Syftet med studien är att klargöra den brukningsvärda jordbruksmarkens skydd och bevarande ur ett nationellt och hållbart perspektiv inom fysisk samhällsplanering. Den övergripande frågeställningen handlar om vad det finns för problematik när det gäller att bevara eller exploatera jordbruksmark. Särskilt studeras lagstiftningens eventuella hinder, tydlighet och tillämpning. Studien fokuserar på den lagstiftning som berör kommunens fysiska planering. Länsstyrelsen har en rådgivande och övervakande roll över kommunen i samband med planläggning av mark- och vattenområden men har inga befogenheter att informera eller ingripa när det gäller brukningsvärd jordbruksmark. Ett område av nationell betydelse i 3 kap. miljöbalken (MB) behandlas därmed annorlunda av staten än ett område av riksintresse i 3- och 4 kap. MB. Tillvägagångssättet för att klargöra lagstiftning som berör kommunens fysiska planering och länsstyrelsens roll i samband med planläggning av mark och vatten utgörs av en kombinerad rättsdogmatisk metod och rättsociologisk metod. Studien redogör för lägesbilden idag och det som förändrats sedan år 2013, genom intervjuundersökning, enkätundersökning och studier av avgöranden i Mark-och miljööverdomstolen (MÖD) från år 2016 till idag. Resultat från intervju ger förslag på en ändrad plan- och bygglagstiftning som förändrar länsstyrelsens rådgivnings- och tillsynsroll i planprocessen. Prognos framöver är fortsatt exploatering av jordbruksmark. Resultat från studiens enkät visar att kommun och länsstyrelse tror på en minskad exploateringstakt fram till år 2030 av jordbruksmark omkring tätorter. Bostadsbebyggelse är ett väsentligt allmänt intresse och är enligt enkätundersökningen den främsta anledningen till att jordbruksmark exploateras. Resultatet visar en ökad uppmärksamhet på jordbruksmarkens betydelse för livsmedelsproduktion och hållbar utveckling. Förslag från myndigheter på förändrat sätt att värdera jordbruksmark kan bidra till en ökad förståelse över jordbruksmarkens värde och betydelse för att uppnå hållbar utveckling. Enligt studien har förändring av rättsläget sedan år 2016 stärkt jordbruksmarkens bevarandevärde. MÖD konstaterar i studiens undersökta rättsfall: oavsett hur lite eller mycket marken brukas, oavsett klassning och oavsett om det är betes- eller åkermark anses jordbruksmark vara brukningsvärd och därmed inte lämplig att exploatera. / The aim of this study is to clarify the agricultural land that is suitable for cultivation and protection from a national and sustainable perspective within physical planning. The general inquiry in this study is whether there is a problem between preserving or developing agricultural land. Studying Swedish legislation, and any potential obstacles, as well as its clarity and applicability have been important to respond to the aim of this study. The study focuses on Swedish legislation that affects municipal physical planning. The County Administrative Board's has a provision of advice- and monitoring role when the municipal wants to plan for use of land- and water areas but has no empowerment to inform or interfere in agricultural land that is suitable for cultivation. Agricultural land is mentioned as an area of "national importance" in the Environmental Code in chapter 3, section 4 but other areas in the same chapter are mentioned as "national interests". This means that the Swedish Government protect the agricultural land differently than the other areas that are mentioned in this chapter. The chosen methods to clarify the Swedish legislation is applied using a legal dogmatic method and a sociology of law method. These methods are used to present Swedish legislation that concerns the municipal physical planning, as well as the County Administrative Board's and their part in monitoring the use of land and water. The study is an overview of the current situation and what has changed since the year of 2013, carried out by conducting a survey, an interview and studying precedents from the Land and Environment Court of Appeal from the year 2016 until present day. The interviews suggest a proposition that a changed Planning and Building Act can alter the municipal and the County Administrative Board's roles and authority regarding regulation and advice in the planning process. The forecast is that agricultural land is going to continue to be developed. The results from the survey indicate that the municipal and the County Administrative Board's believe that the development of agriculture land adjacent to the urban center are going to be reduced by the year of 2030. Housing development is known as a significant national interest and according to the survey it is the main reason to develop agricultural land. The survey result also indicates an increased awareness of agricultural land and the importance for food production and sustainable development. A proposition from authorities to evaluate agricultural land in a different way than before can also contribute to a deeper understanding of agricultural land's value and importance in achieving sustainable development. According to this study the legal postion changed in the year of 2016 which has consolidated the maintenance of agricultural land. The cases in this study from the Land and Environment Court of Appeal mention: no matter how much the agricultural land is being cultivated or not, no matter the classification and no matter if it is pasture or arable land, the agricultural land is suitable for cultivation and therefore not appropriate to develop.

As a species domesticated only in the last century, agricultural cranberry plants (Vaccinium macrocarpon) remain little removed from their wild relatives. Thus, it is a potential model species for studies of the earliest stages of domestication; however, there is little available quantitative information on its wild population biology and ecology. As such information is vital to studies of the ecological changes occurring during domestication, the purpose of this study was to consolidate the relevant knowledge available and conduct a preliminary search for patterns in the invertebrate communities of wild bogs. The alpha diversity was found to be greater than the overall (gamma diversity), which is likely a result of the metric used and the fact that there was minimal overlap in rare species between bogs. In addition, alpha diversity was found to be significantly negatively correlated with bog age. Two pairs of species were found to be correlated with each other, Blunt-nosed (Limotettix vaccinia (Van Duzee)) and Sharp-nosed leafhopper (Scaphytopius sp.), along with fleabeetle (Sysena frontalis (F.)) and firebeetle (Cryptocephalus incertus (Oliv.). In addition, it was found that spiders are significantly more common in western bogs, while firebeetle is significantly more common in eastern bogs. However, this may be indicative of a correlation with bog age rather than a true correlation with geographic location. More work is needed to determine the true dynamics driving these findings, so that the information could eventually be used to improve the efficacy and decrease the environmental impact of pest management on agricultural bogs.

Fall-planted forage radish (Raphanus sativus L. longipinnatus) cover crops have shown successful weed suppression and recycling of fall-captured nutrients. This research evaluated the nutrient cycling and weed suppressive benefits of forage radish cover crop mixtures to develop an integrated system for no-till sweet corn (Zea mays L. var rugosa) production that improves crop yield and soil health. Treatments included forage radish (FR), oats (Avena sativa L.) and forage radish (OFR), a mixture of peas (Pisum sativum subsp arvense L.), oats and forage radish (POFR), and no cover crop control (NCC). Subplots were assigned to nitrogen fertilizer treatments to evaluate N sufficiency and timing: 0 kg N ha-1 as the control, 28 kg N ha-1 at side-dress, and 56 kg N ha-1 with application split between planting and side-dress. Results indicated that POFR and OFR provided improved N cycling and sweet corn yield compared with FR and NCC. Early season N from decomposing cover crop residue was sufficient to eliminate the need for N fertilizer at sweet corn planting, thereby reducing input costs and risks of environmental pollution.

With a changing global climate, plant pathologists must understand the impact aberrant weather events may have on the development of plant diseases. Fungal plant infections are largely dependent on temperature and precipitation, climate parameters that are predicted to change more in this century. Venturia inaequalis causes apple scab, one of the most destructive apple diseases of temperate growing regions. Temperature and precipitation drive apple scab infections and forecast models, which guide growers in efficient, effective fungicide applications. In some recent years in the Northeast, these models have failed to accurately predict when ascospores of this fungus are available to cause primary infections, prompting more fungicide intensive management. Identifying cause(s) of model failures will restore confidence in them, enabling growers to reduce fungicide use. As technology becomes an increasingly important component of on farm decision-making, so does educating new farmers and agricultural students in the benefits of Integrated Pest Management and challenges associated with models early on in their college educational experience. This research attempts to identify reasons for ascospore maturity model failures, determine to what degree critical ascospore maturity parameters have changed and create a tool that educators may use to engage undergraduate students in the complexities of Integrated Pest Management research and modern farming. It will more specifically do the following: 1) Dry periods will be analyzed to determine if frequency and duration are increasing, causing the fungus to mature over a longer period of time than models currently estimate. 2) Degree-days during fall and winter will be examined to estimate what effect a warming climate may have on ascospore and tree development, and ultimately apple scab occurrence. The research will use lab and field observations to track the development of V. inaequalis ascospores, the source of primary apple scab infections. These observations will be compared to infection events and spore maturation forecasts from models currently used by apple growers in the Northeast. 3) A case study developed for publication in American Phytopathological Societies’ Plant Health Instructor will provide early career college students with an introduction to forecasting models, Integrated Pest Management and the challenges associated with climate variability.

Modern weeding is predominantly carried out by spraying whole fields with toxic pesticides, a process that accomplishes the main goal of eliminating weeds, but at a cost of the local environment. Weed management systems based on AI solutions enable more targeted actions, such as site-specific spraying, which is essential in reducing the need for chemicals. To introduce sustainable weeding in Swedish farmlands, we propose implementing a state-of-the-art Deep Learning (DL) algorithm capable of instance segmentation for remote sensing of weeds, before coupling an automated sprayer vehicle. Cereals have been chosen as the target crop in this study as they are among the most commonly cultivated plants in Northern Europe. We used Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) to capture images from several fields and trained a Mask R-CNN computer vision framework to accurately recognize and localize unique instances of weeds among plants. Moreover, we evaluated three different backbones (ResNet-50, ResNet101, ResNeXt-101) pre-trained on the MS COCO dataset and through transfer learning tuned the model towards our classification task. Some well-reported limitations in building an accurate model include occlusion among instances as well as the high similarity between weeds and crops. Our system handles these challenges fairly well. We achieved a precision of 0.82, recall of 0.61, and F1 score of 0.70. Still, improvements can be made in data preparation and pre-processing to further improve the recall rate. All and all, the main outcome of this study is the system pipeline which, together with post-processing using geographical field coordinates, could serve as a detector for half of the weeds in an end-to-end weed removal system. / Site-specific Weed Control in Swedish Agriculture

Psykisk ohälsa är det vanligaste hälsoproblemet i Sverige och framför allt bland unga. Det är alarmerande siffror som ses öka. Brist på regelbunden återhämtning kan vara en orsak och leda till psykisk ohälsa och utmattning.Vårt ursprung nära naturen påverkar oss även idag och i skogen finns många hälsofördelar att hämta. Där får hjärnan vila från alla intryck vi dagligen utsätts för och vi kan få känna lugn och ro.Denna studie undersökte om och hur korta skogsvistelser påverkar välmående. 10 deltagare fick göra korta skogsvistelser och besvara enkäter före och efter skogsvistelsen för att skatta olika aspekter på välmående. Studien visade att korta skogsvistelser hade en momentan positiv effekt på alla efterfrågade aspekter. Efter 15 min i skogen kände deltagarna sig mer avspända, glada, harmoniska lugna och klartänkta än innan. Långtidseffekter sågs främst på koncentrationsförmåga. Samtliga deltagare uppger att de har fått ett förbättrat välmående efter sina skogsvistelser och åtta av tio uppger ett förbättrat välmående efter studien.

Winter cover crops grown in rotation with grain crops can be an efficient integrated pest management tool (IPM). However, cover crop biomass production and thus successful provisioning of ecosystem services depend on a timely planting and cover crop establishment after harvest of a cash crop in the fall. One potential management adaptation is the use of short-season soybeans to advance cover crop planting date in the fall. Cover crops planted earlier in the fall may provide a greater percentage of ground cover early in the season because of higher biomass accumulation that may improve weed suppression. However, adapting to short-season soybeans could have a yield penalty compared to full-season soybeans. In addition, it is unclear if further increasing cover crop growing season and biomass production under environmental conditions in Kentucky could limit nitrogen and water availability for the next cash crop. This thesis combines the use of field trials and a crop simulation model to address the research questions posed. In Chapter 1, field trials evaluating yield and harvest date of soybean maturity group (MG) cultivars from 0 to 4 in 13 site-years across KY, NE, and OH, were used to calibrate and evaluate the DSSAT crop modeling software (v 4.7). The subsequent modeling analysis showed that planting shorter soybean maturity groups (MG) would advance date of harvest maturity (R8) by 6.6 to 11 days per unit decrease in MG for May planting or by 1 to 7.3 days for July planting. The earliest MG cultivar that maximized yield ranged from MG 0 to 3 depending on the location, allowing a winter-killed cover crop to accumulate between 257 to 270 growing degree days (GDD) before the first freeze occurrence when soybean was planted in May, and between 280 to 296 GDD when soybean was planted in July. Winter-hardy cover crops could accumulate 701 to 802 GDD following soybean planted in May and 329 to 416 GDD after soybean planted in July. In Chapter 2, a two-year field trial was conducted at Lexington, KY to evaluate the effect of a soybean – cover crop rotation with soybean cultivars MG 1, 2, 3 or 4 on cover crop biomass and canopy cover, and on weed biomass in the fall and the following spring. Results showed that having cover crops was an efficient management strategy to reduce weed biomass in the fall and spring compared to no cover treatment. Planting cover crops earlier in the fall after a short-season soybean increased cover crop biomass production and percentage of ground cover in the fall, but not the following spring. Planting cover crop earlier after a short-season soybean did not improve weed suppression in the fall or spring compared to a fallow control with full-season soybean. Having a fall herbicide application improved weed control when there was a high pressure of winter annual weeds. By the spring, delaying cover crop termination increased cover crop biomass but also did weed biomass. In Chapter 3, a soybean – cover crop – corn rotation was simulated to evaluate the effect of different soybean MG and cover crop termination, as well as year to year variability on water and nitrogen availability for the next corn crop in Lexington, KY. Simulations showed that when cover crops were terminated early, they did not reduced soil available water at corn planting. However, introducing a non-legume cover crop reduced total inorganic nitrogen content in the soil profile by 21 to 34 kg ha-1 implying 15 to 30 kg ha-1 less in corn nitrogen uptake. Cover crop management that was able to maintain similar available water values than fallow treatment while minimizing nitrogen uptake differences was cover crops planted after soybean MG 4 with an early termination. However, the best management strategies that will maximize ecosystem services from cover crops as well as cash crop productivity may need to be tailored to each environment, soil type, irrigation management, and must consider year-to-year variability.

Skogsägare, främst i Götaland, har stora problem med betesskador i tallföryngringar vilket kan bidra till minskad tillväxt och ekonomisk förlust. Studien undersökte huruvida trädslagssammansättning och fodertillgång påverkar betesskador på tall i ett fältförsök i Blekinge och i praktiska föryngringar i Östergötland. Studien visar att främst toppskottsbetning förekommer vid lägre höjder vilket påvisar vikten av att snabbt få upp föryngringen till en högre höjd. Att fastslå huruvida exempelvis trädslagssammansättning, vegetationstyp, höjdrelation och medelhöjd påverkar betesskador på tall är komplicerad då det finns många faktorer som har en betydande roll. Dessa kan exempelvis vara vikten av ståndortsanpassning, förädlat plantmaterial, markberedning samt tidpunkt för röjning. Skogsägare måste göra en avvägning i vad som är den mest effektiva metoden i varje enskilt fall för att föryngra tall utan en för stor andel betesskador.

Problemen med betesskador på ungskog av tall (Pinus sylvestris) under vintertid är många utifrån flera olika synvinklar. Det finns ett behov av att hitta en balans som är bra för både viltet, skogsbruket, jakten och övriga intressenter. I den här studien har frågan ställts om avverkningsmetoden spelar roll för viltbetet. Kan bränsleanpassad avverkningsmetod bidra till mer foderskapande åtgärder än vid konventionell föryngringsavverkning? En fältdatainsamling utfördes på totalt fyra områden á 2,5 ha, där två var bränsleanpassade och två konventionellt avverkade. All data som samlades in analyserades statistiskt, för att få fram om det fanns någon skillnad mellan avverkningsmetoderna i mängden betat foder, betesfrekvens och andel betade provytor. Även en spillningsinventering utfördes för att se vilken typ av klövvilt som vistats på områdena. Resultatet visar på en högre andel betat foder, högre betesfrekvens, fler spillningshögar och större andel betade provytor vid de bränsleanpassade avverkningarna.

Urban areas around the world are changing constantly and therefore it is necessary to update urban land cover maps regularly. Remote sensing techniques have been used to monitor changes and update land-use/land-cover information in urban areas for decades. Optical imaging systems have received most of the attention in urban studies. The development of SAR applications in urban monitoring has been accelerated with more and more advanced SAR systems operating in space.   This research investigated object-based and rule-based classification methodologies for extracting urban land-cover information from high resolution SAR data. The study area is located in the north and northwest part of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), Ontario, Canada, which has been undergoing rapid urban growth during the past decades. Five-date RADARSAT-1 fine-beam C-HH SAR images with a spatial resolution of 10 meters were acquired during May to August in 2002. Three-date RADARSAT-2 ultra-fine-beam C-HH SAR images with a spatial resolution of 3 meters were acquired during June to September in 2008.   SAR images were pre-processed and then segmented using multi-resolution segmentation algorithm. Specific features such as geometric and texture features were selected and calculated for image objects derived from the segmentation of SAR images. Both neural network (NN) and support vector machines (SVM) were investigated for the supervised classification of image objects of RADARSAT-1 SAR images, while SVM was employed to classify image objects of RADARSAT-2 SAR images. Knowledge-based rules were developed and applied to resolve the confusion among some classes in the object-based classification results.   The classification of both RADARSAT-1 and RADARSAT-2 SAR images yielded relatively high accuracies (over 80%). SVM classifier generated better result than NN classifier for the object-based supervised classification of RADARSAT-1 SAR images. Well-designed knowledge-based rules could increase the accuracies of some classes after the object-based supervised classification. The comparison of the classification results of RADARSAT-1 and RADARSAT-2 SAR images showed that SAR images with higher resolution could reveal more details, but might produce lower classification accuracies for certain land cover classes due to the increasing complexity of the images. Overall, the classification results indicate that the proposed object-based and rule-based approaches have potential for operational urban land cover mapping from high-resolution space borne SAR images. / QC 20101209