Indicators of Biodiversity and Conservational Wildlife Quality on Danish Organic Farms for Use in Farm Management: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Indicator Development and Testing

Organic farming is expected to contribute to conserving national biodiversity on farms, especially remnant, old, and undisturbed small biotopes, forests, and permanent grassland. This objective cannot rely on the legislation of organic farming solely, and to succeed, farmers need to understand the goals behind it. A set of indicators with the purpose of facilitating dialogues between expert and farmer on wildlife quality has been developed and tested on eight organic farms. “Weed cover in cereal fields,” was used as an indicator of floral and faunal biodiversity in the cultivated land, and “uncultivated biotope area” on the farm was used as a general measure of wildlife habitats. Functional grouping of herbaceous plants (discriminating between “high conservation value” plant species and “competitive”/“ruderal” species) and low mobility butterflies were used as indicators of conservation value, especially focusing on the few sites left with considerable remnant conservation value. The dialog processes revealed that the organic farmers’ ideas and goals of conservation of wildlife quality were not necessarily the same as for biologists; the farmers expressed very different opinions on the biological rooted idea, that wildlife quality is related to the absence of agricultural impact. However, farmers also stated that the information given by the indicators and especially the dialogue with the biologist had influenced their perception and awareness of wildlife. We conclude that, combined with a dialogue process, using these indicators when mapping wildlife quality could be an important key component of a farm wildlife management advisory tool at farm level.     

Network position: a key component in the characterization of social personality types

In recent years, animal social interactions have received much attention in terms of personality research (e.g. aggressive or cooperative interactions). However, other components of social behaviour such as those describing the intensity, frequency, directedness and individual repeatability of interactions in animal groups have largely been neglected. Network analysis offers a valuable opportunity to characterize individual consistency of traits in labile social groups and therein provide novel insights to personality research in ways previously not possible using traditional techniques. Should individual network positions be consistently different between individuals under changing conditions, they might reflect expressions of an individual's personality. Here, we discuss a conceptual framework for using network analyses to infer the presence of individual differences and present a statistical test based on randomization techniques for testing the consistency of network positions in individuals. The statistical tools presented are useful because if particular individuals consistently occupy key positions in social networks, then this is also likely to have consequences for their fitness as well as for that of others in the population. These consequences may be particularly significant since individual network position has been shown to be important for the transmission of diseases, socially learnt information and genetic material between individuals and populations.     

Landuse experience does qualify for adaptation to climate change

The need to implement sustainable resource management regimes for semi-arid and arid rangelands is acute as non-adapted grazing strategies lead to irreversible environmental problems such as desertification and associated loss of economic support to society. In these sensitive ecosystems, traditional sectoral, disciplinary approaches will not work to attain sustainability: achieving a collective vision of how to attain sustainability requires interactive efforts among disciplines in a more integrated approach.     

Reduction of ammonia emission by shallow slurry injection: injection efficiency and additional energy demand

Ammonia (NH3) emission from livestock production causes undesirable environmental effects and a loss of plant-available nitrogen. Much atmospheric NH3 is lost from livestock manure applied in the field. The NH3 emission may be reduced by slurry injection, but slurry injection in general, and especially on grassland, increases the energy demand and places heavy demands on the slurry injection techniques used. The reduction in NH3 emission, injection efficiency, and energy demand of six different shallow slurry-injection techniques was examined. The NH3 emission from cattle slurry applied to grassland was reduced by all the injectors tested in the study, but there were major differences in the NH3 reduction potential of the different types of injectors. Compared with the trailing hose spreading technique, the NH3 loss was reduced by 75% when cattle slurry was injected using the most efficient slurry injection technique, and by 20% when incorporated by the least efficient injection technique. The reduction in NH3 emission was correlated with injection depth and the volume of the slot created. The additional energy demand for reducing ammonia emissions by slurry injection was approximately 13 000 kJ ha(-1) for a 20% reduction and 34 000 kJ ha(-1) for a 75% reduction. The additional energy demand corresponds to additional emissions of, respectively, 5.6 and 14.5 kg CO2 per ha injected.