Search

This work presents a quantitative assessment of adaptation options in the context of forest fires in Europe under projected climate change. A standalone fire model (SFM) based on a state-of-the-art, large-scale forest fire modeling algorithm is used to explore fuel removal through prescribed burnings and improved fire suppression as adaptation options. The climate change projections are provided by three climate models reflecting the SRES A2 scenario. The SFM’s modeled burned areas for selected test countries in Europe show satisfying agreement with observed data coming from two different sources (European Forest Fire Information System and Global Fire Emissions Database). Our estimation of the potential increase in burned areas in Europe under ‘‘no adaptation’’ scenario is about 200% by 2090 (compared with 2000-2008). The application of prescribed burnings has the potential to keep that increase below 50%. Improvements in fire suppression might reduce this impact even further, for example, boosting the probability of putting out a fire within a day by 10% would result in about a 30% decrease in annual burned areas. By taking more adaptation options into consideration, such as using agricultural fields as fire breaks, behavioral changes, and long-term options, burned areas can be potentially reduced even further.

The SOIL Action (22004) of the Joint Research Centre’s Land Management and Natural Hazards Unit (H07) has just completed a comprehensive collaborative project focusing exclusively on life in the soil. One of the resulting outputs is the first ever European Atlas of Soil Biodiversity. This atlas is the result of a collaboration between the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy and world leading experts in soil biodiversity from Europe and beyond. The atlas is a visually stunning publication of 128 pages, using striking photographs, informative texts and maps to explain and illustrate the great diversity of life in the across Europe. The atlas functions as a comprehensive guide to soil biology, allowing non-specialists to access information about this unseen world. The first part of the book provides an overview of the below ground environment, soil biota in general, the ecosystem functions that soil organism perform, the important value it has for human activities and relevance for global biogeochemical cycles. The second part is more of an 'Encyclopedia of Soil Biodiversity'. Starting with the smallest organisms such as the bacteria, this segment works through a range of taxonomic groups such as fungi, nematodes, insects and macro-fauna to illustrate the astonishing levels of heterogeneity of life in soil.

In this study we present simulations of burned area at European scale for the period 1990{2009 conducted with the Community Land Model (CLM). By using statistics on re counts and mean re suppression time from the European Fire Database werefined the parameterization of the functions describing human ignition/suppression and we modified the description of biomass availability for res. The results obtained with the modified imodel show an improvement of the description of the spatial and interannual variability of the burned area: the model bias is reduced by 45 %, and the explained variance is increased by about 9 % compared to the original parameterization of the model. The observed relationships between burned area, climate (temperature and precipitation) and aboveground biomass are also reproduced more accurately by the modied model. This is particularly relevant for the applicability of the model to simulate future re regimes under different climate conditions. However, results showed an overestimation of the burned area for some European countries (e.g. Spain and France) and an underestimation in years with an extreme re season in Mediterranean countries. Our results highlight the need for refining the parameterization of human ignition/suppression and fuel availability for regional application of re models implemented in land{surface{models., JRC.H.7-Climate Risk Management

This paper reviews and extends the work done on photodarkening by our project consortium and present our latest results on bleaching and photodarkening mitigation in fiber lasers. We shows the need for a standard set-up to avoid underestimation of photodarkening equilibrium losses and we suggest photodarkening losses scale with the square of Yb doping level. Investigation on visible light emission suggest an interplay of visible light with the Yb excited level. Finally we present an extensive investigation of photobleaching, both as post-irradiation and as simultaneous bleaching. We show evidence photobleaching can effectively mitigate the impact of photodarkening on laser performance when highly-doped Al-silicate fibers are used.

International audience; The Biosoil project carried under the scope of the Forest Focus EC regulation aims to constitute a European-wide database in order to monitor forest soil condition, and feed the Soil Profile Analytical Database of Europe (SPADE-M) with measured soil profiles. The final database will gather information on approximately 5000 plots dealing with soil classification, profile description and soil sample analysis over 2 survey rounds. This huge amount of data of different nature and of different origin has to be stored in a single database in order to be manipulated, retrieved for analysis and shared. Besides, soil related databases have to face two critical issues: the need to store properly not only the data but also the method used to obtain it; and the ability to check the data for errors, as many inputs are entered manually. With these considerations in mind, we have designed a generic software architecture that comprises: (1) the central relational database that favours generic tables because they are more suitable for analytical menu changes; (2) a metadata base that describes data formats, data units and codes and analytical methods; (3) a validation database that stores checking SQL queries that generate warnings when data seems suspicious, and also a record of such data and the follow up of its validation so as to assure a quality assurance/quality control (QA/QC) procedure. Furthermore this allows testing the validation relevance. (4) Data input is made via a web application that betters the interaction between data input and database managers. The system described here manages the data workflow from its initial spreadsheet format to data checked for errors and arranged in a self-descriptive database that will be stored by the European Commission Joint Research Centre. Concepts developed may be generalised to any soil database to better data quality management and assessment.

With critical-point dried specimens, skin window cells of normal subjects showed a wealth of surface detail with no evidence of underlying nucleus or organells. Cells interpreted as neutrophils were characterized by delicate curved surface folds and variable numbers of fine filopodia; macrophages were larger and usually covered with tightly-packed clusters of knob-like microvilli, their periphery showing many filopodia and broader projections. Some macrophage filopodia took origin from the free surface of the cell and extended outwards to be attached to the coverslip for part of their extent, giving a 'fly-leg' appearance. Filopodial communications between cells were also present. With slow-dried preparations, the cells were flattened and a putative nuclear profile was evident. In these preparations quantitative analysis was made of various cell parameters comparing neutrophils and macrophages. The significance of these features has been discussed in relation to the in vivo inflammatory response as revealed by cell contact with a glass surface. The technique might be useful for studying haematogenous cells in certain disease states.