Liikennepolttoaineeksi tarkoitettu ohraetanoli, Suomen ohramarkkinat ja ilmastonmuutos

The aim of the thesis was to analyze the use of barley as an input for bioethanol production and the impacts the use has on the Finnish barley markets. Two main research questions were formulated. First, privately and socially optimal bioethanol production levels were examined. In the social optimum, the climate benefits of bioethanol production were considered. It was calculated that the production and use of bioethanol created smaller CO2 -emissions when compared with the production and use of gasoline. Second, the impacts of bioethanol production on farmland allocation and agricultural production were analyzed. In more detail, the second aim was to analyze the farmland allocation between wheat and barley cultivation and green set aside in the private and social optimum. An analytical model was produced to analyze the barley markets in Finland. To provide an empirical counterpart to this model, existing research data on bioethanol production and barley cultivation was used. The aim of the model was to analyze the supply and the demand as well as market equilibrium of barley. Furthermore, the model provided a framework for analyzing the differences between the private optimum and social optimum of bioethanol production in Finland. The demand for barley consists of animal feed demand and bioethanol demand. On the supply side, a heterogeneous model of farmland quality was used. With this framework, it is possible to analyze farmland allocation between barley and wheat cultivation and green set aside and how the climate benefits of bioethanol production affects the allocation. Moreover, the relative changes in barley price between the private and social optimum were analyzed. Based on the empirical analysis, the private optimum for barley based bioethanol production is 58 691 metric tons. However, the social optimum for barley based bioethanol production is 72 736 metric tons. The portion of farmland that is allocated to barley cultivation is increased if the climate benefits of bioethanol production are considered. In the private optimum, 1/19 of the total farmland is allocated to barley cultivation whereas in social optimum the share increases to 7/19. Furthermore, the increase in barley price between private and social optimum is rather modest. Total increase in price is only about 1,8 percent.

Suomi ja Euroopan kirkollinen jälleenrakentaminen 1945-1948

The international aid that the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland received between 1945 and 1948 is the topic of this historical study, in which the process of reconstruction of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland is examined in a European context. The key questions are related not only to the achievements of the reconstruction programs but also to the purposes and objectives of the donating churches. The study pays particular attention to the changes in the ecclesiastical, political and economic fields after the Second World War and asks how the tense political atmosphere of a divided world affected the reconstruction programs of the churches. It is possible to distinguish three periods within the European church reconstruction process. To begin with, the year 1945 was, in general, the year of organization. Many churches had started planning reconstruction work already during the war, but only after the conflict in Europe had ceased did they have a chance to renew contacts, assess the damage and begin operations. The years 1946 and 1947 were the main years of the work. Large reconstruction organizations from American churches donated money, food, clothes and vitamins worth millions of dollars to the European churches. The work started to diminish as early as 1948, partly because Marshall Plan aid and the rising standard of living had reduced the need for material assistance in many countries and partly because other problems overshadowed the reconstruction work of the World Council of Churches: for example, most WCC resources at this time were directed to refugee programs and to Third World churhces. The most important donors from the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland's point of view were the American Section of the Lutheran World Federation, the World Council of Churches and the Churches of Denmark, Sweden and England. The amount of money and value of goods received by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland totaled approximately 2.5 million dollars, from which about 60 per cent came from the Lutheran churches of America. The importance of the Lutheran World Federation was even greater because of the productive financial arrangements that increased the American Lutheran funds. In addition the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland imported hundreds of tons of tax-free coffee and sold this to Finns. The money gained was used mostly to rebuild destroyed church buildings and to support the work of different ecclesiastical organizations. Smaller amounts were used for scholarship programs, youth work, and supporting sick and disabled church workers.

Microbial communities in Pb contaminated boreal forest soil

Lead contamination in the environment is of particular concern, as it is a known toxin. Until recently, however, much less attention has been given to the local contamination caused by activities at shooting ranges compared to large-scale industrial contamination. In Finland, more than 500 tons of Pb is produced each year for shotgun ammunition. The contaminant threatens various organisms, ground water and the health of human populations. However, the forest at shooting ranges usually shows no visible sign of stress compared to nearby clean environments. The aboveground biota normally reflects the belowground ecosystem. Thus, the soil microbial communities appear to bear strong resistance to contamination, despite the influence of lead. The studies forming this thesis investigated a shooting range site at Hälvälä in Southern Finland, which is heavily contaminated by lead pellets. Previously it was experimentally shown that the growth of grasses and degradation of litter are retarded. Measurements of acute toxicity of the contaminated soil or soil extracts gave conflicting results, as enchytraeid worms used as toxicity reporters were strongly affected, while reporter bacteria showed no or very minor decreases in viability. Measurements using sensitive inducible luminescent reporter bacteria suggested that the bioavailability of lead in the soil is indeed low, and this notion was supported by the very low water extractability of the lead. Nevertheless, the frequency of lead-resistant cultivable bacteria was elevated based on the isolation of cultivable strains. The bacterial and fungal diversity in heavily lead contaminated shooting sectors were compared with those of pristine sections of the shooting range area. The bacterial 16S rRNA gene and fungal ITS rRNA gene were amplified, cloned and sequenced using total DNA extracted from the soil humus layer as the template. Altogether, 917 sequenced bacterial clones and 649 sequenced fungal clones revealed a high soil microbial diversity. No effect of lead contamination was found on bacterial richness or diversity, while fungal richness and diversity significantly differed between lead contaminated and clean control areas. However, even in the case of fungi, genera that were deemed sensitive were not totally absent from the contaminated area: only their relative frequency was significantly reduced. Some operational taxonomic units (OTUs) assigned to Basidiomycota were clearly affected, and were much rarer in the lead contaminated areas. The studies of this thesis surveyed EcM sporocarps, analyzed morphotyped EcM root tips by direct sequencing, and 454-pyrosequenced fungal communities in in-growth bags. A total of 32 EcM fungi that formed conspicuous sporocarps, 27 EcM fungal OTUs from 294 root tips, and 116 EcM fungal OTUs from a total of 8 194 ITS2 454 sequences were recorded. The ordination analyses by non-parametric multidimensional scaling (NMS) indicated that Pb enrichment induced a shift in the EcM community composition. This was visible as indicative trends in the sporocarp and root tip datasets, but explicitly clear in the communities observed in the in-growth bags. The compositional shift in the EcM community was mainly attributable to an increase in the frequencies of OTUs assigned to the genus Thelephora, and to a decrease in the OTUs assigned to Pseudotomentella, Suillus and Tylospora in Pb-contaminated areas when compared to the control. The enrichment of Thelephora in contaminated areas was also observed when examining the total fungal communities in soil using DNA cloning and sequencing technology. While the compositional shifts are clear, their functional consequences for the dominant trees or soil ecosystem remain undetermined. The results indicate that at the Hälvälä shooting range, lead influences the fungal communities but not the bacterial communities. The forest ecosystem shows apparent functional redundancy, since no significant effects were seen on forest trees. Recently, by means of 454 pyrosequencing , the amount of sequences in a single analysis run can be up to one million. It has been applied in microbial ecology studies to characterize microbial communities. The handling of sequence data with traditional programs is becoming difficult and exceedingly time consuming, and novel tools are needed to handle the vast amounts of data being generated. The field of microbial ecology has recently benefited from the availability of a number of tools for describing and comparing microbial communities using robust statistical methods. However, although these programs provide methods for rapid calculation, it has become necessary to make them more amenable to larger datasets and numbers of samples from pyrosequencing. As part of this thesis, a new program was developed, MuSSA (Multi-Sample Sequence Analyser), to handle sequence data from novel high-throughput sequencing approaches in microbial community analyses. The greatest advantage of the program is that large volumes of sequence data can be manipulated, and general OTU series with a frequency value can be calculated among a large number of samples.

Integrated climatic impacts of forestry and fibre-based packaging

The purpose of this study was to examine the integrated climatic impacts of forestry and the use fibre-based packaging materials. The responsible use of forest resources plays an integral role in mitigating climate change. Forests offer three generic mitigation strategies; conservation, sequestration and substitution. By conserving carbon reservoirs, increasing the carbon sequestration in the forest or substituting fossil fuel intensive materials and energy, it is possible to lower the amount of carbon in the atmosphere through the use of forest resources. The Finnish forest industry consumed some 78 million m3 of wood in 2009, while total of 2.4 million tons of different packaging materials were consumed that same year in Finland. Nearly half of the domestically consumed packaging materials were wood-based. Globally the world packaging material market is valued worth annually some €400 billion, of which the fibre-based packaging materials account for 40 %. The methodology and the theoretical framework of this study are based on a stand-level, steady-state analysis of forestry and wood yields. The forest stand data used for this study were obtained from Metla, and consisted of 14 forest stands located in Southern and Central Finland. The forest growth and wood yields were first optimized with the help of Stand Management Assistant software, and then simulated in Motti for forest carbon pools. The basic idea was to examine the climatic impacts of fibre-based packaging material production and consumption through different forest management and end-use scenarios. Economically optimal forest management practices were chosen as the baseline (1) for the study. In the alternative scenarios, the amount of fibre-based packaging material on the market decreased from the baseline. The reduced pulpwood demand (RPD) scenario (2) follows economically optimal management practices under reduced pulpwood price conditions, while the sawlog scenario (3) also changed the product mix from packaging to sawnwood products. The energy scenario (4) examines the impacts of pulpwood demand shift from packaging to energy use. The final scenario follows the silvicultural guidelines developed by the Forestry Development Centre Tapio (5). The baseline forest and forest product carbon pools and the avoided emissions from wood use were compared to those under alternative forest management regimes and end-use scenarios. The comparison of the climatic impacts between scenarios gave an insight into the sustainability of fibre-based packaging materials, and the impacts of decreased material supply and substitution. The results show that the use of wood for fibre-based packaging purposes is favorable, when considering climate change mitigation aspects of forestry and wood use. Fibre-based packaging materials efficiently displace fossil carbon emissions by substituting more energy intensive materials, and they delay biogenic carbon re-emissions to the atmosphere for several months up to years. The RPD and the sawlog scenarios both fared well in the scenario comparison. These scenarios produced relatively more sawnwood, which can displace high amounts of emissions and has high carbon storing potential due to the long lifecycle. The results indicate the possibility that win-win scenarios exist by shifting production from pulpwood to sawlogs; on some of the stands in the RPD and sawlog scenarios, both carbon pools and avoided emissions increased from the baseline simultaneously. On the opposite, the shift from packaging material to energy use caused the carbon pools and the avoided emissions to diminish from the baseline. Hence the use of virgin fibres for energy purposes, rather than forest industry feedstock biomass, should be critically judged if optional to each other. Managing the stands according to the silvicultural guidelines developed by the Forestry Development Centre Tapio provided the least climatic benefits, showing considerably lower carbon pools and avoided emissions. This seems interesting and worth noting, as the guidelines are the current basis for the forest management practices in Finland.