Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
Way of publication
- Open Access (2)
Keywords
Institute
- FG Geopedologie und Landschaftsentwicklung (85)
- Forschungszentrum Landschaftsentwicklung und Bergbaulandschaften (FZLB) (10)
- FG Bodenschutz und Rekultivierung (2)
- FG Ökologie (2)
- Institut für Medizintechnologie (2)
- FG ABWL, insbesondere empirische Unternehmensforschung und Transformation (1)
- FG Medizinische Informationssysteme (1)
- FG Volkswirtschaftslehre, insbesondere Umweltökonomie (1)
- Zentrale Analytik der BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg (ZA-BTU) / Zentrales Analytisches Labor (1)
BTU
Relict charcoal hearths (RCH) are a widespread feature in forested areas in Europe and the USA.
Before the usage of hard coal, charcoal from RCHs was the main energy source and chemical reagent for the production of iron from ore. Depending on region and age, RCHs have diameters CAA 2019 305
Poster session up to 30 m, and due to their size and shape they are nowadays often identified by GIS-analysis of widely available LiDAR data. We study the architecture and soil stratigraphy of RCHs in several type regions in the USA and Germany where high densities of RCHs are known (Connecticut, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Brandenburg, Bavaria) and propose a morphological classification scheme. Whereas RCHs on flatland mostly have a circular shape which is often surrounded by an about half a meter-wide ditch, RCHs on slopes are mostly elliptical and often have a different architecture than on flatland sites. While the RCH platforms in flatland are only about 30 cm higher than the surrounding area, the platform of RCHs on slopes has often a height of up to one meter in downslope direction. Therefore, RCHs on slopes are much easier to identify during GIS mapping than RCHs on flatland. Remarkably the size, shape and architecture between our studied RCHs in the USA and Germany are often very similar which could indicate common roots of collier’s knowledge and technology that can be explained by immigration of European craftsmen to New England in the 18th and 19th century.
Objective To investigate long-term recovery of allocentric and egocentric spatial orientation as a sensitive marker for hippocampal and extrahippocampal network function in transient global amnesia (TGA).
Methods A group of 18 patients with TGA performed an established real-space navigation paradigm, requiring allo- and egocentric spatial orientation abilities, 3 days (postacute stage) and 3 months (follow-up) after symptom onset. Visual exploration behavior and navigation strategy were documented by a gaze-controlled, head-fixed camera. Allo- and egocentric spatial orientation performance was compared to that of 12 age-matched healthy controls. Navigation-induced brain activations were measured using [18F]-fluorodeoxyglucose-PET in a subgroup of 8 patients in the postacute stage and compared to those of the controls.
Results In the postacute stage, the patients navigated worse and had higher error rates than controls in allocentric (p = 0.002), but not in egocentric, route planning (p = 0.30), despite complete recovery of verbal (p = 0.58) and figural memory (p = 0.11). Until follow-up, allocentric navigation deficits improved, but higher error rates and reduced use of shortcuts persisted (p < 0.0001). Patients still exhibited relatively more fixations of unique landmarks during follow-up (p = 0.05). PET measurements during the postacute stage showed increased navigation-induced brain activations in the right hippocampus, bilateral retrosplenial, parietal, and mesiofrontal cortices, and cerebellar dentate nucleus in patients compared to controls (p < 0.005).
Conclusions Patients with TGA show selective and prolonged deficits of allocentric spatial orientation. Activations in right hippocampal and extrahippocampal hubs of the cerebral navigation network functionally substitute for the deficit in creating and updating the internal cognitive map in TGA.
Deciphering the drivers of tree growth is a central aim of dendroecology. In this context, soil conditions may play a crucial role, since they determine the availability of water and nutrients for trees. Yet, effects of systematically differing soil conditions on tree growth render a marginally studied topic. In this context, relict charcoal hearths (RCH) – a widespread legacy of anthropogenic charcoal production – render a valuable ‘natural’ experiment to study possible effects of artificially altered soil conditions on tree growth. We hypothesize, that the differing physico-chemical properties of RCH result in differing wood properties if compared to trees growing on unmodified soils. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed tree-growth, wood density, and wood elemental concentrations of Scots pine as well as physico-chemical soil properties. We applied a classic control-treatment design to compare RCH with unmodified soils. Our analyses identified significantly lower above-ground wood production but systematically higher wood elemental concentrations in RCH-trees compared to control trees. Since we could not identify treatment-specific growth patterns, we hypothesize the observed lower above-ground productivity of Scots pine to indicate an increased root-shoot ratio to compensate for a potentially lower plant water availability on RCH-sites. The observed higher wood elemental concentrations likely reflect higher soil elemental concentrations of Fe, Ca, K, and Mn in RCH soils. In conclusion, our study highlights diverse effects of RCH on tree growth and wood properties and strengthens the value of dendro-chemistry to use the tree-ring archive as proxy for soil conditions within a dendro-ecological context.
Competition and moral behavior: A meta-analysis of forty-five crowd-sourced experimental designs
(2023)
Does competition affect moral behavior? This fundamental question has been debated among leading scholars for centuries, and more recently, it has been tested in experimental studies yielding a body of rather inconclusive empirical evidence. A potential source of ambivalent empirical results on the same hypothesis is design heterogeneity—variation in true effect sizes across various reasonable experimental research protocols. To provide further evidence on whether competition affects moral behavior and to examine whether the generalizability of a single experimental study is jeopardized by design heterogeneity, we invited independent research teams to contribute experimental designs to a crowd-sourced project. In a large-scale online data collection, 18,123 experimental participants were randomly allocated to 45 randomly selected experimental designs out of 95 submitted designs. We find a small adverse effect of competition on moral behavior in a meta-analysis of the pooled data. The crowd-sourced design of our study allows for a clean identification and estimation of the variation in effect sizes above and beyond what could be expected due to sampling variance. We find substantial design heterogeneity—estimated to be about 1.6 times as large as the average standard error of effect size estimates of the 45 research designs—indicating that the informativeness and generalizability of results based on a single experimental design are limited. Drawing strong conclusions about the underlying hypotheses in the presence of substantive design heterogeneity requires moving toward much larger data collections on various experimental designs testing the same hypothesis.