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.
2018
Abstract
No abstract has been registered
Authors
Kar H. Lim Wuyang Hu Rodolfo M. Jr. NaygaAbstract
The Marine Stewardship Council's (MSC) sustainable seafood ecolabel covers about 10% of total seafood catch globally. Despite its prevalence, consumer willingness to pay (WTP) for MSC-certified imported seafood is not well understood. Using a choice experiment conducted with an American-consumers sample, this study measures the differences in WTP for American, Ecuadorian, and Vietnamese canned tuna. The results noted two things. First, the ecolabel induces country-specific effects, where the marginal WTP for the MSC label is higher for the imported products than for the domestic product; second, consumers prefer domestic products ceteris paribus, nevertheless, the premium of the ecolabel—when attached to the imported products—may partially eclipse preference for domestic products without the ecolabel. The results imply that the MSC ecolabel may generate a more favorable effect when applied to products from developing countries.
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No abstract has been registered
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No abstract has been registered
Authors
Victor Phani Tagginahalli N. Shivakumara Keith Davies Uma RaoAbstract
Mucins are highly glycosylated polypeptides involved in many host–parasite interactions, but their function in plant-parasitic nematodes is still unknown. In this study, a mucin-like gene was cloned from Meloidogyne incognita (Mi-muc-1, 1125 bp) and characterized. The protein was found to be rich in serine and threonine with numerous O-glycosylation sites in the sequence. Quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) showed the highest expression in the adult female and in situhybridization revealed the localization of Mi-muc-1 mRNA ex-pression in the tail area in the region of the phasmid. Knockdown of Mi-muc-1 revealed a dual role: (1) immunologically, there was a significant decrease in attachment of Pasteuria penetrans en-dospores and a reduction in binding assays with human red blood cells (RBCs), suggesting that Mi-MUC-1 is a glycoprotein present on the surface coat of infective second-stage juveniles (J2s) and is involved in cellular adhesion to the cuticle of infective J2s; pretreatment of J2s with different carbohydrates indicated that the RBCs bind to J2 cuticle receptors different from those involved in the interaction of Pasteuria endospores with Mi-MUC-1; (2) the long-term effect of RNA interference (RNAi)-mediated knockdown of Mi-muc-1 led to a significant reduction in nematode fecundity, suggesting a possible function for this mucin as a mediator in the interaction between the nematode and the host plant.
Authors
Signe Kynding Borgen Gry Alfredsen Johannes Breidenbach Lise Dalsgaard Gunnhild Søgaard Aaron SmithAbstract
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Authors
Stefano PulitiAbstract
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Abstract
Degradation of organic chemicals in natural soils depends on oxidation-reduction conditions. To protect our groundwater resources we need to understand the degradation processes under anaerobic conditions. Available iron and manganese oxides are used as electron acceptors for anaerobic degradation and are reduced to the dissolved form of metallic cations in pore water. To monitor this process is a challenge, because anaerobic conditions are difficult to sample directly without introducing oxygen. A few studies have shown an impact of iron reduction on spectral induced polarisation (SIP) signature, often associated with bacterial growth. Our objective is to study the impact of iron and manganese oxide dissolution, caused by degradation of an organic compound, with spectral induced polarisation signatures. Twenty-six vertical columns (30 cm high, inner diameter 4.6 cm) were filled with a sand rich in oxides (manganese and iron) with a static water table in the middle. In half of the columns, a 2 cm high contaminated layer was installed just above the water table. As the contaminant degrades, the initial oxygen is consumed and anaerobic conditions form Every three days over a period of one month, spectral induced polarisation (twenty frequencies between 5mHz and 10 kHz) data were collected on six columns: three contaminated replicates and three control replicates. Chemical analysis was done on twenty columns assigned for destructive water sampling, ten contaminated columns and ten control. The results show an increase of the real conductivity associated with the degradation processes, independent of frequency. Compared with the pore water electrical conductivity in the saturated zone, the real conductivity measurement revealed the formation of surface conductivity before iron was released in the pore water. In parallel, we also observed an evolution of the imaginary conductivity in both saturated and unsaturated zones at frequencies below 1 Hz. Overall, the anaerobic reduction of iron and manganese oxide during the organic degradation increased both the conductive and polarisation component of the complex conductivity.
Abstract
The Norwegian area frame survey of land cover and outfield land resources (AR18X18), completed in 2014, provided unbiased statistics of land cover in Norway. The article reports the new statistics, discusses implications of the data set, and provides potential value in terms of research, management, and monitoring. A gridded sampling design for 1081 primary statistical units of 0.9 km2 at 18 km intervals was implemented in the survey. The plots were mapped in situ, aided by aerial photos, and all areas were coded following a vegetation type system. The results provide new insights into the cover and distribution of vegetation and land cover types. The statistic for mire and wetlands, which previously covered 5.8%, has since been corrected to 8.9%. The survey results can be used for environmental and agricultural management, and the data can be stratified for regional analyses. The survey data can also serve as training data for remote sensing and distribution modelling. Finally, the survey data can be used to calibrate vegetation perturbations in climate change research that focuses on atmospheric–vegetation feedback. The survey documented novel land cover statistics and revealed that the national cover of wetlands had previously been underestimated.
Abstract
Inspired by the success of deep learning techniques in dense-label prediction and the increasing availability of high precision airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data, we present a research process that compares a collection of well-proven semantic segmentation architectures based on the deep learning approach. Our investigation concludes with the proposition of some novel deep learning architectures for generating detailed land resource maps by employing a semantic segmentation approach. The contribution of our work is threefold. (1) First, we implement the multiclass version of the intersection-over-union (IoU) loss function that contributes to handling highly imbalanced datasets and preventing overfitting. (2) Thereafter, we propose a novel deep learning architecture integrating the deep atrous network architecture with the stochastic depth approach for speeding up the learning process, and impose a regularization effect. (3) Finally, we introduce an early fusion deep layer that combines image-based and LiDAR-derived features. In a benchmark study carried out using the Follo 2014 LiDAR data and the NIBIO AR5 land resources dataset, we compare our proposals to other deep learning architectures. A quantitative comparison shows that our best proposal provides more than 5% relative improvement in terms of mean intersection-over-union over the atrous network, providing a basis for a more frequent and improved use of LiDAR data for automatic land cover segmentation.