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To satisfy national sustainability targets in Germany, both bioenergy and organic farming claim a growing area of farmland. Analyses with a land use model and ac-companying expert interviews show, how the competition for land is growing in certain regions. A restricted area potential for energy crops – even with an ever intensifying farming opposes targets for an increasing share of land for organic agriculture and nature conservation. Thus there is a need for policy action, to discuss and solve this goal conflict. An ongoing study currently develops strategies for two selected German regions for a more ecologically compatible bioenergy production.

Forest biomass plays a crucial role in the quantification of the terrestrial carbon budget. Today, forest biomass is poorly quantified across most parts of the Earth surface due to the great difficulties in measuring biomass on the ground and consistently aggregating measurements across scales. SAR satellites can provide the required information globally and frequent in order to quantify current biomass state and the changes. Tandem-L is a German mission proposal for an innovative interferometric L-band radar mission that enables the systematic monitoring of dynamic Earth processes using advanced techniques and technologies. The mission is science driven aiming to provide a unique data set for climate and environmental research, geodynamics, hydrology and oceanography. Important application examples are global forest height and structure and the derivation of forest biomass. The Tandem-L mission concept consists of two cooperating satellites flying in close formation. The 3 D structure mode provides a unique data source to observe and quantify changes in forest biomass. This paper provides an overview of the potential of using multi-parametric SAR for forest structure estimation with the derivation of forest biomass and suggests a mission for a global acquisition.

In 2011 the German Advisory Council for Global Change (WBGU) published a remarkable policy document entitled ‘World in Transition: A Social Contract for Sustainability’ in which the authors proclaim the need for a great social transformation at the global scale in order to address climate change. This article builds on and critically discusses the central messages of the report that emphasizes the necessity to pro-actively shape the change of our values and worldviews that underpin our lifestyles and consumption patterns. By arguing for a transdisciplinary approach to implement this challenging vision the report identifies urbanization as a significant dimension in these processes thus shifting away from the dominant focus on socio-technical solutions. This puts the field of urban planning and development and related disciplines at the centre of the climate change adaptation and mitigation debate raising profound questions as to how these professionals, academics and practitioners could respond to the ideas brought forward in the report. The author considers this an opportunity for hitherto largely neglected integral approaches to gain more importance in mainstream urban planning practice and theory. The concluding part sketches out an initial research programme based on the previous discussion in order to illustrate at a more concrete level the implications of an integrative, transdisciplinary framework for planning.

«Guided Biofilm Therapy» (GBT) represents a systematic, risk and demand-oriented prophylaxis and treatment concept. A significant difference to conventional methods is - above all - the reduced, tissue-friendly and targeted use of ultrasound and hand instruments. The biofilm is consistently shown with suitable color solutions, the oral hygiene instruction and professional tooth cleaning is optimized. The use of suitable powders guarantees a tissue-conserving and targeted removal of biofilm. While individual treatments, techniques and materials have already been well investigated and described, little data is available on patient acceptance. The aim of the present study was to gain an impression of the acceptance of this method in comparison to the conservative-classical recall care mainly based on hand and ultrasound devices in a survey of 100 consecutive patients from the clinic's internal recall system. The overall results were very positive. The powder jet device showed the best acceptance. The aspect fear before/during the recall session was also interesting: At a low level (10%), an additional reduction to 4% occurred, since hand instruments were probably used much less and only very specifically. mConclusion: The use of plaque elevators makes the work in the recall session more efficient, more effective and guarantees ma higher quality control, which is also highly appreciated by patients.

Due to the increasing number of people living and/or working in dense urban environments, the importance of city planning in consideration of human health and comfort has been continuously growing. Health and comfort factors such as thermal comfort, air quality, ventilation and UV exposure, must be considered in a future-oriented development of urban regions. For decision support, urban climate models (UCM) are applied to model the effects of existing and planned building distributions, facade and city greening, etc., based on the above mentioned factors. A highly-efficient microscale UCM, PALM-4U, has been developed allowing simulations of large cities with grid-resolved buildings and vegetation canopy, which consider a large variety of processes important for urban environments. PALM-4U is part of the PALM model system (http://palm-model.org), which is based on the large-eddy simulation code PALM. While there exist numerous UCMs that have been used for over two decades and which are well established in the scientific community, they are difficult to adapt to state-of-the-art parallel computer systems and thus often have limitations in either performance and/or possible number of grid points. PALM-4U is able to compute entire city environments like Berlin (about 1 700 km²) at building-resolving grid spacing (here 10 m) on massively parallel computers, where limitations are mainly imposed by the available computational resources. It offers several features required in urban environments, such as an energy balance solver for urban and natural surfaces, radiative transfer in the urban canopy layer, chemical reactions, biometeorological analysis products, and self-nesting to allow high resolution (e.g. 1 m) in regions of special interest. In this presentation we will focus on an overview of PALM-4U's current and planned capabilities for application in urban environments. Besides, we will demonstrate PALM-4U's performance and features based on microscale building-resolving large-eddy simulation of entire Berlin (Germany, 1700 km²) at a grid spacing of 10 m, with a nested domain of size of 1 km² at a grid spacing of 1 m. The simulation spans a simulated period of a full diurnal cycle during a selected heat wave period and is characterized by low geostrophic winds and a strong solar forcing during daytime. General features of the simulation will be visualized. This presentation is intended to be the first in a series of presentations that all have a more specific focus on single features of PALM-4U and for which abstracts are submitted separately. In this overview talk we will thus focus on the more general features of the simulation.

With the co-operation of a further 13 institutes and as a continuation of our own epidemiological-statistical survey, we recorded the total and relative distribution (frequency profile) of the blood alcohol concentration of car drivers for the 3rd quarter 1990 and the 1st quarter 1991. The participating institutes recorded almost 27,000 blood samples and compared them with results of the first part of the study (1989). The survey dealt separately with sex-, age- and time of day-distribution of drivers involved and not involved in road accidents. One of our repeatedly presented field research into the problem of "alcohol and road safety", once again, provided to be a useful method in the run-up to the unprejudiced alcohol test which we are striving for. We noticed characteristic changes in the frequency profiles of the old and the new counties (Bundesländer) in Germany in the 1st (1989) and the 2nd (1990/91) report of the study. The results of Police supervisory operations in the administrative district of Cologne have basically given useful indications as to their epidemiological-statistical value as evidence.

The design of support structures of offshore wind turbines contains high number of design variables that influence load characteristics and structural responses. These variables are stochastic and cause many uncertainties. Some of them are examined in this study. It is investigated how scattering of site conditions and load parameters affect the structural response. It is exemplified in terms of stresses that contribute to the accumulated fatigue damage within a monopile substructure. Random sampling of combinations of site conditions and load parameters is performed in order to classify the effects of parameter scattering on the stress variability by means of Sobol’ indices. Analysis shows that the highest influence on stress outputs have the variations in the load parameters. The reason is the sensitivity of the structural dynamical response to the wave height increase and decrease of distance between the wave peak frequency and the structural eigenfrequencies. © 2017 ISOPE

Mortality from ischemic heart disease (ICD 410-414) is changing. Remarkable decreases have been observed in the age groups from 35-64 years, while overall mortality (all age groups) has remained approximately stable. In Switzerland this has meant a gain of some 4700 life years in the period 1988 to 1993 in the working population (35-64 years). The object of this study was to assess the associated change in indirect costs (productivity losses) due to premature death, using the human capital approach. The indirect costs were CHF 519 million (CHF 7.5 million per 100,000 population) in 1993. This represents approximately half of all indirect costs (and 25% of the total costs generated by the disease). Compared with the year 1988, a decrease in productivity losses due to premature death was observed amounting to CHF 46 million (-11%) in constant Swiss francs. Society benefits from this decrease in indirect costs, a desirable development hardly ever mentioned.

The first to create a "needle-free injector" was the American anesthetist Robert A. Hingson, 65 year ago. Since that time those devices underwent a changeful history. In 1986 an outbreak of hepatitis B among patients receiving injections from a needle-free multiple-use-nozzle injector was documented and related to the use of the injector device. Due to such risk of transmission of infection with these reusable devices, their application has been restricted. In 1998 the WHO recommended that only conventional needles and syringes should be used for immunization until safe needle-free injectors are identified through independent safety testing. Since needle-free injection has shown numerous advantages in comparison to conventional injection, new systems were developed that combine the advantages of needle-free injection with sufficient safety in mass vaccination programs. As an alternative to this early injector type, the disposable-cartridge injectors were developed. The newest research field in the area of the needle-free injection systems opened with the development of powder injectors, in which the drug preparation is no longer a suspension or solution, but a powdered solid. This injector type using powder formulations shows a number of advantages in comparison with the conventional needle/syringe injection technique as well as towards the liquid jet injectors. Due to this new kind of injectors the comeback of the needle-free injection technique in large-scale vaccination programs of the WHO seems reasonable and within reach.

With its warm climate and large amounts of fertile lands South Africa has the potential to become a relevant player in the production of bioenergy. The increasing demand of the African continent for energy shows the need in renewable energy sources. On the other hand, large-scale land use for energy crops may induce food security risks keeping in mind the also growing population attending the increasing demand on edibles. With the vegetation model BETHY/DLR we estimated the potential for bioenergy production, considering food security and sustainability. For the year 2003 we estimate a biomass energy potential of 461 PJ which is about 9% of the energy supply of this year according to IEA.