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Train-the-trainer concepts (TTT concepts) to impart evidence-based practice competences aim at promoting the implementation of evidence-based practice. The aim of this study was to develop and pilot-test a TTT training program for teachers at schools for health care professionals. The program is based on the core curriculum "Evidence-based Decision-making" set up by the German Network for Evidence-based Medicine e.V. (DNEbM).The study was conducted according to the UKMRC framework for complex interventions and consisted of Phase 1 (Development) and Phase 2 (Piloting). In Phase 1, the intervention was modelled on the basis of a systematic literature search. In Phase 2, the TTT concept was piloted with teachers at two schools for health care professionals. For the evaluation, short interviews with the participants were carried out after each module; classroom observations took place during the training and were followed by a focus group interview. In addition, baseline characteristics were collected prior to the training and descriptively evaluated. Critical health competence was surveyed using the Critical Health Competence Test (CHC test) before and after the course. The questionnaires, interviews and classroom observation protocols were processed according to Mayring's qualitative content analysis. Person parameters ±SD were calculated to determine the level of competence.Piloting took place in September 2018 and from September to November 2019. Eight teachers from two training institutions participated. The evaluation of the focus group interviews and the classroom observation protocols resulted in a category system comprising 6 main and 17 subcategories. The feasibility of the materials and methods could be demonstrated in both pilot tests. Reactivation and extension of prior knowledge were confirmed by the participants. The small group size was appreciated; the participants took an active part during the lessons and were stimulated to plan their own lessons. The evaluation of the CHC test revealed average person parameters of 432 ± 45 (pretest, n=8) and 512 ± 65 (posttest, n=8).Using mixed methods, the results show the feasibility of the curriculum.Further evaluation in a randomized controlled trial (RCT) is needed to prove the efficacy of the curriculum.

The use of modern digital technologies in water management is an important driver for obtaining better data for assessing the status of water bodies and their development. These data can be beneficially implemented for the monitoring and management of rivers and especially waterways.In the BMDV-funded project RiverCloud, an autonomous tandem system consisting of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and an Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) is being developed under the coordination of the gia of RWTH Aachen University, which will provide spatially and temporally high-resolution data for the development and maintenance of waterways as well as for river management. The contribution introduces the developed coupled UAV/USV tandem system with its mounted sensors for high resolution data acquisition and continuously accurate georeferencing and presents some significant results using the example of a study area on the Rhine River (Tomateninsel).The data presented are, among others, camera-based flow measurements using an image processing method, discharge data of a precise ADCP (Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler) with 2000 kHz frequency and ten water quality parameters using a multi-parameter probe. All data mentioned were simultaneously collected in two locations of the study area on the Rhine River in September 2022. The 4 seconds videos collected by the UAV-camera were processed using an image processing method based on the surface velocity after implementing a new developed stabilisation tool. The cross-section data collected by ADCP were used for the configuration of the two sites. The agreement between ADCP and camera-based flow and discharge data was very good on both sites with less than 5% deviation for a discharge value of approx. 600 m3/s and 1.63 m/s mean velocity. The water quality parameters collected during the measuring campaign were temperature, conductivity, salinity, pH value, oxygen concentration, oxygen saturation, ammonium, turbidity, Total suspended solids (TSS) and total dissolved solids (TDS). The water quality data were in the expected ranges for river water (e.g. average values: pH 7.8, T 21.8°C, EC 0.35 mS/cm, Sal 0.71%, O2 7.5 mg/l, NH4+ 0.3 mg/l).The results, specific requirements of the developed solution and challenges under the measuring conditions of the study area are presented in this paper. The data collected are used as the input of an overview report for river or waterway water flow and quality monitoring.

Maintenance of waterways is often a challenging task with conflicting interests between different parties. They are subject to economical stresses through the industry and transportation sector on the one hand, on the other the European Water Framework Directive dictates to ensure (or lead them back to) a chemically and ecologically “good status” (which benefits the balance between regulating, supporting, providing and cultural ecosystem services).To have a good decision base for ecological measures, local-scale high resolution temporal and spatial data is needed to make sound decisions for a sustainable river management, which extends to assess and monitor the succession of restoration areas and to document change.The objective of the project RiverCloud is the development of a data acquisition platform which enables synchronous data collection with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and unmanned surface vehicles (USV). On the base of this platform different sensors can be used for a holistic data base in semiterrestrial areas of streams: e.g. acoustic doppler current profilers, multi-parameter sensors, multibeam-echosounders and a 360° camera for the USV; Sensors on the UAV consist of a bathymetric range finder and an industrial grade camera for structure from motion application to derive high-resolution point clouds and orthomosaics.Building upon this data base, a further objective is the detection of vegetation structures such as a canopy height, single trees and the balancing of aboveground biomass, as a regulating ecosystem service for carbon sequestration, from high-resolution point clouds by using open source software. The results from remote sensing data are tested against comparative data collected in the field. Workflow, results and benefits for river management will be presented. All data was collected in September 2022 along the river Rhine near Karlsruhe, Germany.

Das 2018 veröffentlichte Szenario „Sicherheit neu denken – von der militärischen zur zivilen Sicherheitspolitik“ und die daraus entstandene Initiative Sicherheit Neu Denken (SND) verstehen sich als friedenspädagogischer Ansatz: Eine breite sowie auf Dauer angelegte Kampagne auf der Grundlage eines Szenario-Buches und ergänzender (Bildungs-)Materialien animiert und provoziert Menschen zur Befassung mit der Sicherheits- und Friedenspolitik über die Friedensbewegung hinaus. (DIPF/Orig.) The scenario “Rethinking Security – From Military to Civilian Security Policy” published in 2018 and the resulting initiative Security Rethinking (SND) see themselves as a peace education approach: A broad and long-term campaign based on a scenario book and supplementary (educational) materials animates and provokes people beyond the peace movement to engage with security and peace policy. (DIPF/Orig.)

In Europe, the genusTolypella(Characeae) comprises four to eightTolypellaspecies in sectionsRothiaandTolypellathat have been distinguished by vegetative morphology and gametangial characters such as antheridial size and oospore cell wall ornamentation. However, morphological species differentiation is difficult in some cases due to overlapping and variable vegetative features, which in many cases are difficult to observe clearly.To clarify the taxonomic status of the five European species ofTolypellain sectionTolypella, sequence data of the plastid genesatpB,rbcL andpsbC forTolypella glomerata(Desv.) Leonh.,Tolypella hispanicaAllen,Tolypella nidifica(O.F. Müll.) A. Braun,Tolypella normaniana(Nordst.) Nordst. andTolypella salinaCor. were combined with data on oospore morphology, including oospore wall ornamentation.Gene sequence data identified five distinct clusters, but they differed from the morphologically identified five species. ‘T. glomerata’ consisted of some of the samples morphologically identified asT. glomerataand seven samples ofT. normaniana, while the remainingT. glomeratasamples clustered with specimens of unclear affiliation (“Tolypella. sp.”). ‘T. hispanicaI’ consisted of samples from various locations, whereas “T.hispanicaII” consisted of samples ofT. hispanicafrom the Mediterranean island, Sardinia. The remaining cluster consisted of all the specimens that had been determined asT. salinaorT. nidificain addition to two specimens ofT. normaniana. Oospore morphology was most clearly distinguishable forT. glomerata. Oospore characteristics for all other taxa were not as informative but showed some geographical and/or environmentally influenced differences, especially forT. nidificaandT. salina.Our results suggest a significantly different taxonomy ofTolypellasect.Tolypellain which specimens normally identified asT. glomeratamight be two different species,T. glomerataand an unidentified species;T. nidificaandT. salinaare not separate species;T. normanianais a diminutive variant ofT. nidificaorT. salina; andT. hispanicacomprises two different species, one from the Mediterranean island Sardnia.

Comprehensive charophyte surveys on the island of Sardinia, Italy revealed a novel species of Lamprothamnium occurring in a salt marsh in the vicinity of San Giovanni Sinis. Most of the discovery and description of charophyte species in Europe took place in the mid–late 1800s, so the discovery of a new species in the region is of note. The species is described and compared with the other species of Lamprothamnium known for the Mediterranean region of Europe and elsewhere. Lamprothamnium sardoum sp. nov. differs from all other species in having antheridia and oogonia clustered internal and external to the axial nodes and on the branchlets, and in the relative absence of sterile whorls, the length and width of its bract cells and decumbent stipulodes, and the persistence of the protonema on mature plants. In addition, data on hydrochemistry and accompanying flora of the Sardinian site of L. sardoum are presented together with proposals for management and conservation.

The German Weather Service (DWD) initiated the operational observation of solar global and diffuse radiation at the Observatory Potsdam in 1937. Nowadays, these components are observed at 35 stations using thermopile-based pyranometers. Most of the stations are also equipped with a pyrgeometer to record the downwelling long-wave radiation.The solar radiation experienced major decadal variations in Germany over the past 80 years. While a significant decrease between 1950 and 1985 occurred, a continuous increase can be observed since 1985 with some of the highest annual means ever recorded in the past five years. The decrease in the second half of the 20th century with the subsequent increase is commonly referred to as dimming and brightening. While these variations were most likely due to anthropogenically caused variations in the aerosol load, the recent increase is not yet fully understood. Since aerosol loads have stabilized at low levels at the beginning of the 21th century, the direct aerosol effect might be less prominent at present. Instead, changes in cloudiness may have become more important.In order to disentangle the observed trends in the radiative fluxes and to determine the contribution from aerosols and clouds separately we also use radiation data from the BSRN station at the Meteorological Observatory Lindenberg. The station was established in 1994 and high accuracy measurements of downwelling long-wave radiation and all three components of downwelling short-wave radiation (global, diffuse and direct) have been recorded continuously since then. We use a 1-dim. Radiative Transfer Model (RTM) to calculate the short- and long-wave cloud-free fluxes in order to quantify the cloud radiative effect. Similar, we estimate the direct aerosol effect. Preliminary results indicate a decrease in the cloud radiative effect over the past 20 year, which can imply a decrease in cloud cover but may also include a shift towards a different cloud type and/or a change in microphysical cloud properties. Finally, we present methods which can be used to determine the spectral AOD and the cloud-radiative effect for sites or periods when no direct observations of the spectral AOD and no information about the vertical temperature and humidity structure of the atmosphere for thermal RTM calculations are available.

Balloon-based soundings have been carried out for more than 100 years and have since formed an important database and reference for characterizing the 3-dimensional structure of the atmosphere. In addition to the meteorological standard variables trace gases, aerosol and radiation profiles have recently also been recorded using radiosondes.Since this is significantly more expensive equipment compared to a standard radiosonde, some more effort is required to enable safe soundings and transfer back home for each case. The repetition rates of the soundings are consequently much lower than those of the operational measurements.The measurement conditions during the sounding differ significantly from the usual conditions for radiation measurements near the ground: temperatures down to -85°C at the tropopause level, rapid temperature changes of more than 50 K/h at an ascent rate of 5 m/s and possible impacts of liquid and iced cloud droplets on the observations need to be handled. This requires adjustments to the acquisition of measured values ​​and a careful selection of the launch time.At Lindenberg Meteorological Observatory (52.21° north, 14.12° east) of the German Weather Service, a total of 68 all-season sounding flights have been carried out since April 2015 with modified radiosondes of the Meteolabor SRS-C34 and SRS-C50 type with added upward and downward solar and terrestrial radiation.This presentation is discussing and interpreting the observational results of individual cloudless cases as well as soundings passing low, medium and high clouds. The downward fluxes are significantly modified below the tropopause. On the other hand, reflected radiation and terrestrial radiation are not only subject to local changes, even up to an altitude of 34 km, which can be quantified by including data on land use and cloud cover.In addition, we will show the result of a case study where the radiative fluxes observed in and around clouds are used to validate corresponding numerical simulations performed with the ICON-ART model.

Over 50% of the energy consumption in Europe is used for heating and cooling, of which the majority still comes from fossil fuels. For the heating and cooling supply of buildings, heat pumps using borehole heat exchangers (BHE) are an efficient and sustainable alternative. Design and performance of BHE fields strongly depend on the thermal properties of the subsurface. For the dimensioning of BHE fields, the subsurface properties are assessed using geothermal potential maps published by federal states or authorities.Such maps are created based on available geological and hydrogeological subsurface data. From these data, the stratigraphic sequence a BHE would intersect is inferred and thermal properties are assigned to the rock sequence. The mean thermal conductivity of the intersected sequence has a high uncertainty that is not quantified in most geothermal potential estimates. Moreover, geothermal potential maps are often not comparable because the used calculation methods differ in terms of complexity and calculated quantity. In Germany, for example, almost each of the federal states published its own geothermal potential map showing different quantities.For these reasons, we propose an approach to estimate the subsurface thermal conductivity together with its uncertainty. To enable applicability to datasets of different regions, e.g., all German federal states, the method takes only publicly available and standardized hydrogeological and geological data as input. Thermal conductivity estimation takes place on1) a large scale, to obtain a general estimate of thermal conductivity, and2) on a fine scale, to update the large-scale estimate in smaller target areas.For both estimations, we consider uncertainty by assigning not only the mean but also the minimum and maximum thermal conductivities of each rock type to the intersected sequence. Data handling and initiation of calculations is done via a geoportal. It connects the calculation method to geodata servers, instead of storing data locally, thus ensuring data up-to-dateness. This way, the approach does not only estimate the thermal conductivity, but also automatizes the cumbersome step of geological data gathering for all types of subsurface investigations.We demonstrate the approach using data from the federal state of Hamburg and compare our results to a thermal conductivity map published by the city of Hamburg. The partly considerable differences between the two estimates illustrate the uncertainty of the geothermal potential, and thus the need to communicate it.

Solar shortwave and terrestrial thermal longwave irradiance are measured at radiation sites at the Earth's surface and on satellite platforms high up in space, since many years. Radiation profiles through the Earth's atmosphere, however, have only sporadically been measured from enhanced upper-air radiosondes. Here we show profiles of solar and terrestrial radiation measured with balloon-borne radiometers through cloud-free and cloudy atmospheres, which reveal radiative effects of temperature, water vapor, ozone and clouds on downward and upward radiation. Shortwave radiation profiles show solar absorption in the free atmosphere and strong reflection in clouds and albedo effects on the ground and the atmosphere above. Longwave upward radiation profiles visualize terrestrial radiation emitted from the Earth's surface, which is partly absorbed and reemitted in the boundary layer and in the atmosphere by water vapor and other greenhouse gases. Longwave downward radiation profiles show the absorbed terrestrial radiation in the atmosphere and reveal the warming effect of increasing greenhouse gases, and by this visualize and demonstrate radiative forcing and a changing greenhouse effect by water vapor in the Earth's atmosphere. Longwave net radiation profiles show terrestrial emission into space to be reduced by water vapor and clouds. Measured radiation profiles are compared to numerically calculated radiation profiles.

Mechanistic explanations – especially mechanistic models – are commonly used to describe living beings. But their usage should be scrutinised closely. This text elucidates the motives, conditions and implications of a so called ‘methodical mechanism’. Due to the fact that humans cannot properly explain certain biotic processes, they have to rely on their technical knowledge to explain them. The history of philosophy and scientific thinking is, therefore, intertwined with the history of technology: the way humans interpret and explain natural phenomena is subject to the technological knowledge of a given time. The danger of this mechanistic approach, however, is that it can lead to false ontological assumptions about nature and humankind’s place therein, resulting in a subjugation of natural processes to instrumental reason.

Chara canescens Loisel. is the only haplostichous charophyte species in Europe. Populations with parthenogenetically reproducing females have been described from several European locations....

The charophyte flora of Italy is insufficiently known. This paper reports the results of a survey of the historical and recent distribution of Characeae in Sardinia, in order to fill current knowle...

We analyzed macrophysical characteristics of clouds and their radiative effects using COSMO mesoscale model and four German CLOUDNET sites. The study was performed for selected days with optically thick cloudiness, which relates to the period from April to October 2018. The short-term forecasts with only 3-hour time interval permit to evaluate only cloud microphysics effect on global irradiance at ground. The comparisons of liquid cloud water content (QC) and ice cloud content (QI) between measurements and modelling are discussed. We showed that the CLOUDRAD experimental cloud radiation interaction scheme provides a better agreement in global irradiance with observations than that from the default scheme.

Journal of photogrammetry, remote sensing and geoinformation science : PFG 88, 33-42 (2020). doi:10.1007/s41064-020-00090-4, Published by Springer International Publishing, [Cham]