeness. Furthermore, firm innovativeness was also found to have an independent positive effect on financial performance. No direct effect of learning orientation on financial performance was found. According to the data, firm age also does not appear to affect the relationship between learning orientation and firm innovativeness.
Authors
Sekhar Udaya Nagothu M. Muralidhar M. Kumaran B. Muniyandi R. Umesh K.S. Krishna Prasad Sena S. De SilvaAbstract
Approximately 70% of shrimp consumed globally is farmed. India is ranked among the top five shrimp farming countries globally, and occurs mainly in the eastern coastal state of Andhra Pradesh (AP). More than 90% of the farms are less than 2 ha and are farmer owned, operated and managed. The objective of this study was to increase our understanding of climatic and socio-economic factors influencing this sector, through a survey of 300 shrimp farmers in AP in 2009/10. The farming communities were divisible into two groups: members of a society/cooperative and those operating individually. The latter were large scale adopting more intensive practices. The average production cost was Indian Rupees (IRS) 80,186 ha-1 and net income in summer and winter was IRS 221,901 and IRS 141,715, respectively. The mean technical efficiency estimated using Stochastic frontier function was 7% and 54%. The present study attempts to explain the difference in efficiencies using socio-economic and climatic variables, the latter being a novel approach. Among socio-economic variables, farming experience and membership in society were found to have a significant influence to improve technical and economic efficiencies. Further improvements in identifiable facets of the practices and a consequent increase in technical efficiency will make the sector less vulnerable to climatic change impacts.
Abstract
No abstract has been registered
Authors
Marianne BechmannAbstract
No abstract has been registered
Abstract
No abstract has been registered
Authors
Adam Tomasz Sikora Erlend NybakkAbstract
Poland's share of private forests is relatively small compared with that of other European countries. Private Polish forests are in poor condition and have been under great economic stress. This situation has changed somewhat with respect to rural development since Poland's accession to the European Union. However, many antecedents to the innovativeness of forest owners remain unaddressed by scholars. The objective of this paper is to study the effect of forest owners' attitudes towards risk, social responsibility, learning orientation and institutional support on their innovativeness. Additionally, we aim to analyse the forest owners' attitudes towards start-ups based on nature-based tourism, which is a relatively new activity in Poland. We used both quantitative and qualitative approaches in this study and collected data via face-to-face interviews with 105 forest owners. The results showed that, although a forest owner's attitudes towards risk, social responsibility and learning orientation positively impacted the owner's innovativeness, institutional support did not. In the qualitative portion of this study, we examine nature-based tourism as a relatively new phenomenon and the factors affecting an owner's decision to initiate this type of business. The results imply that private forest owners in Poland require greater institutional support to start tourism businesses related to their forest land. However, the present support policies do not seem to have a direct positive effect on the forest owners' innovativeness. Nevertheless, policies that limit risk, promote learning and encourage social responsibility among Polish forest owners can stimulate them to become more innovative. Previous research has shown that this change, in turn, results in better economic performance and enhanced rural vitality.
Authors
Stehane Dray Raphaël Pélissier Pierre Couteron Marie-Josée Fortin Pierre Legendre Pedro R. Peres-Neto Edwige Bellier Roger Bivand F. Guillaume Blanchet Miquel De Cáceres Anne-Béatrice Dufour Einar Heegaard Thibaut Jombart François Munoz Jari Oksanen Jean Thioulouse Helene H. WagnerAbstract
Species spatial distributions are the result of population demography, behavioral traits, and species interactions in spatially heterogeneous environmental conditions. Hence the composition of species assemblages is an integrative response variable, and its variability can be explained by the complex interplay among several structuring factors. The thorough analysis of spatial variation in species assemblages may help infer processes shaping ecological communities. We suggest that ecological studies would benefit from the combined use of the classical statistical models of community composition data, such as constrained or unconstrained multivariate analyses of site-by-species abundance tables, with rapidly emerging and diversifying methods of spatial pattern analysis. Doing so allows one to deal with spatially explicit ecological models of beta diversity in a biogeographic context through the multiscale analysis of spatial patterns in original species data tables, including spatial characterization of fitted or residual variation from environmental models. We summarize here the recent progress for specifying spatial features through spatial weighting matrices and spatial eigenfunctions in order to define spatially constrained or scale-explicit multivariate analyses. Through a worked example on tropical tree communities, we also show the potential of the overall approach to identify significant residual spatial patterns that could arise from the omission of important unmeasured explanatory variables or processes. ecological community; multivariate spatial data; ordination; spatial autocorrelation; spatial connectivity; spatial eigenfunction; spatial structure; spatial weight.
Authors
Julia Schregel Alexander Kopatz Snorre Hagen Henrik Brøseth Martin Smith Steinar Wikan Ingvild Wartiainen Paul Eric Aspholm Jouni Aspi Jon Swenson O. Makarova Natalia Polikarpova Michael Schneider Per Knappskog Minna Ruokonen Ilpo Kojola Konstantin F. Tirronen Pjotr I. Danilov Hans Geir EikenAbstract
Noninvasively collected genetic data can be used to analyse large-scale connectivity patterns among populations of large predators without disturbing them, which may contribute to unravel the species’ roles in natural ecosystems and their requirements for long-term survival. The demographic history of brown bears (Ursus arctos) in Northern Europe indicates several extinction and recolonization events, but little is known about present gene flow between populations of the east and west. We used 12 validated microsatellite markers to analyse 1580 hair and faecal samples collected during six consecutive years (2005–2010) in the Pasvik Valley at 70_N on the border of Norway, Finland and Russia. Our results showed an overall high correlation between the annual estimates of population size (Nc), density (D), effective size (Ne) and Ne ⁄Nc ratio. Furthermore, we observed a genetic heterogeneity of _0.8 and high Ne ⁄Nc ratios of _0.6, which suggests gene flow from the east. Thus, we expanded the population genetic study to include Karelia (Russia, Finland), Va¨sterbotten (Sweden) and Troms (Norway) (477 individuals in total) and detected four distinct genetic clusters with low migration rates among the regions. More specifically, we found that differentiation was relatively low from the Pasvik Valley towards the south and east, whereas, in contrast, moderately high pairwise FST values (0.91–0.12) were detected between the east and the west. Our results indicate ongoing limits to gene flow towards the west, and the existence of barriers to migration between eastern and western brown bear populations in Northern Europe.