Vienna Institute for Nature Conservation & Analyses

The dual crises of climate change and biodiversity loss demand integrated approaches to align renewable energy expansion with ecological conservation. Ground-mounted photovoltaic (PV) systems, a key component of renewable energy strategies, require significant land use, potentially impacting already vulnerable ecosystems. This study reviews the scientific literature on the ecological effects of ground-mounted PV systems under Central European conditions, with Austria as a case study. Findings reveal scattered evidence of altered environmental conditions, such as changes in microclimate and soil properties, and direct impacts on biodiversity, including habitat loss, fragmentation, and species behaviour. Current planning guidelines in Austria inconsistently address biodiversity concerns, often neglecting habitats outside protected areas. Mitigation measures, such as grazing, hedgerows, and structural elements, are widely recommended but lack robust scientific validation. The study highlights the urgent need for standardized Before-After-Control-Impact (BACI) studies and adaptive monitoring to better understand biodiversity impacts and improve mitigation. Strategic conservation planning at the landscape level is essential to balance energy and ecological goals, ensuring sustainable development. This research underscores the importance of harmonizing renewable energy policies with biodiversity conservation to address the intertwined climate and biodiversity crises effectively.

Polymer pollution transcends national boundaries and threatens both human health and the environment. Despite efforts for efficient reuse of polymer waste, the majority of it accumulates in landfills and dumps or is mismanaged and is being dispersed in the environment. The application of ionizing radiation techniques could serve to reprocess and recycle polymer waste. Using a radiation source (gamma, electron beam or X-ray) to irradiate post-consumer plastics enhances their recyclability and facilitates their transformation into new products. Application of radiation technology is promising because it is not a novel one. Irradiated polymers could be found all around, from vehicle tires to hot water pipes and food packaging. Idea is to use irradiation applying different dose rates to gain reform and restructure polymer structure, with the aim to improve its recyclability and reduce the amount of polymer waste. The use of electron beam irradiation to form bridges between polymer strands refers to the process of cross-linking. Polymers degradation occurs after radiation is applied in the opposite way through chain scission, in that process polymers are cut up or ‘degraded’. Radiation can also induce an electric charge on the surface of plastics, making it easier to sort plastic waste more accurately. This improves both the volume and the number of times the waste can be recycled, such as with thermoplastics, which can be melted and reshaped repeatedly. Radiation technology can drive the economic potential of plastic upcycling by enabling the production of upscaled secondary products, like wood-plastic composites (WPC), from plastic waste, rather than downscaled alternatives.

In this study, waste hemp fibers were transformed into cationically modified materials through a two-step process. The process began with the collection of agricultural waste fibers after hemp harvesting, followed by a delignification pretreatment, and subsequently, quaternization using the synthesized Deep Eutectic Solvent of chlorocholine chloride and urea. To form the material into membranes, modified fibers were cross-linked under pressure using citric acid as a natural cross-linker. The structural and chemical characteristics of the non-treated fibers (NtHF) and formed membranes were analyzed using SEM and FTIR techniques. The mechanical properties of the membranes were determined by measuring the breaking force and calculating the tensile strength via the Brazilian test method. Biodegradability was assessed by examining the mass loss of membranes composed of unmodified and cationized hemp fibers over 90 days, using a Soil Burial Test (AATCC Test Method 30-1993) in controlled laboratory conditions (24 °C). The results demonstrated a significant improvement in the tensile strength of the synthesized material (2.41 MPa), attributed to the synergistic effect of physical intermolecular interactions within the cationically modified hemp membranes (WCHM) and enhanced cross-linking using citric acid. The newly synthesized membrane showed great potential as a biodegradable material, with the first signs of degradation, reflected by a 25% mass loss, observed after 14 days. A slightly faster degradation rate was noted for non-treated fibers, highlighting the effectiveness of citric acid as a cross-linker.

International audience

Astrophysical observations provide compelling evidence for gravitationally interacting dark matter in the universe that cannot be explained by the standard model of particle physics. The extraordinary amount of data from the CERN LHC presents a unique opportunity to shed light on the nature of dark matter at unprecedented collision energies. This Report comprehensively reviews the most recent searches with the CMS experiment for particles and interactions belonging to a dark sector and for dark-sector mediators. Models with invisible massive particles are probed by searches for signatures of missing transverse momentum recoiling against visible standard model particles. Searches for mediators are also conducted via fully visible final states. The results of these searches are compared with those obtained from direct-detection experiments. Searches for alternative scenarios predicting more complex dark sectors with multiple new particles and new forces are also presented. Many of these models include long-lived particles, which could manifest themselves with striking unconventional signatures with relatively small amounts of background. Searches for such particles are discussed and their impact on dark-sector scenarios is evaluated. Many results and interpretations have been newly obtained for this Report.

This editorial opens the sixth volume of Vegetation Classification and Survey (VCS), a gold open access journal of the International Association for Vegetation Science (IAVS). On occasion of the fifth anniversary of the start of the journal, we provide an analysis of the 119 articles published from 2020 to 2024, focusing on their content, geographic scope, article category and the collection they belong to, if any. For articles that performed a plot-based classification, we provide information on classification approach, plot size, importance value, taxonomic coverage, number of plots, and classification algorithm. We also analyze the bibliometric performance of VCS across the five years and predict a CiteScore of 3.6 and a Journal Impact Factor of 2.7 for 2024 (to be published in 2025). Using the Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) from the Scopus database, we identified the nine VCS articles published in the first five years that received at least twice as many citations as expected for their age and field. Next we present the four Editors’ Choice papers of 2024, among which Naftal et al. (2024; Vegetation Classification and Survey 5: 127–151) received the Editors’ Award. We conclude that VCS is on the right track, although we would like to encourage the submission of more classification papers based on large plot datasets, as well as methodological papers and comprehensive reviews. Abbreviations: CCCN = Committee for Changes and Conservation of Names; FWCI = Field-Weighted Citation Impact; JIF = Journal Impact Factor; IAVS = International Association for Vegetation Science; VCS = Vegetation Classification and Survey.

Abstract Restoring the heterogeneity of farmland mosaics can help mitigate the ongoing global decline of biodiversity. It has been shown that semi‐natural habitats in viticultural landscapes influence biodiversity in vineyards. However, less attention has been paid to the influence of the extent of vineyard fields and their arrangement in the landscape. Using previously published data, we investigated the influence of both semi‐natural habitats and vineyard fields on arthropod diversity in vineyards in 35 viticultural landscapes located in South Africa and Austria. Effects on several arthropod groups were assessed using standardised landscape predictors that integrate compositional (total area) and configurational (shape and spatial arrangement) heterogeneity of semi‐natural habitats and vineyards. In addition, we assessed the influence of within‐vineyard vegetation cover and farming system (organic or non‐organic) to explore local‐scale effects. Within‐vineyard vegetation and flower cover had a consistent positive influence on most arthropod taxa, whereas farming system had little effect. In addition, configurational heterogeneity of semi‐natural vegetation and vineyards influenced several taxa. However, different taxa showed contrasting relationships with configurational heterogeneity, hindering general recommendations for optimal configuration of semi‐natural elements and vineyards in the landscape. The only significant response to compositional heterogeneity was bug abundance in South Africa, which increased with increasing proportion of semi‐natural elements. We found that increasing vegetation cover in vineyards is an effective and easily implementable measure to improve biodiversity in vineyards. In addition, the spatial arrangement of vineyards influences within‐vineyard arthropod diversity as much as the spatial arrangement of semi‐natural vegetation in the landscape, which expands the possibilities for planning viticultural landscapes with high overall biodiversity.

A safe and effective vaccine is urgently needed to bring the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic under control. The spike protein (SP) of SARS-CoV-2 represents the principal target for most vaccines currently under development. This protein is highly conserved indicating that vaccine based on this antigen will be efficient against all currently circulating SARS-CoV-2 strains. The present analysis of SP suggests that mutation D614G could significantly decrease the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccine through modulation of the interaction between SARS-CoV-2 and its principal receptor ACE2.

A barragem de rejeitos minerais de Fundão, da Samarco (Vale S.A/ BHP Billiton), em cinco de novembro de 2015, rompeu-se, deixando 19 mortos, milhares de atingidos e um rastro de destruição ao longo da Bacia do Rio Doce. Considerado o maior desastre relacionado com rompimento de barragens de rejeitos no Brasil - e um dos maiores do mundo –, a catástrofe interpela-nos pela extensão, magnitude e complexidade das perdas e danos, bem como pelas negligências e omissões sistemáticas por parte das empresas envolvidas. A partir da análise de três momentos, o artigo analisa a sobreposição de processos sociais, territorialmente circunscritos, violentos e supressores de direitos fundamentais, no âmbito do (neo)extrativismo. Concluímos que o colapso da barragem e a vivência do desastre revelam o contexto sistemático de violências e violações intrínsecas ao capitalismo extrativista, cujo padrão de acumulação destrói naturezas, territórios, culturas e vidas

An embedding technique is presented to estimate standard model ττ backgrounds from data with minimal simulation input. In the data, the muons are removed from reconstructed μμ events and replaced with simulated tau leptons with the same kinematic properties. In this way, a set of hybrid events is obtained that does not rely on simulation except for the decay of the tau leptons. The challenges in describing the underlying event or the production of associated jets in the simulation are avoided. The technique described in this paper was developed for CMS . Its validation and the inherent uncertainties are also discussed. The demonstration of the performance of the technique is based on a sample of proton-proton collisions collected by CMS in 2017 at √s=13 TeV corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 41.5 fb−1.