• Energy Research
• DE close
• Sustainability close

Background: Temperate agroforestry is regarded as a sustainable alternative to monoculture agriculture due to enhanced provisioning of ecosystem services. Plant health and food safety are crucial requirements for sustainable agriculture; however, studies of fungal diseases and mycotoxin contamination of crops grown under temperate agroforestry are lacking. This study therefore aimed to compare fungal colonization and mycotoxin contamination of crops grown in temperate agroforestry against conventional monoculture. Methods: The biomass of plant pathogenic fungi in oilseed rape plants and barley and wheat grain harvested in 2016 to 2018 at four paired agroforestry and monoculture sites was quantified using species-specific real-time PCR. Mycotoxin content of barley and wheat grain was determined by HPLC-MS/MS. Results: The colonization of oilseed rape plants with the vascular pathogen Verticillium longisporum and wheat grain with the head blight pathogen Fusarium tricinctum was lower in agroforestry than in conventional monoculture. Mycotoxin content of barley and wheat grain did not differ between agroforestry and monoculture systems and did not exceed the legal limits of the EU. Remarkably, fumonisin B1 was detected in wheat grains at two sites in two years, yet the low levels found do not raise food safety concerns. No differences were found between the two production systems with regard to infection of wheat and barley grain with five Fusarium species (F. avenaceum, F. culmorum, F. graminearum, F. poae, and F. proliferatum) and oilseed rape with fungal pathogens Leptosphaeria biglobosa, Leptosphaeria maculans, and Sclerotinia sclerotiorum. Conclusions: Temperate agroforestry does not negatively affect the infection of wheat, barley and oilseed rape with major fungal pathogens though it may suppress the infection of oilseed rape with V. longisporum and wheat grain with F. tricinctum. Furthermore, temperate agroforestry does not increase mycotoxin contamination of barley and wheat. Therefore, temperate agroforestry does not negatively affect food safety.

Technological change has altered labor market demands within well-developed societies implying global competition for skilled labor and, as a consequence, new forms of labor migration. So far, patterns of this labor migration have been underexplored. Thus, the article analyzes characteristics, geographies and possible underlying drivers of workers migrating from Germany as an exemplary case for a well-developed country. Relying on probability-based and unique data, our findings reveal that, besides demand for people with higher levels of education, performing specific occupational tasks is also in demand in the global competition for talent. Hence, Germans in jobs with a high proportion of analytical non-routine tasks are more likely to emigrate than those with predominantly manual routine tasks. Moreover, the results show that global discrepancies concerning the technological development between the country of origin and the country to which they emigrate are a crucial contextual driver attracting this specifically demanded work force. Workers mainly performing analytical non-routine tasks within their job tend to move to countries which are technologically more developed than Germany while individuals performing jobs with a high share of non-routine manual or interactive tasks tend to emigrate to countries that are less technologically developed than Germany.

The construction industry is considered as one of the least productive, highest energy consuming, and least digitized industries. The Lean Management (LM) philosophy became a significant way for eliminating non-value-added activities and wastes during a building’s lifecycle. However, studies have shown that philosophies are not efficient by themselves to solve the issues of the construction industry. They need to be supported with the appropriate technologies and tools. Therefore, the integrated use of Building Information Modelling (BIM) with LM or Value Engineering (VE) were proposed in the literature. Nonetheless, it was also seen that BIM can provide more insights and improvements when BIM is integrated with data analysis tools to analyze BIM data. In the literature, the synergies between these concepts are generally addressed pairwise, and there is no comprehensive framework which identifies their relationships. Therefore, this study aims to develop a maturity framework that facilitates the adoption of LM, VE, BIM, and Big Data Analytic (BDA) concepts to address long-standing productivity and digitalization issues in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry. Design Science Research (DSR) methodology and its three-cycle view (relevance, rigor, and design cycle) were applied to build the proposed maturity framework. Two interviews were performed to identify and observe research problem in relevance cycle. In the rigor cycle, a comprehensive literature review was performed to create a base for the development of the maturity framework. In addition to the developed base of the framework, lean processes were added to this cycle. In the design cycle, the developed framework was evaluated and validated by five experts through face-to-face interviews. The importance of employer’s requirements to adopt the proposed methodologies, the negative impact of change orders, the importance of pre-construction phases to facilitate value creation and waste elimination, and the usage of common data environment with BIM were identified as the prominent application and adaptation issues.

Regional flood frequency analysis (RFFA) is a powerful method for interrogating hydrological series since it combines observational time series from several sites within a region to estimate risk-relevant statistical parameters with higher accuracy than from single-site series. Since RFFA extreme value estimates depend on the shape of the selected distribution of the data-generating stochastic process, there is need for a suitable goodness-of-distributional-fit measure in order to optimally utilize given data. Here we present a novel, least-squares-based measure to select the optimal fit from a set of five distributions, namely Generalized Extreme Value (GEV), Generalized Logistic, Gumbel, Log-Normal Type III and Log-Pearson Type III. The fit metric is applied to annual maximum discharge series from six hydrological stations along the Sava River in South-eastern Europe, spanning the years 1961 to 2020. Results reveal that (1) the Sava River basin can be assessed as hydrologically homogeneous and (2) the GEV distribution provides typically the best fit. We offer hydrological-meteorological insights into the differences among the six stations. For the period studied, almost all stations exhibit statistically insignificant trends, which renders the conclusions about flood risk as relevant for hydrological sciences and the design of regional flood protection infrastructure.

The comprehensive approach for a building envelope design involves building performance simulations, which are time-consuming and require knowledge of complicated processes. In addition, climate variation makes the selection of these parameters more complex. The paper aims to establish guidelines for determining a single-family household’s unique optimal passive design in various climate zones worldwide. For this purpose, a bi-objective optimization is performed for twenty-four locations in twenty climates by coupling TRNSYS and a non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-III) using the Python program. The optimization process generates Pareto fronts of thermal load and investment cost to identify the optimum design options for the insulation level of the envelope, window aperture for passive cooling, window-to-wall ratio (WWR), shading fraction, radiation-based shading control, and building orientation. The goal is to find a feasible trade-off between thermal energy demand and the cost of thermal insulation. This is achieved using multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) through criteria importance using intercriteria correlation (CRITIC) and the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS). The results demonstrate that an optimal envelope design remarkably improves the thermal load compared to the base case of previous envelope design practices. However, the weather conditions strongly influence the design parameters. The research findings set a benchmark for energy-efficient household envelopes in the investigated climates. The optimal solution sets also provide a criterion for selecting the ranges of envelope design parameters according to the space heating and cooling demands of the climate zone.

The zinc acetato and triflato complexes of 2,2’-bipyridine and 1,10-phenanthroline were prepared and completely characterised. The whole series (including the already described dichlorido complexes and the ligands themselves) were screened for their catalytic activity in the solvent free ring-opening polymerisation of D,L-lactide. The acetato and triflato complexes were found to be active initiators and polylactides could be obtained in almost quantitative yields or with high molecular weights, up to 145,000 g/mol.

Sustainability usually refers to the ability to maintain a certain standard of human lifestyle without causing environmental damage or any other destruction to nature and biodiversity. It is beneficial for human health and well-being in addition to socio-economic benefits and contributes to environmental integrity. However, as Robert Swan (1956) once stated: “the greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it”—this is true even today; namely, there are still serious threats to the planet and there is “a short time period” for action. We all have to be obliged to save the planet in which we live throughout our daily and local activities. In this study, the authors provide an overview of the meaning of sustainable tourism and its relationship to all global Sustainable Development Goals established by UN (2015) as one way to achieve a brighter sustainable future and society for everyone, leaving no one behind. More specifically, the case of Kosovo and its potential for the development of sustainable tourism is analyzed. In this case, the authors aim to present the potential to serve the local tradition, culture, diversity, and inclusiveness through sustainable actions in the tourism and hospitality sector.