Alkali land occurs adjacent to nearly every extensively irrigated area. Much of this land is too alkaline to produce profitable crops. Each year thousands of acres or land are going out of production because or increasing alkalinity. This presents one or the most acute problem which confronts irrigation agriculture today.

The goal of this master thesis is to evaluate an investment project to a biogas power plant. The first part of the master thesis defined the essential theory needed for the capital investment decisions. There is overview of the most important investment criteria like net present value and methods and sources of project financing. In the analytical part I calculate the necessary values like revenues, operational costs and depreciation in order to find out projects cash flow. The investment is then evaluated by investment criteria. In order to make the analysis more accurate the sensitivity analysis is made. In the last part of the thesis there is an overview of results and a investment recommendation.

Leaf epidermal transmittance of ultraviolet radiation (280-400 nm) was examined in several plant species to determine the capability of the epidermis to attenuate solar ultraviolet radiation. Epidermal samples were mechanically isolated and examined with a spectroradiometer/integrating sphere for transmittance. A survey of 25 species exposed to natural insolation was conducted. Although the species differed in life form, habitat type, and epidermal characteristics, epidermal transmittance was generally less than 10%. Ultraviolet radiation was attenuated 95 to 99% in more than half of the species. In 16 species, flavonoid and related pigments in the epidermis accounted for 20 to 57% of the attenuation. Several species exposed to supplemental ultraviolet irradiation (288-315 run) in a greenhouse exhibited significant (p≤0.05) depressions in epidermal transmittance of 31 to 47%, apparently resulting from an increase in ultraviolet-absorbing pigments.

In recent years, the society is more interested in the use of renewable source of energy, which is related to the establishment of biogas power plants. The aim of this thesis is to evaluate the economic benefits of investing in a particular project of biogas power plant where social impacts will not be the main indicator. In the methodological part is defined methodology (static and dynamic methods of investment decision making, sensitivity analysis). Followed by the introduction of the investor and the project. In the analytical part is evaluated the project from an economic point of view and ways of sales compared with use of biogas feed-in tariffs and green bonuses. The thesis also includes assessment of the impacts of investment from the economic, social and environmental point of view.

The investor has to decide whether he realizes the investment in the biogas power plant Smržice with a certain installed capacity If implemented, the investor is entitled to the government-guaranteed purchase price of electricity fixed for 15 years. It is necessary to predict profits and cash flows of each period which are further used for dynamic investment evaluation methods for the purpose of investment decision making. The application of the net present value shows whether the investment project is acceptable or not. The sensitivity analysis is used to compare changes in inputs with its impact on the net present value. The biogas power plant Smržice is typical example of biogas power plants built in Czech Republic in 2011-12 due to the government economic support, so finally these conclusions are generalised for the whole branch of electricity production from biogas.

Renewable energy resources, especially photovoltaics, have experienced enormous boom all over the world in the past few years. It was completely the same in Czech Republic where you would not find anybody without his own opinion regarding PV business. Installation of PV power plants has become very attractive business, with very significant role in 2011 in Czech Republic. At this time, this solar boom has found its "home" in other European countries, particularly in Eastern Europe. The post of the new Eastern Europe's "powerhouse" can defend even Romania, that's the cause I have chosen this country as the subject of this thesis. The aim of this thesis is to create a business plan for PV power plant and evaluate the investment opportunity of its installation in Romania. And then by means of a sensitivity analysis find out the impact of external factors that can significantly affect the profitability of the project.

The intensification of aridity due to anthropogenic climate change is likely to have a large impact on the growth and survival of plant species in the southwestern U.S. where species are already vulnerable to high temperatures and limited precipitation. Global climate change impacts plants through a rising temperature effect, CO2 effect, and land management. In order to forecast the impacts of global climate change, it is necessary to know the current conditions and create a baseline for future comparisons and to understand the factors and players that will affect what happens in the future. The objective of Chapter 1 is to create the very first high resolution, accurate, park-wide map that shows the distribution of dominant plants on the Colorado Plateau and serves as a baseline for future comparisons of species distribution. If we are going to forecast what species have already been impacted by global change or will likely be impacted in the future, we need to know their physiology. Chapter 2 surveys the physiology of the twelve most abundant non-tree species on the Colorado Plateau to help us forecast what climate change might do and to understand what has likely already occurred. Chapter 1. Our objective was to create an accurate species-level classification map using a combination of multispectral data from the World View-3 satellite and hyperspectral data from a handheld radiometer to compare pixel-based and object-based classification. We found that overall, both methods were successful in creating an accurate landscape map. Different functional types could be classified with fairly good accuracy in a pixel-based classification but to get more accurate species-level classification, object-based methods were more effective (0.915, kappa coefficient=0.905) than pixel-based classification (0.79, kappa coefficient=0.766). Although spectral reflectance values were important in classification, the addition of other features such as brightness, texture, number of pixels, size, shape, compactness, and asymmetry improved classification accuracy.Chapter 2. We sought to understand if patterns of gas exchange to changes in temperature and CO2 can explain why C3 shrubs are increasing, and C3 and C4 grasses are decreasing in the southwestern U.S. We conducted seasonal, leaf-level gas exchange surveys, and measured temperature response curves and A-Ci response curves of common shrub, forb, and grass species in perennial grassland ecosystems over the year. We found that the functional trait of being evergreen is increasingly more successful in climate changing conditions with warmer winter months. Grass species in our study did not differentiate by photosynthetic pathway; they were physiologically the same in all of our measurements. Increasing shrub species, Ephedra viridis and Coleogyne ramosissima displayed functional similarities in response to increasing temperature and CO2.

The intensification of aridity due to anthropogenic climate change is likely to have a large impact on the growth and survival of plant species in the southwestern U.S. where species are already vulnerable to high temperatures and limited precipitation. Global climate change impacts plants through a rising temperature effect, CO2 effect, and land management. In order to forecast the impacts of global climate change, it is necessary to know the current conditions and create a baseline for future comparisons and to understand the factors and players that will affect what happens in the future. The objective of Chapter 1 is to create the very first high resolution, accurate, park-wide map that shows the distribution of dominant plants on the Colorado Plateau and serves as a baseline for future comparisons of species distribution. If we are going to forecast what species have already been impacted by global change or will likely be impacted in the future, we need to know their physiology. Chapter 2 surveys the physiology of the twelve most abundant non-tree species on the Colorado Plateau to help us forecast what climate change might do and to understand what has likely already occurred. Chapter 1. Our objective was to create an accurate species-level classification map using a combination of multispectral data from the World View-3 satellite and hyperspectral data from a handheld radiometer to compare pixel-based and object-based classification. We found that overall, both methods were successful in creating an accurate landscape map. Different functional types could be classified with fairly good accuracy in a pixel-based classification but to get more accurate species-level classification, object-based methods were more effective (0.915, kappa coefficient=0.905) than pixel-based classification (0.79, kappa coefficient=0.766). Although spectral reflectance values were important in classification, the addition of other features such as brightness, texture, number of pixels, size, shape, compactness, and asymmetry improved classification accuracy.Chapter 2. We sought to understand if patterns of gas exchange to changes in temperature and CO2 can explain why C3 shrubs are increasing, and C3 and C4 grasses are decreasing in the southwestern U.S. We conducted seasonal, leaf-level gas exchange surveys, and measured temperature response curves and A-Ci response curves of common shrub, forb, and grass species in perennial grassland ecosystems over the year. We found that the functional trait of being evergreen is increasingly more successful in climate changing conditions with warmer winter months. Grass species in our study did not differentiate by photosynthetic pathway; they were physiologically the same in all of our measurements. Increasing shrub species, Ephedra viridis and Coleogyne ramosissima displayed functional similarities in response to increasing temperature and CO2.