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AbstractThe presented synthesis of the title compounds (II), (IV), (VI) and (VIII) is extremely simple and highly efficient without the use of any chromatographic purification.

Background On-going global climate change poses a serious threat for natural populations unless they are able to evolutionarily adapt to changing environmental conditions (e.g. increasing average temperatures, occurrence of extreme weather events). A prerequisite for evolutionary change is within-population heritable genetic variation in traits subject to selection. In relation to climate change, mainly phenological traits as well as heat and desiccation resistance have been examined for such variation. Therefore, it is important to investigate adaptive potential under climate change conditions across a broader range of traits. This is especially true for life-history traits and defences against natural enemies (e.g. parasites) since they influence organisms’ fitness both directly and through species interactions. We examined the adaptive potential of fitness-related traits and their responses to heat waves in a population of a freshwater snail, Lymnaea stagnalis. We estimated family-level variation and covariation in life history (size, reproduction) and constitutive immune defence traits [haemocyte concentration, phenoloxidase (PO)-like activity, antibacterial activity of haemolymph] in snails experimentally exposed to typical (15 °C) and heat wave (25 °C) temperatures. We also assessed variation in the reaction norms of these traits between the treatments. Results We found that at the heat wave temperature, snails were larger and reproduced more, while their immune defence was reduced. Snails showed high family-level variation in all examined traits within both temperature treatments. The only negative genetic correlation (between reproduction and antibacterial activity) appeared at the high temperature. However, we found no family-level variation in the responses of most examined traits to the experimental heat wave (i.e. largely parallel reaction norms between the treatments). Only the reduction of PO-like activity when exposed to the high temperature showed family-level variation, suggesting that the cost of heat waves may be lower for some families and could evolve under selection. Conclusion Our results suggest that there is genetic potential for adaptation within both thermal environments and that trait evolution may not be strongly affected by trade-offs between them. However, rare differences in thermal reaction norms across families indicate limited evolutionary potential in the responses of snails to changing temperatures during extreme weather events. BMC Evolutionary Biology, 17 ISSN:1471-2148

This upload includes the data presented and analyzed in the article "Hot-Carrier Generation in Plasmonic Nanoparticles: The Importance of Atomic Structure" by Tuomas P. Rossi, Paul Erhart, and Mikael Kuisma. The codes for reproducing the data are provided at doi:10.5281/zenodo.3964229. See README.md in data.zip for a detailed description.

Tämän Pro Gradu tutkimuksen tavoite on selvittää, miten sidosryhmäyhteistyö voi auttaa kestävyyden johtamista kompleksisessa kaupunkikehityshankkeessa, sekä edistää sidosryhmäyhteistyöhön liittyvää tutkimusta, joka on saanut rakennusalalla toistaiseksi liian vähän huomiota. Akuutti tarve entistä kestävämmälle kehitykselle yhdistettynä yhä jatkuvaan kaupungistumiseen osoittaa, että alalla tarvitaan lisää sekä teoreettista ymmärrystä että tehokkaita käytännön toimia, jotta urbaani kasvu voi jatkua ilman lisääntyviä ympäristöön ja yhteiskuntaan kohdistuvia haittavaikutuksia. Kaupunkikehitys tuo yhteen laajan kirjon toimijoita ja yksittäisen kaupunkikehityshankkeen sidosryhmäkenttä näyttäytyy entistä laajempana ja kompleksisempana. Näin ollen tarvitaan yhä enemmän yhteistyötä moninaisten toimijoiden kesken. Vastausta siihen, miten sidosryhmäyhteistyö voi auttaa kehittämään kestävyyden johtamista kompleksisessa kaupunkikehityshankkeessa on etsitty tässä tutkimuksessa kirjallisuuskatsauksen ja kaksivaiheisen empiirisen tiedonkeräysvaiheen avulla, jossa mukana oli niin sisäisiä sidosryhmiä case-projekti Trigonista kuin myös asiantuntijoita kestävän kaupunkikehityksen kentältä. Kestävyyteen liittyvää kompleksisuutta on tarkasteltu tässä tutkimuksessa pirullisten ongelmien diskurssin avulla. Tämä lähestymistapa osoittautui soveltuvaksi risteykseen, jossa kohtaavat rakennushankkeiden perinteiset ja tehokkaat lineaariset ongelmanratkaisumallit, sekä se kompleksisuus ja ne epävarmuudet, jotka kestävän kehityksen integroiminen tuo mukanaan. Tässä tutkimuksessa hyödynnettiin konseptuaalista viitekehystä, joka rakentui kuuden tunnistetun epävarmuuskategorian ympärille. Sen avulla tarkasteltiin pirullisille ongelmille ominaista dikotomiaa pirstaleisuuden ja koherenssin välillä. Näin pyrittiin selvittämään, miten kestävyyden integroimisen pirullista ongelmaa tulisi käsitellä kompleksisten kaupunkikehityshankkeiden kontekstissa. Tutkimuksen perusteella tehokas ja tavoitteellinen sidosryhmäyhteistyö on olennaista kollektiivisen älykkyyden valjastamisessa ja koherenssin rakentamisessa. Se ei kuitenkaan yksin riitä torjumaan pirstaloitumista, vaan tarvitsee tuekseen soveltuvan kestävyyden johtamisen viitekehyksen, joka huomioi projektien elinkaaren. The aim of this Master’s Thesis study is to uncover how a stakeholder engagement approach might improve the overall sustainability management of complex urban development projects, and contribute to sustainability management research in the area of stakeholder engagement that calls for additional attention, particularly in the construction field. The urgent need for sustainability transition coupled with the on-going process of urbanization, suggests that both theoretical insight and effective practical action is needed to ensure that urban growth can be decoupled from detrimental environmental and societal effects. Urban development brings together a host of actors, and the stakeholder field of any given urban development project is wide and increasingly complex, leading to a need for collaboration among a host of heterogeneous actors. An answer to how stakeholder engagement can help with sustainability management in complex construction projects is sought in this study through a review of relevant literature and a two-part empirical data collection involving the internal stakeholders of the case project, Trigoni, and expert stakeholders in the field of sustainable urban development. The complexity inherent to sustainability is examined here through the wicked problems discourse. This approach is determined particularly suitable for the intersection between the linear problem-solving models traditionally – and successfully – applied in construction projects for general management purposes and the complexity and uncertainties that come with sustainability-incorporation. A conceptual framework structured around six identified categories of uncertainty is utilized in this study to explore the dichotomy between fragmentation and coherence and to discover how the wicked problem of sustainability-incorporation should be dealt with in the context of complex urban development projects. Based on this study it seems that stakeholder engagement, when carried out in an effective and goal-directed manner, is essential to harnessing collective intelligence and boosting coherence. Yet, it is not enough in itself to prevent fragmentation and should therefore be accompanied by an appropriate sustainability management frame- work that takes project life-cycle into account.

The engagement of civil society actors in energy generation can be defined by the term community energy. Community energy initiatives have increased in several countries. This thesis aims at better understanding how this phenomenon emerges and how it can contribute to the decarbonization of our economy. For this purpose, a multi-level perspective on socio-technical transitions and strategic niche management theory were employed as theoretical lenses. The research material consisted of 75 qualitative interviews, a survey of 26 distributed energy experts, and a panel data study of 66 large electric utilities from various countries. Thematic, narrative, regression and descriptive statistical analysis were utilized to analyse the data collected. The main findings showed that four main development patterns are triggering the rise of community energy projects. They are: (a) the characteristics of individuals, (b) social needs, (c) economic factors and (d) policy factors. The type of drivers behind community energy development is linked to the possibilities for scaling up the sector. Along with the drivers, some barriers were also identified. These included the resistance of incumbent regime actors to renewable energy diffusion, regulation and, in a few cases, technology performance. Regression analysis and the Granger test for causality showed that this resistance of incumbent energy firms was due to the negative correlation between an increase in renewable energy production and firms’ long-term financial performance. The thesis concluded that community energy could have an important role to play in the ongoing energy transition. Its impact, however, is contingent on the degree of internal niche development and on the ways the community energy niche will engage with important regime actors such as energy companies, governments, and network operators. This work contributed to better understanding the factors influencing the development of socio-technical niches in the case of non-market driven innovation and the reasons that lead to the locking-up of energy regimes. In the future, researchers should make further attempts to uncover the ways in which regimes can be unlocked and social innovation for sustainability diffused.

In this work, we consider the practical issues of resource allocation problem in OFDMA two-way relay networks: the inaccuracy of channel-state information (CSI) available to the transmitters. Instead, only the estimated channel status is known by the transmitters. In this context, a joint optimization of subcarrier pairing and allocation, relay selection and transmit power allocation is formulated in the OFDMA two-way amplify-and-forward relay networks. Moreover, to ensure the Quality of Service (QoS) requirement, the energy consumption must be minimized without compromising the QoS. Therefore, by applying convex optimization techniques, energy efficient algorithms are developed with the objective to minimize the total transmit power while guaranteeing the required data rates. Through simulation studies, energy consumption performance of the systems under the proposed schemes are investigated. It is shown that the proposed scheme can improve the energy consumption performance without scarifying the QoS.

AbstractForests provide a wide variety of ecosystem services (ES) to society. The boreal biome is experiencing the highest rates of warming on the planet and increasing demand for forest products. To foresee how to maximize the adaptation of boreal forests to future warmer conditions and growing demands of forest products, we need a better understanding of the relative importance of forest management and climate change on the supply of ecosystem services. Here, using Finland as a boreal forest case study, we assessed the potential supply of a wide range of ES (timber, bilberry, cowberry, mushrooms, carbon storage, scenic beauty, species habitat availability and deadwood) given seven management regimes and four climate change scenarios. We used the forest simulator SIMO to project forest dynamics for 100 years into the future (2016–2116) and estimate the potential supply of each service using published models. Then, we tested the relative importance of management and climate change as drivers of the future supply of these services using generalized linear mixed models. Our results show that the effects of management on the future supply of these ES were, on average, 11 times higher than the effects of climate change across all services, but greatly differed among them (from 0.53 to 24 times higher for timber and cowberry, respectively). Notably, the importance of these drivers substantially differed among biogeographical zones within the boreal biome. The effects of climate change were 1.6 times higher in northern Finland than in southern Finland, whereas the effects of management were the opposite—they were three times higher in the south compared to the north. We conclude that new guidelines for adapting forests to global change should account for regional differences and the variation in the effects of climate change and management on different forest ES.

In this paper, we investigate how to apply industrial unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for autonomous power line inspection in smart grid from an energy efficiency perspective. Firstly, the energy consumption minimization problem is formulated as a joint optimization problem, which involves both the large-timescale optimization and the small-timescale optimization. Then, the NP-hard joint optimization problem is transformed to a two- stage optimization problem based on energy consumption magnitude and optimization timescale differences. Next, the first-stage and second-stage problems are solved by exploring dynamic programming (DP) and auction matching, respectively. Finally, the proposed algorithm is verified based on realistic power grid topology. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves significant energy consumption reduction.