We talk to Dr. Bogdan Jaroszewicz, head of the Białowieża Geobotanical Station of the University of Warsaw, about how planned logging in the Białowieża Forest will damage not only the forest itself but also Poland’s image around the globe.

The concentrations of Cu, Mn, Ni and Zn in the soil and litterfall, as well as influx of the elements to the soils with litterfall were studied in a mixed beech-pine-spruce stand in northern Poland during the years 2007–2009. Annual influx of litterfall to the soil amounted from 3.234 to 4.871 t/ha. Beech, pine and spruce litterfall contributed in total litterfall in 50.8−70.1%, 11.4−11.9% and 1.6−24.0% respectively. The following average annual concentrations of heavy metals in total litterfall during the 3-year study period were noticed: 2469.3–3469.2 mg Mn/kg, 153.6–160.8 mg/kg Zn, 8.0–14.3 mg Ni/kg and 5.0–6.8 mg Cu/kg. In general, the concentrations of Mn and Cu were higher in beech litterfall in comparison to pine and spruce. The contents of Zn and Ni in beech, pine and spruce litterfall were comparable. Annual influx of metals to the soil with litterfall was: 10341.6–14422.4 g/ha Mn, 460.3–748.1 g/ha Zn, 37.4–66.6 g/ha Ni and 20.2–31.8 g/ha Cu. The fluxes were higher for Mn, Zn and Ni, and comparable for Cu in relation to those observed in other beech, pine, spruce and mixed stands in northern Europe.

Wherein lies the essence of the two-year dispute over the management and protection of the commercial forest stands in the Białowieża Primeval Forest?

Turning conflict into cooperation.

Affective computing studies and develops systems capable of detecting humans affects. The search for universal well-performing features for speech-based emotion recognition is ongoing. In this paper, a small set of features with support vector machines as the classifier is evaluated on Surrey Audio-Visual Expressed Emotion database, Berlin Database of Emotional Speech, Polish Emotional Speech database and Serbian emotional speech database. It is shown that a set of 87 features can offer results on-par with state-of-the-art, yielding 80.21, 88.6, 75.42 and 93.41% average emotion recognition rate, respectively. In addition, an experiment is conducted to explore the significance of gender in emotion recognition using random forests. Two models, trained on the first and second database, respectively, and four speakers were used to determine the effects. It is seen that the feature set used in this work performs well for both male and female speakers, yielding approximately 27% average emotion recognition in both models. In addition, the emotions for female speakers were recognized 18% of the time in the first model and 29% in the second. A similar effect is seen with male speakers: the first model yields 36%, the second 28% a verage emotion recognition rate. This illustrates the relationship between the constitution of training data and emotion recognition accuracy.

The human factor in Białowieża.

Almost half (47%) of Latvian forest areas (3611 thousand ha) are considered degraded or partly improved by the hydro-technical drainage. The degradation is caused by very poor soil aeration due to waterlogged conditions. The location of waterlogged forests in Latvia is neither uniform nor occasional. Comparison of the abundance of waterlogged forests and the amount of atmospheric precipitation showed that the waterlogged forests are mainly located in areas with least precipitation. This hydrological phenomenon is connected with water discharge in drainage ditches: even during the dry summers of the years 1963, 1964, 1975, 1976 and 2002 in the drained forests with deep peat soils water flowed continuously in 1 m deep ditches and the discharge exceeded the amount of precipitation. Using the data from 182 sample plots in drained forests with the peat layer depth of 4.2 m, it was found, that coniferous forests are most productive in areas where the peat layer is most dense. One of the possible explanations for this phenomenon is that the most intensive paludification and formation of most dense peat layer are characteristic for the areas with intensive water discharge from confined aquifers. This discharge provides necessary mineral nutrients for the forest soil regardless of the peat layer thickness. The forest productivity may increase several times due to the enhancement of water movement in soil and to improved soil aeration by hydro-technical drainage. Also the flow regime of rivers connected with the drained areas changes considerably, mitigating extremely high and low flow events.

When ordinary people visit Poland’s forests, they are most afraid of encountering a big mammal – a wolf, boar, or bear. But the greatest dangers are actually posed by more inconspicuous animals: ticks and snakes.

How do bark-beetle outbreaks begin, how do they spread? What are the key factors that affect their population dynamics? Ongoing research has provided some understanding and knowledge, although many questions still remain to be answered fully.

On the need to change perceptions of the Białowieża Primeval Forest’s value.

The Bulletin of the Polish Academy of Sciences: Technical Sciences (Bull.Pol. Ac.: Tech.) is published bimonthly by the Division IV Engineering Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences, since the beginning of the existence of the PAS in 1952. The journal is peer‐reviewed and is published both in printed and electronic form. It is established for the publication of original high quality papers from multidisciplinary Engineering sciences with the following topics preferred: Artificial and Computational Intelligence, Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology, Civil Engineering, Control, Informatics and Robotics, Electronics, Telecommunication and Optoelectronics, Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering, Thermodynamics, Material Science and Nanotechnology, Power Systems and Power Electronics.

Journal Metrics: JCR Impact Factor 2018: 1.361, 5 Year Impact Factor: 1.323, SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) 2017: 0.319, Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) 2017: 1.005, CiteScore 2017: 1.27, The Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education 2017: 25 points.

Abbreviations/Acronym: Journal citation: Bull. Pol. Ac.: Tech., ISO: Bull. Pol. Acad. Sci.-Tech. Sci., JCR Abbrev: B POL ACAD SCI-TECH Acronym in the Editorial System: BPASTS.

The aim of the research was to study the influence of different tree stands on topsoil magnetic susceptibility and heavy metal contamination in the soil. The study was performed in the old park in Pruhonice (near Prague) in the Czech Republic. On the relatively small area of Pruhonice Park, five different coniferous tree species (pine, spruce, blue spruce, fir, Douglas fir) and five deciduous species (beech, red oak, common oak, hornbeam, birch) were found, growing in small clusters on the same geological background. Also other natural and anthropogenic factors such as distance from industrial and urban sources of pollution, type of soil, climate, etc. were similar. The magnetic susceptibility was measured directly in the field. Twenty topsoil cores 0.3 m long (2 under each tree species) were collected and also soil samples from under each tree (litter horizon) were taken. The magnetic susceptibility values of the topsoil profiles and of litter layer samples were obtained. Heavy metal analyses of surface samples (litter horizon) were also carried out. The field magnetic susceptibility (K) data are more or less comparable to the laboratory data (x). High heavy metal contents corresponding to high magnetic susceptibility values are observed in the litter horizon. A positive correlation between magnetic susceptibility and some heavy metals was observed. The results suggest that the type of forest may also influence the values of magnetic susceptibility and heavy metal content. Generally higher magnetic susceptibility values were observed in the coniferous forest, except for the surface layer (litter horizon) where the K values are lower than in the deciduous forest.

Treating a sick forest: evidence-based medicine?

Forests may play important role in partial neutralization of CO2 emission. To maximize their potential it is unavoidable to divide them into forests that will be allowed to evolve toward natural state and forest predisposed for timber production, supplemented with forest plantations. Natural forests store almost twice more carbon in biomass and soil than managed forests, and carbon contained in wood from plantations and timber-producing forests will be frozen long time in wooden constructions. Gasification of wood debris instead of burning will allow for production of biocarbon that added to soil will residue there through decades, and will decrease necessary amount of artificial fertilizers, which production is an important source of carbon dioxide. Forests evolving to natural state will be less prone to fire and hurricanes, and will better protect biodiversity. Presented project is not contradictory to the project “The Forest Carbon Farms” of State Forests, but allows to reach better results in shorter time and likely at lower cost.

New types of models can help us better predict how well species will be able to adapt to climate change.

Machine learning methods, such as the random forests algorithm, have revolutionized how we analyze growing volumes of data. The algorithm can be usefully applied in studying… real forests.

How can we best describe the living space of given species? Are geographical criteria sufficient, or do we need more dimensions to specify an ecological niche? What can we learn from such analyses?

Professor Krzysztof Spalik, Chairman of the PAS Committee for Environmental and Evolutionary Biology, tells us why the Białowieża Forest should be allowed to renew itself on its own.

The story of bark-beetle outbreaks in the Šumava National Park, in the Czech Republic along the German and Austrian borders, provides some insight into the impact of stable/unstable zonation regimes on efforts to fight the beetle, as well as a better understanding of what may be described as the “paradoxes of sanitary cutting.”

The heat supply systems energy efficiency improvement requires the use of increasingly complex methods. The basic ways to reduce heat consumption is by using better thermal insulation, although they have more and more limited possibilities and need relatively large financial outlays. Good effects can be achieved by the better heat source adaptation to the conditions of a specific facility supplied with heat. However, this requires research that identifies the effectiveness of such solutions as well as the tools used to describe selected elements of the system or its entirety. The article presents the results of tests carried out for a gas boiler room supplying heat to a group of residential buildings. The goal was to build a model that would forecast the day range in which the maximum gas consumption occurs for a given day. Having measurements of gas consumption in subsequent hours of the day, it was decided to build a forecasting model determining the part of the day in which such a maximum would occur. To create the model the random forest procedure was used along with the mlr (Kassambara) package. The model’s hyperparameters were tuned based on historical data. Based on data for another period of boiler room operation, the results of the model’s quality assessment were presented. Close to 44% efficiency was achieved. Tuning the model improved its predictive ability.

The paper presents the results of field studies carried out in I O chosen forest islands in a suburban area of the town of Jaworzno in the years 1995-2002. Different objects have been studied, among others: natural remnants of oak-hornbeam forest and planted pine-larch woodlots cultivated on the habitat of xerothermic grasslands. In comparison with the total nora of the town, the participation of non-synantropie species and synecological groups associated with natural habitats is much bigger. There are 24 protected species to be found, 40% of protected nora of the town. Despite their diversity, they are precious refugees of many woodland and grassland as well as meadow species occurring within the areas and in their vicinity.

The Polish Academy of Sciences asks prominent experts about the problem with bark beetle outbreaks in the Białowieża Primeval Forest. Should the protection of this ancient forest include felling and removing infected trees?

The Białowieża issue is a question of values.

Premises for the construction of balance equations of water reserves in the saturation zone of forest soil are presented in this paper. Changes of soil water reserves are dealt with as an effect of the atmosphere-tree stand-soil balance at the assumption of constant ground water flow and negligibly small losses for infiltration down the soil profile below saturation zone. These assumptions are met in permeable lowland forest soils, particularly in areas where the aquifer is situated on relatively shallow impermeable substratum. Then, for snow-free periods, it is possible to: 1) combine the increment of soil water reserves with precipitation above tree crowns and with plant and litter interception and 2) combine the losses of soil water reserves with plant transpiration and evaporation from the soil surface. The periods of increments and losses of soil water reserves are determined from limnigraph records of ground water table depth in piesometers. Examples are given in the paper of equations identified by long term data from 13 soil profiles localised in pine forests on Pleistocene floodplain of the Dunajec River. The data included: ground water table depth, physical properties of grounds in soil profiles, and hydro-climatic conditions. The equations combine increments and losses of water reserves in the saturation zone with rainfall and deficits of air humidity measured on a midforest meadow.