Sweden has formulated ambitious energy goals which signify that by year 2050 the energy usage should be halved. One of the objectives is the reduction of energy usage by 20% by year 2020 and that it should be compared to the usage of energy from 1995. In parallel with increased energy requirements for buildings the demand on housing conservation, by highlighting also buildings from the last 50 years as part of the building heritage, continues to enhance, which in theory means that there is a conflict between these.The law will never be able to point out unique buildings and PBL (planning and building act) is not especially concrete. The National Housing Board has tried to make this more concrete by the new BBR regulations though there are still an enormous variety of interpretations.This report deals with the conflict between conservation requirements and additional insulation of the building envelope and is limited to multi-residential buildings built between the years 1945 and 1975. It is the stock with the greatest energy consumption and that is where the big challenge lies.

The decomposition of organic carbon in drained peat soils is a major source of carbon di-oxide in Sweden. A big part of these drained peat soils are used in agriculture and it is a big challenge to slow down their decomposition. It has earlier been thought that less tilling and higher water table levels would decrease the activity of soil microbes and thereby the decomposition, but recent experiments has showed that this has little or no effect. In this bachelor thesis a field experiment was made on drained peat soil with ley, outside Björklinge, Uppsala municipality, Sweden. The experiment was carried out in May 2011. The objective was to develop a method to examine how the net exchange of carbon diox-ide from plant covered peat soil is affected by temperature and photosynthetically active radiation (PAR).

The forests in Sweden have, for a long time, been managed intensively. This has led to even-aged stands with few tree species and a lack of dead wood. Therefore, general conservation measures in connection with regeneration felling are important in order to promote biodiversity. Inventories carried out by the Swedish Forest Agency, however, show that about 25 % of the felled area does not reach the level of the Forestry Act, regarding general conservation measures. The aim of my study was to see whether exemptions from the six week notice of reporting regeneration fellings (the Forest Agency demands a report six weeks in advance of fellings), affect the results of the general conservation measures taken.

The purpose of this report was to investigate how the abiotic factors (temperature, pH, nutrients, oxygen levels and water content) would affect the decomposition of oil-contaminated soil and how a variance in structured soil would affect the decomposition-rate. A minor field-study was made and soil where structured in five different ways (one was a default pile and was used as a reference). The study took place over 137 days and three samples were taken (start, middle, end) and analyzed for aromatic and aliphatic compounds. The result of this study shows that there is a significant difference between all methods for the aliphatic compounds and no significant difference for the aromatic compounds. The abiotic factors that affect decomposition vary from organism to organism, depending on what type of environment it will function the best.

Pollen analysis of a peat core was used to reconstruct the last 2500 years of vegetation history, with focus on the impact of anthropogenic disturbance, in Hamra National Park, central Sweden. In addition, analysis of pollen in soil samples was performed in an attempt to locate ancient cultivation plots in the National Park. The analysis of the peat core shows a development of the vegetation that can be divided into four stages of different degrees of human impact: A - virgin forest (c. 500 B.C.-A.D. 1300), B - grazed forest (c. A.D.

It is important for today?s farmers to minimize the costs for crop establishment, because of decreased prices and support from the EU. Farmers, who plow in autumn on heavy clay soil, often do some kind of tillage in autumn to get better soil structure before spring seeding. This is especially important when growing small seed crop, e.g. sugar beet and oil plants.

Striga hermonthica, a parasitic weed, has long been believed to be correlated with the declining soil fertility status. However scientists have recently come to question this statement since some recent studies have shown contradictive results. To investigate whether soil fertility status and infestation of Striga hermonthica were correlated and the impact of it were caused by farmer management, 120 farmers in Western Kenya, where Striga hermonthica infestation is prone, participated in this study. In three districts with two sub-locations each, farmers answered a structural questionnaire and identified two fields, one with high and one with low soil fertility. These fields later came to be the basis for this study and soil were therefore also sampled from them.

The Swedish government has set up 16 environmental goals for Sweden to achieve. One ofthem is ?Living forests?, which is the foundation for the ?National strategy for the formalprotection of forests?. The ?National strategy? puts the private forest owner at the centre ofattention in order to achieve the environmental goal ?Living forests?.

An increasing demand for wood products in China has resulted in large areas invested in fast-growing tree plantations of eucalyptus. Eucalyptus plantations are often associated with an intensive management including fertilization. By understanding the effects of fertilization and where in the ecosystem nutrients are accumulated a more sustainable forest management could be achieved. In this study, a nutrient budget including all biomass and soil components was created for Eucalyptus urophylla. The examined nutrients were nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium.

This study was made on former agricultural areas that had been planted with spruce or pine, in the county of Västerbotten. The goal of the project was to investigate suspected deficiency of boron in these areas. Several objects have been reported for possible deficiency and some of these have the characteristic symptoms of boron-deficiency. The hypotheses are that 1) Boron deficiency is present at several of the investigated objects. 2) Planting of forest on cultivated postglacial sediments leads to a successive podzolisation with a decreasing content of organic matter in the mineral soil, due to decomposition, and a decreasing pH in the soil, even on locations that have been added lime. To be able to confirm or reject the hypotheses a number of tests were performed.

This master thesis aims to examine the methods of the conservation field and their visionabout maintenance and change, in terms of liturgical values. This is to be able todetermine if there is a need to develop the methods that the field of conservation has tosafeguard the intangible cultural heritage of the churches.This is mainly a literature review, focusing on different tutorials from the Swedish nationalheritage board, and different texts on liturgy aswell as Unesco's Convention for theSafeguarding of intagible Heritage (2003), ratified in Sweden in January 2011. A casestudy of the practical work has been carried out on three churches that have undergonechange. The application process and the results were important for this study.The conclusion is that the conservation field have ambitions to preserve the liturgicalvalues, but they do not have sufficiently developed methods to do so. Nevertheless, itappears that most cases of change in churches, increases the liturgical values..

Nitrogen deposition leads to environmental damage in areas where the nitrogen deposition is high. Southwest Sweden receives an annual nitrogen deposition of up to 20 kg N/ha. Nitrogen that is not assimilated by the vegetation is accumulated in the soil, which may lead to nitrogen saturation and an elevated risk of nitrogen leaching. Nitrogen leaching from forest areas in southern Sweden has proven to be higher than from agricultural areas, which have been thought to be the main contributors to elevated nitrogen levels in rivers and lakes. The amount of nitrogen that leaches depends on the fraction of the total nitrogen in the soil that consists of nitrate, since nitrate is easily transported through the soil.

Swedish agriculture has gone through big changes in the latest 60 years. The farm sizes have increased, which has led to raised tractor and machinery sizes and therefore increasing problems with soil compaction. A method to reduce these problems is to implement controlled traffic farming, CTF. All field operations are then concentrated to specific tracks by using GPS guidance. The aim of this work was to study how the tillage regime, with or without CTF, affects the soil, with the main focus on macroporosity. In Säby close to Uppsala, and Alnarp close to Malmö, randomized block trials has been carried out, and the data has mainly been taken from these trials.

Based on laboratory studies with lysimeters, the concentrations of dissolved reactive phosphorus(DRP) and particulate phosphorus, which is the main part of other P (OVRP), has been studied inpercolating water. The experiment was conducted through irrigation of small soil columnscontaining clay topsoil from an experimental field in Västergötland. Three rain simulations wereconsecutively performed. DRP concentrations in the percolating water ranged between 0.2 - 0.3mg·Lclearly related to the phosphorus concentration in the soil, measured in a soil extract ofammonium lactate (P-AL). Concentrations of OVRP were relatively low and ranged between0.12 and 0.16 mg·Lwas not proven and the experiment may reflect how a relatively slow percolation of water mayrelease DRP.

This study was conducted in Kkingo district, west of Masaka, Uganda. It compared soil macrofauna abundance in non-agroforestry farms with that of agroforestry farms. The agroforestry farms had participated in the Vi Agroforestry´s program between 1995 and 2006, and continued on their own after 2006, when Vi Agroforestry left the area. The soil macrofauna is important for soil structure and processes that are contributing to soil organ-ic matter decomposition and nutrient mineralization. They are also predators of potential pests.